A.I. Might Actually Help the Humanities | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]So, what you hear people saying now, and these are like tech industry leaders, but they're also like deans at prominent schools that say, "Because AI is changing the workforce in such and such a way, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important." Mhm. And um >> I I may have said that to myself contemplating my own children's future.

[00:00:22]Yes. Yes. This is the exactly the wrong case to make for the humanities because it denatures and destroys the thing that it's supposed to be promoting. If again, liberal arts education, humanities education is just uh workforce training, you're not actually going to be able to fully benefit from the thing that you've instrumentalized.

[00:00:46]>> Just in defense though, work is a real part of human affairs, right? It's not some area where you you cease to be human when you're at your job or relating to your co-workers. It is a zone of real and important human interaction. And if you say one thing that the humanities do is prepare you to exist in a corporate environment, you aren't saying something that's completely different from Cicero saying the humanities prepare you to be a Roman citizen, right? Like there's I'm just saying there's a form of the humanities prepare you to work. Well, I mean, what I would rather say, let me circle back to that in [clears throat] a minute, but what I would rather say is that AI is good for the humanities because it clarifies what is at stake if we stop being invested in this project of cultivating our own humanity and we give ourselves over to the robots and the machines. What the machines can't really do well, and that quite frankly, I think we don't want them to do well, is to think about what our ends and our goals are. And the humanities when done well, right, real humane learning is an investigation into what the goal of human society is. And so, I think that what AI really clarifies is the absolutely fundamental, existential, cultural need for humane learning. If we give up our thinking to machines, what will be left? We will just be a bundle of desires that are coming from outside.

[00:02:25]And we will be a kind of slave to them.

[00:02:26]We will not really, in any meaningful sense, be free. I don't care what the political system is. If you haven't done that work of deep humane reflection and self-cultivation, you are not really engaged in that project of becoming a person.