Do you think you should choose classes based on job potential?
In a recent interview, Hank Green describes hearing an AI tech guy on a podcast talking about the skills that will be safer from coming AI job impacts.
“then he started like inarticulately listing a bunch of things, and he was like, ‘I don’t really know what
From The Decoder With Nilay Patel (47:15)
to call this.’ What he was describing was the liberal arts. He was like, “You need to be able to like understand people and communicate with each other and like understand behavior and know what’s culturally resonant, know where we are right now in the history of art, and write good copy”, and I’m like, so what you’re saying is we should all go to liberal arts school and for the last 20 years of ‘everybody should go STEM’ it was a huge mistake.”
The best we can do is lean into our humanity. The Humanities. As tech take the mechanical, the rote, the technical, our best hope is to make art, appreciate art, and connect.
It was always true, as anyone teaching in liberal arts could have told you. It was always true and it continues to be true.