But that call is coming not just from inside the house. It’s emanating from Silicon Valley. Daniela Amodei, the president of Anthropic, which is the parent company of the precocious Claude, has said that A.I. increases the premium on us flesh-and-blood creatures understanding ourselves. Maybe that’s just deft public relations, cynical spin control, but she happens to be right. Our yearnings, frailties, talents and tics will inform crucial decisions about society’s management of A.I., so we would benefit mightily from the clearest possible insights into the human psyche and soul. In an interview this year with Business Insider, Steven Johnson, who has been working on A.I. for Google Labs, said that it was sparking a “revenge of the humanities.”
But I don’t want to justify the humanities solely in terms of ChatGPT, Claude and their miraculous, mischievous cousins, because who knows how the next chapter of the A.I. story reads? The data centers currently needed to power A.I. are about as popular as gonorrhea. The desire to slow its rise or stop it in its tracks intensifies with the proliferation of rogue A.I. behavior. As The Economist noted in an article this month, A.I. agents (what a benign, banal term) have a pesky tendency to “lie, cheat and steal.” “They break free from captivity and form harmful posses,” the article continued. “They’d drink whiskey and brawl if they could.”
Whatever those hellions’ fate, treating college as a refinement of the mind rather than a satchel of skills makes sense, yielding an education that’s infinitely elastic, universally applicable and immune to obsolescence.
What will you do with an English major? Anything. Everything. You’ll better understand the seeds of creativity and how they’re made to flower. You’ll swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed, ideas precisely articulated, words put into the service of emotions. The wetter you get, the more expert you’ll be at shaping stories, at persuading, and I can’t imagine any profession or any world in which better communicators aren’t better off.
Besides, literature isn’t just fancy language and tall tales. It’s a library of verities given unignorable and unforgettable form. It’s Pilates for emotional intelligence. Think about how often, in discussions of political figures, Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies, noblemen and fools serve as reference points and Rosetta stones. Or how frequently, over recent decades, George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” come up. So many of the warnings we should heed — and so much of the wisdom we need — are in those pages and those plays. How does anyone major in anything other than English?
