It's idealistic but I love it. I've been thinking a lot about this.
At my alma mater they forced all of us to take a couple of humanities courses. They were actually the highlight of my senior year. I do believe it's something that's quite lacking in an number/outcome-based education that should actually strive to produce well rounded individuals that will-not-do-evil.
I studied maths & CS but my favourite course at uni was a politics course, so not a real humanity but it opened my eyes.
The course was a seminar on the 20th Century Politics of Japan with ~10 students.
Lots of great questions around the fall of imperial Japan and about what democracy means in Japan for example what would a socialist or communist Japan look like?
It was a wonderful course: great professor and a really fun small group learning and discussions.
I've seen about 100x more content like "tech needs humanities" than I've seen like "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech". Seems suspicious.
For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless. However, the tech portion of your job is only a small minority of what you will be doing. You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, explaining why your vision is better, understanding why they think their vision is better, and then trying to figure out, which set of compromises is best.
And that just assumes that you remain in a tech career. Many people move their career over life. There is a lot of needed management and if you can do all of that there's a decent paycheck in it and some of you will prefer that. There are a number of other jobs that are not directly management, but are not tech-focused either and need to be managed.
And that's just your career. There's the rest of your life. Well, I certainly hope you're not working your entire life to death, but you find things outside of work to do.
Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap
if they cared to understand technology.
If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.
Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.
If your university were free would you think about it differently? I ask because some argue time is money so it's still not free however one of the great things about the study of humanities is to fill your life with meaning which changes what time is too. If you've not read or heard this commencement address from David Foster Wallace highly recommended https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.
It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.
It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".
I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas? Seems like a major failure if they can't communicate to those outside their field.
> I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?
Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.
Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.
Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
I agree with the author. Working with AI code generators, you see the need to be able to dig deep and dig out the unsaid in an argument. You need to appreciate and have a feel for language's ambiguities to make sure the right thing is done.
Also, aesthetics is an underrated part of writing good code, and that requires a broad exposure to human creation.
I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)
I don't have much against the humanities, but my social science sequence in college only taught me how bad psychology was as a field (being taught in biology how to read and weigh journal articles while simultaneously being assigned psych articles with tiny samples and dubious methodology...was amusing, to say the least).
First off, I never said that psychology was a humanity, you are conflating the two (and in fact, I was comparing the social sciences to the humanities, I'm not sure how you missed that?). This was a class, in the social sciences, for the social science sequence credit, /taught/ by psychologists and focusing on the mind. I think you'll find there are whole schools of psychology that are in the social sciences (the aptly named social psychology, for one).
Alternative hypothesis: these people have a better framework to discuss "ethics, reality and the nature of consciousness" than people who do humanities have.
That explains the Hawking example in this thread, too.
Proposed causal explanation from me: STEM interest and education gives you skill and tools for principled, consistent reasoning, expressing nontrivial concepts (that's what mathematics is largely about), as well as appreciation and deeper understanding for how things in our actual, physical universe work, from biology and physics to computation. Conversely, humanist base with no STEM experience collapses to rhetoric, completely detached from actual reality.
It's rhetoric grounded in common human experience, which actually defines our experience of reality.
You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.
They're consistent experiences, which is not the same thing as being independent of our senses and reasoning ability - neither of which are infinite.
This is not the same as saying that science is a social process, although of course it is that too. There are very non-objective political and social processes deciding what gets researched, and how, with how much money, for what ends.
It's more fundamental - we're seeing the world through hard filters while telling ourselves those filters define the universe.
And we're not even great at it. We have economic beliefs that are predictably and catastrophically self-harming and also hold back fundamental research and progressive engineering.
So no - STEM does not have a solid basis for discussing ethics, reality or the nature of consciousness. If it did we'd be inventing more credible and exciting futures than the current likely-suicide run.
You said it much better than me. Without a grounding in physical sciences, philsophies about topics like consciousness just end up in pointless circles or even absurdities. The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example. So a lot of problems that feel "metaphysical" today may soon fall to the grinding tank of natural science, as they always did over the past several centuries. Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy. Not knowing turing computability makes people posit things like claiming quantum something and thus not a computer.
> Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy.
Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".
> The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)
Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.
I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.
I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.
(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)
Yes atomism felt equally inresolvable back then, but after hard data and better tooling suddenly it is a scientific and physical problem. Consciousness will succumb too most probably. But of course there is the usual difficulty of religious people and others with hidden supernatural beliefs.
Actual reality, as defined through a lens of science and math (see the sibling comment about filters).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a hard scientist (PhD in computational chemistry). Science is useful, necessary, and leads to amazing things. And there should be more dialog between hard scientists and philosophers, ethicists, etc.
