I say … no. In truth my mission right now is to inform you that your training was not in useless. You do have an excellent future forward of you regardless of how good and succesful ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And right here is the rationale: You’ve gotten one thing that no laptop can ever have. It’s a superpower, and each one in all you has it in abundance.
Your humanity.
Liberal arts graduates, you’ve gotten majored in topics like Psychology. Historical past. Anthropology. African American, Asian, and Gender Research. Sociology. Languages. Philosophy. Political Science. Faith. Felony Justice. Economics. And there’s even some English majors, like me.
Each a kind of topics entails inspecting and decoding human habits and human creativity with empathy that solely people can convey to the duty. The observations you make within the social sciences, the analyses you produce on artwork and tradition, the teachings you talk out of your analysis, have a priceless authenticity, based mostly on the straightforward truth that you’re devoting your consideration, intelligence, and consciousness to fellow homo sapiens. Individuals, that’s why we name them the humanities.
The lords of AI are spending a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} to make their fashions assume LIKE completed people. You’ve gotten simply spent 4 years at Temple College studying to assume AS completed people. The distinction is immeasurable.
That is one thing that even Silicon Valley understands, ranging from the time Steve Jobs advised me 4 many years in the past that he needed to marry computer systems and the liberal arts. I as soon as wrote a historical past of Google. Initially, its cofounder Larry Web page resisted hiring anybody who didn’t have a pc science diploma. However the firm got here to appreciate that it was shedding out on expertise it wanted for communications, enterprise technique, administration, advertising and marketing, and inner tradition. A few of these liberal arts grads it then employed grew to become among the many firm’s most dear staff.
Even inside AI corporations. liberal arts grads can and do thrive. Do you know that the president of Anthropic, one of many high creators of generative AI, was an English main? She idolized Joan Didion.
Moreover, your work does one thing that AI can by no means do: it makes a real human connection. OpenAI just lately boasted that it educated one in all its newest fashions to churn out artistic writing. Possibly it might probably put collectively cool sentences—however that’s not what we actually search from books, visible arts, movies and criticism. How would you’re feeling should you learn a novel that shifted the best way you noticed the world, heard a podcast that lifted your spirit, noticed a film that blew your thoughts, heard a bit of music that moved your soul, and solely after you had been impressed and reworked by it, realized that it was not created by an individual, however a robotic? You would possibly really feel cheated.
And that’s greater than a sense. In 2023, some researchers revealed a paper confirming simply that. In blind experiments human beings valued what they learn extra after they thought it was from fellow people and never a complicated system that fakes humanity. In one other blind experiment, individuals had been proven summary artwork created by each people and AI. Although they couldn’t inform which was which, when topics had been requested which photos they favored higher, the human-created ones got here out on high. Different analysis research concerned mind MRIs. The scans additionally confirmed folks responded extra favorably after they thought people, not AI, created the artworks. Nearly as if that connection was primal.
