I say … no. In reality my mission at this time is to let you know that your training was not in useless. You do have an ideal future forward of you regardless of how sensible and succesful ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And right here is the explanation: You’ve one thing that no pc can ever have. It’s a superpower, and each considered one of you has it in abundance.
Your humanity.
Liberal arts graduates, you’ve majored in topics like Psychology. Historical past. Anthropology. African American, Asian, and Gender Research. Sociology. Languages. Philosophy. Political Science. Faith. Prison Justice. Economics. And there’s even some English majors, like me.
Each a type of topics entails analyzing and decoding human habits and human creativity with empathy that solely people can carry 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. Folks, that’s why we name them the humanities.
The lords of AI are spending tons of of billions of {dollars} to make their fashions suppose LIKE completed people. You’ve simply spent 4 years at Temple College studying to suppose 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 a long time in the past that he wished 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 dropping out on expertise it wanted for communications, enterprise technique, administration, advertising and marketing, and inside tradition. A few of these liberal arts grads it then employed grew to become among the many firm’s most precious staff.
Even inside AI firms. 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 lately boasted that it educated considered one of its newest fashions to churn out inventive writing. Perhaps it could actually put collectively cool sentences—however that’s not what we actually search from books, visible arts, movies and criticism. How would you are feeling in the event 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 remodeled 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 printed 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 footage 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.