I said…no. Actually, my task today is to tell you that your education is no in vain. No matter how smart, competent Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini and Llama Got you have, you will have a bright future. Here’s why: You have anything that a computer can’t have. This is a superpower, and each of you has a lot.
Your humanity.
A graduate of the liberal arts, you major in psychology and other subjects. history. anthropology. African American, Asian and Gender Studies. sociology. language. philosophy. Political Science. religion. Criminal justice. economics. There are even some British majors, like me.
Each of these topics involves examining and explaining human behavior and human creativity in an empathetic way, which only humans can bring to the task. Your observations in the social sciences, the analysis you perform in art and culture, the lessons conveyed from research, are pricelessly authentic, based on the simple fact that you devote your attention, wisdom and consciousness to fellow countrymen. People, that’s why we call them Humanities.
AI’s House of Lords spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think like mature humans. You have just been at Temple University for four years and are studying to be an accomplished human being. The difference is immeasurable.
From Steve Jobs telling me forty years ago he wanted to marry computers and arts, which Silicon Valley can understand. I have written about Google’s history. Initially, its co-founder Larry Page refused to hire anyone without a computer science degree. But the company is beginning to realize that it is losing the talent needed for communication, business strategy, management, marketing and internal culture. Some of these liberal arts graduates were subsequently hired as one of the company’s most valuable employees.
Even within AI companies. Liberal arts graduates can and do flourish. Did you know that Anthropic’s president is one of the top creators of Generative AI, a professional in the UK? Her idol, Joan Didion.
Also, your job does something AI can never do: It builds real relationships. Openai recently boasted that it trained its latest models to develop creative writing. Maybe it can organize sentences, but that’s not what we really look for in books, visual arts, films, and criticism. If you read a novel that changes the way you see the world, hear podcasts to cheer up your spirit, see a movie that blows your mind, hear a piece of music that touches your soul, and only after you are inspired and transformed by it, will you know that it is not created by a person, but a robot? You may be cheated.
It’s more than just a feeling. In 2023, some researchers published a paper confirming this. In blind experiments, humans think that when they think it is from fellow humans rather than a complex system that fakes humans, they value more. In another blind experiment, participants showed abstract art created by humans and AI. Although they can’t tell which one is which, when asked which ones they like, human-created photos stand out. Other studies involve brain MRI. Scans also show that people’s responses are more favorable when people think that humans create artworks rather than artificial intelligence. Almost this connection is primitive.