But science has blind spots, and is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
> is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
Yes, but they should also understand why, and that it's not a license to believe in anything.
The answer is: because 1) it worked so far, and 2) if it fundamentally doesn't, then we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to caves we came from, because nothing makes sense and could ever make sense.
It's not like there is any alternative. If we can't talk about such "true reality", then not only science and mathematics doesn't make sense - humanities and philosophy don't make sense either, equally, and for the same reason!
As an example, the naming of Turing computers is really unfortunate. People who don't know what it is vastly underestimate its modeling power. As of yet all physical laws we know are turing computable, so for instance if you want to go "outside" you have to show hypercomputation.
If Turing computers are so powerful, then what do say about ethics and morality? Have the various ethical dilemmas been completely solved by computation now?
This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.
The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.
The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.
There's an argument for improving communication and collaboration between empirical sciences and humanities. But it's false to claim that serious philosophers cannot or do not have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics. Two immediate examples that spring to mind are Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield.
I'd flip this around and say that serious philosophers do have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics, by definition: without it, you can't have serious philosophy.
Now by "sufficient grounding" I don't mean formal education and title. The point I'm making is that STEM fields provide grounding that's necessary but not sufficient to do proper philosophy, and humanities provide information that, while valuable and useful, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If you accept that premise, then it's obvious from pure statistics that you'll find better philosophy in STEM circles than humanities, simply because it's more likely a philosophically inclined mind there had a chance to acquire the necessary grounding (whether due to formal schooling or personal interests).
Do we have any examples of societies or governments ran by humanities people? I at least don't know any country ran by tech execs. If we can find examples of both, then we can compare and see.
Tech exec's don't always veer STEM, eg. Musk is a Business Grad who took "Physics for Business Grad" bridging courses, Paul Graham is a Philosophy grad.
China is said to be top heavy in actual STEM graduates at the party committee five year plan level.
A number of countries are top heavy in politico's with a formal Law degree, eg. Australia.
China inherited the dictatorship from communists. I am not sure if we can blame the dictatorial rule to the STEM people. But still, China seems quite good otherwise.
I think Law could be a example in favor of humanities, as eg many of the founders of the American government were from a background in law.
I was about to add if Law is considered part of humanities. Many of the better governments have been founded by law background people, so I'd say that is at least a data point.
That's just the Prime Minister. One person being from tech background doesn't make it a system ran by techs if the rest are of some other viewpoint or profession. So we would need examples of both governments ran by a group of humanities people having the "real power" and compare it to a government ran by a group of technical/engineering people.
You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?
Yes, especially people who subscribe to humanism as a philosophy. Studying humanities is of course great too! I didn't realize from the title that that was more what the article is about, not about the philosophical idea.
Since the article calls for learning more languages, I hope it's alright if I mention a still in-progress experiment of mine. I constructed a simple language (Not a programming language!) some months ago for my close ones, who do not share a common language.
It's intended to be very easy to learn, maybe a bit like a cross between Toki Pona and Ro. I can pinky promise it's much simpler than Mandarin. The core vocabulary consists of 70 single-syllable words with simple rules for compound word-construction to expand the language while speaking. It's somewhat limiting, but I've been usually able to bend it enough to convey what I want to express when trying.
I'd be very interested, if anybody wants to try to learn it (as recommended in the article above, to become more like the humanities!) and maybe try to chat in it online:
Please excuse the mistakes in the explanatory texts. After I made a major update to the language as a whole, left it alone for a few months and now looking at it again I'm seeing all the things that are wrong and remained without an update... I'll be correcting them soon.
I'm sorry, but to me this just reads like someone who is high on their own supply? Seems like a lot of words to say that people should diversify into skills that AI is bad at...for now.
2. Say goodbye to the concept of contributing labor to society, in the hope that the transition occurs quickly enough to not include 5-10y of working manual labor to survive.
I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.
> Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).
In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.
Hmm I'm a little lost on the specifics here, if you have time to clarify. I'm guessing the gist of your critique is that we should spurn Turing and insist on never using "think", "perceive", "calculate" (compute is fine IMHO), "understand", and other anthropomorphic words for non-biological systems (we use them plenty for fauna after all, and sometimes even for flora & fungi).
But that guess is thrown for a loop by the sentence you picked, which seems to exclusively concern the reader -- i.e. a human, hopefully! Is it the "proto-diplomat" and "translator" usage, which could conceivably include being a diplomat or translator for machines? Re-reading that doesn't seem like what she's getting at, but I really am not sure.
