If you’re at all versed in the humanities, the phrase, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” might sound a bit familiar. Strangely, that bit of Charles Dickens’s prose could also be used to describe, well, the state of the humanities. Or, more specifically, the state of the study of the humanities. It’s a contradictory time, and it’s also possible that AI is a contributing factor — though maybe not in the way you’d expect.
Readers seeking a reason to be bearish on the humanities’ future have plenty of evidence to choose from. Many colleges and universities have made cuts in these programs, often bolstering STEM programs at their expense. It’s a situation that has sparked no small amount of impassioned editorials. The headline of a recent article at The Guardian by Alice Speri referenced an “existential crisis at U.S. universities,” and Speri’s reporting features numerous examples of undergraduate and graduate programs facing cuts or outright elimination.
In that situation, you might not expect AI to be grounds for optimism. And yet, that’s the case Juliana Kaplan makes in an article for Business Insider. Kaplan points to “the creation of courses focusing on the intersection of AI and humanities” at the University of Colorado Boulder as a model for how institutions of higher education might be able to emphasize these departments’ importance.
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Where technology and public health collideThat doesn’t necessarily mean a sudden hiring boom for humanities and arts majors, but Kaplan did chat with a number of academics who sound cautiously optimistic about the near future of their field. And given that a recent New York Times podcast interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei closed with a discussion of the poetry of Richard Brautigan, that sense of all bets being off can certainly feel liberating.
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