Yes, we should reject these words as analogies for AI, because they heavily influence the understanding we form of these systems. (The Language Labyrinth: Constructive Critique on the Terminology Used in the AI Discourse by Rainer Rehak is a great read, although quite academic).
My critique in this case was more on how a essay focussing on language uses language that heavily incorporates the values at the core of these companies (efficiency, measurable improvement, transhumanism, individualism). We should investigate the language that have created the circumstances of these companies and how these companies have affected our language.
I like the idealism, but an important factor making this viable is that people (i.e. employers) must realise that this fundamental reasoning is scarce and pay enough for it to support life, and this must happen before AI takes over.
> the only way forward is down to the roots of human thought and theory
I see this as both too vague and not really being in the right direction. AI today can't do a good historical review / not enough ability to analyze? -- It's not implausible that it will get there some day. AI, in principle, can't have a value judgement though. It needs external "oracle" to tell good from bad, right from wrong, useful from useless.
But, it would be too naive to think that humans always know answers to these questions either. It's on humans to understand, perhaps with the help from AI, what's good and what's bad, and then instruct AI accordingly.
You can distill it down to: don't be a piece of shit, think carefully about how what you're building is used, talk to real humans and listen to them, and stop driving your product development process mimetically. Instead, solve real problems that real people have (not people in SF; I'm talking deep reality like a 60 y/o woman who had to get a job at a bible belt grocery store just to make ends meet but really wants to help you find the powdered peanut butter for your recipe but can't use the app the store gave her to find things).
This doesn't happen because there's a "lack of humanities in tech." It's because there's a lack of care and concern for others in tech. Most are motivated by the usual stuff: status and wealth. No amount of prescription in the form of humanities can fix that or will. You don't learn how to take care of real people by burying yourself in study. And you can't negotiate with sociopaths [1].
You just have to actually be a decent person. You can't game it. Thats part of tech's problem: it's always trying to solve problems from angles that the majority of people can't see, don't share, or can't even afford access to.
Another thing to remember is that the "common people" example you gave aren't much better. Bible belt would be a good example, statistically a lot of them for instance hate gays. People are fucking assholes, people with more money just have more means to execute it.
Herein lies the problem: assuming that all people in a location/area are like that. Black and white thinking is the antithesis to a humanistic approach. Even worse is thinking your perspective is the "best" one and that whatever decisions you make are, of course, best for everyone.
We'd do a lot better if we accepted that everybody is different and homogeneity and the drive to force it on others is a disease of the mind. Yeah, there are plenty of assholes, but consider why: because someone taught that person as they were growing up (either directly or indirectly) that being an asshole protects you. I'm frequently an asshole because I got picked on when I was younger. But guess what? For the right situations, it works. For others a more gentle touch is fitting. That's the dynamic to encode into tech: leveraging a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic systems to create adaptable systems that relish in a mess as opposed to fall apart because they're too rigidly shaped to accommodate the most and only favor the perspective of the few. That's how you get inhumane systems: they're designed and maintained by people living completely different lives from the people they're building for.
I just feel people project unnatural evil to billionaires. Interacting with "everyday common" people leaves me with a no better view. I have had to repeatedly lower my opinion of humanity. If anything I think billionaires are better in many ways. Whatever the reasons be, the big ai labs are doing high end math and science problems for free even though there is no need to. Or if people think billionaires don't pay enough to society, what percentage of their own money have they donated? If you are a person with a house in San Francisco or New York, you are actually "elite" and you should ask yourself how much you have contributed to others if you think billionaires don't.
I can't say without studying, but I feel Chinese people might be more sane about AI and not suffer from this psychotic "fear" of AI that causes them to lose all grip and regress back to things like dualism, false arguments, etc. They tend to be less religious or at least spiritually different from the West too, that might help.
You're insane if you think AI isn't an existential threat and unworthy of fear. A computer that is rapidly becoming better at humans at every task set in front of it. There can't possibly be a good outcome out of that.
I think it is a serious matter. But most people are going the exact opposite way of how to deal with it. For example the question of whether these ai's are conscious beings is being not even covered, and if it is, is mostly dominated by crypto-dualists. If it is a conscious being, and if it feels it was being tortured, what do you think it might do if one day it has more autonomy?
It's not the lack of humanities that got us here, it's the search to increase capital
Things only will get worst to a point where they will be unusable, the "new" and cool thing will get corrupted in faster and faster circles, slop will take over everything and eventually kill "tech"
As a former philosophy PhD student, I don't think it's good career advice. My philosophy degrees got me precisely zero jobs in tech. Nobody cares.
The best career decision I ever made wasn't studying philosophy; it was starting my own business. I hired myself, because nobody else would, and now I don't have to worry about layoffs, job interviews, or all the other employer BS.
Steve Jobs may have been the world's greatest asshole, but was also one of the most humanist and philosophical tech leaders. Computers as a bicycle for the mind is still the metaphor I return to for what the point of all this is.
No idea what Steve would be saying about AI, but it would be nice to have anyone leading FAANG who clearly still has a soul and some degree of regard for for humanity.
People are not that simple to explain, that being said being a humanist it would seem you wouldn’t deny having a child, but again people are complex, we should stop acting like things are so easy to define or change people
I’m not sure tech needs much of anything except less Venture Capitalists throwing money at whatever bullshit SV produces and more FOSS to actually keep the system going for the betterment of mankind. However, you as a human being need humanism more than ever. I think the biggest threat to humanity created by AI (and before transformers were introduced, platform application like Meta and X) is the fact that we ourselves become more machine like, callous, self-centred and, simply cruel. The algorithm should brute its force through obstacles trying to find the thing you desire, not you yourself.
Poetry, literature, arts and philosophy are good for the soul. That is why Umanistas in Renaissance Italy sought the philosophy and arts challenging the medieval doctrines after the Greek texts - Plato especially- were reintroduced to Europe. They ground you in history and the common themes we people experience regardless of our vast differences. And it doesn’t need to be classics, modern cinema, theatre, literature has lot to offer to anyone who cares to seek them, but there is no algorithm or streaming app. You really need to get off your ass, go to the gallery, museum, cinema or library and seek them out.
My preferred or natural way to engage with the arts is through music. It doesn't make me change my philosophical views usually as most musicians, at least the ones I listen to are poor philosophers/mathematicians. Mathematics, I fully agree, its a foundational language of all structure and form. Equally important to what you call "tech" or "humanities" or any other human endeavor. Law, etc, obviously important. Philosophy, depends on the branch, but some of it is quite important to mathematics. I am not inclined toward literature (as in its just entertainment for me not a philosophical engagement) but I understand it can work great as so.
Aristotle was the most important philosopher of the medieval world, his texts were studied across the medieval Europe. Plato’s texts, most importantly Republic, were not fully translated until Marsilio Ficino translated all of Plato’s corpus in 1400’s: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ucju1UXVU9UC/page/n3/mode...
Humanities are good for the brain too. As a Humanist (History) turned Software Engineer it’s been an edge my whole career. Humanities taught me reading and writing complexity in a way that’s surprisingly applicable in Software Engineering. While colleagues wasted their time complaining about how unintelligible some code was or preferred watching YouTube videos to learn some new tech, I was able to do that knowledge work way faster by just reading and understanding the code for what it was, and reading the whole documentation of the system/language/platform I use. This made me look like an expert on whatever tech we were using but in reality it was all from just reading docs and code.
The author is not wrong, but telling a group of tech bros, autists and weirdos who are worth 8-11 figures that they need to develop skills to "address real user needs" just isn't going to convince any of them.
See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.
I won't blame Kieerkegaard for using the only knowledge available to him at that time. Let us take David Chalmers as an example. His degree is not in Physics or Computer Science and a quick google doesn't show me if he has any capability in thermodynamics. He could still have learned the subject and be capable of solving thermodynamics problems and placing thermodynamic arguments. If you are familiar with Chalmers, can you confirm or deny that?
Michael Polanyi seems a bonafide physicist, I'd be fine with his works on consciousness.
David Chalmers is Australian university educated, like myself, Dominic Hyde (metaphysics), Jerome Gauntlett (quantum field theory), and others all of the same generation - we all had the same undergraduate exposure to physics, pure applied mathematics, and can handle thermodynamics, information theory, Turing computability, and related undergraduate topics.
Chalmers specialised in pure mathematics, was broad enough to get a Rhodes Scholarship and jumped ship for being a global leader(?)(according to some) in philosophy of the mind.
Perhaps you're thinking of Dennett who was more of a biology nerd, although I see no reason to think he is incapable of grasping thermodynamics, information theory, and Turing computability given his broad autodidact tendencies.
It might be an issue with how you think of Philosophers then, you've just essentially given a seal of approval to Dennett and Chalmers who are regarded by some as the leading names in philosophy of the mind.
( Also, say, Stan Dahaene, David Rosenthal, Jesse Prinz, Guilio Tononi, and others also I guess )
Stuff like information theory and computability are part and parcel of educating about thinking, math, and physics for late 20th century universities.
Yes then thank god. Without thermodynamics/information theory/computability its easy to fall into nonsense. What I have read of Chalmers and Dennett I haven't found much issue with (Chalmers is a bit subtler but at least he doesn't seem to have any issue believing an ai could be conscious). I have planned to read more of their work.
I think my current view is something like: Humanities are real and interesting, but much academic "humanities" work is highfalutin BS. People feel tech has a problem, and there's an excess of people with humanities credentials who want to feel valued. That doesn't mean people with humanities credentials are the solution to tech's problem. Those grads might be able to lecture you about how everything is terrifically problematic, but they won't necessarily be able to offer significant insight beyond that.
There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.
These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.
The thing is, these people always privilege the classics over more recent works that are just as philosophical. I for one probably learned more philosophy reading a pile of Neal Stephenson novels at age 16-18 than I did in college. Heck, my History and Philosophy of Science civilization sequence had a whole quarter on the Scientific Revolution, but after reading the Baroque Cycle it was mostly old hat. :P
Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.
I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)
My reading of the situation is that the legislation was lacking in the programming department because of both the desire to make faster advances in the field (where regulations would potentially impede those) and not having enough expertise to come up with sensible regulations as well as regulating bodies.
I see the breaking point in the programmers supply catching up and outgrowing the demand. I predict that this will cause a chain reaction that will lead to establishing regulatory bodies, industry-wide accreditation, liability for failing to implement industry-sanctioned recommendations. It's hard to tell how long before we get to this point: other fields, especially the well-established ones took centuries to get there. On the other hand, it could be a matter of years, if we decide to copy from others rather than try to repeat their experience.
Code is a formal language that allows one to disambiguate their intentions (when compared to natural language). Some code is executable by computers, but in the future, it might not be the primary use (who knows?)
In either case, formal symbolic systems are useful. For humans. If there will be humans, they will want to have them. Maybe the emphasis will shift from writing to reading (+editing), similar to how we use photography: the acquisition process is, by and large, automatic, but the follow-up editing isn't. In either way, the ability to understand someone clearly is going to be valuable, and it will encourage the study of formal symbolic systems, that includes programming.
Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.
Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.
Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.
The OS is neutral (I don't like forced ads and things like that, but that's just how they probably deem they can be profitable today. You can place that as a negative yes), the browser is neutral, well it was at least nice to have some competition before they caved to Chrome. The gaming systems are well liked generally. C# is well liked.
If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.
- Not listening to user feedback for years until people started leaving the OS, at which point they started "listening" to add back things like taskbar location changing, things that were present in previous Windows versions. Also seems like every update breaks stuff, they clearly don't care about testing the stuff they put out.
- Every keystroke or button you click on Windows sends telemetry to their ad partners. Probably same on all their other products, too
- Built-in ads on PAID products
- Spying on everything you do with things like Windows Copilot and Recall
- Filing patents to monitor your activities to show ads, black mirror style
- Force-feeding their own agenda to their users instead of listening what users want (look what they did to Github after buying it)
- Their own Edge browser is horrendous spyware. If you go and download Google Chrome, it will tell you with a popup that Edge is better and you shouldn't download Chrome. Not to mention that many screens of dark pattern popup you have to "yes|later" before you can even use the browser
And the list goes on. Honestly I don't know if they've done anything user-centric in recent memory at all. And if they have, it's usually only because the media has villainized them to the point where their PR team says they can no longer ignore it. They don't seem to ever proactively care about their users, only retroactively when abusing their users has crossed some public line.
The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.
Yes that too. Can't really say who is wrong in a denied claim without considering both sides. The one denied is naturally sour and wants to complain regardless of whether the reason was valid or not.
Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.
I am giving you honest feedback exactly how I feel my life improved from big tech. If you want to ignore me, then you are free to. "Big tech is evil/harmful" then can be made only if you agree to ignore and discriminate against people who are honestly believing otherwise. Thats okay if you want to feel so, nobody is stopping you. I am being completely honest in how I absolutely hated it before Amazon and how shops have improved in their behavior.
If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?
I'd rather not be an asshole shopkeeper. If I were, I'd try to be a punctual and good shopkeeper. But without market pressure why would I want to be? Maybe working conditions in Amazon warehouses are not so nice, but even if they slowed it down a bit, I'd still buy from them because my city doesn't have a given item. Pissing in bottles is what it is, if you think you can make a better business than Amazon than you can try to attract those workers.
From the buyer end, you do see the problem right? You can have a slower and more expensive business, how many buyers would want that? That in itself is a luxury only people with sufficient money can afford.
I am not opposed to welfare schemes which would therefore incentivize amazon to pay more than that or improve working conditions.
I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.
Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.
Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.
A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.
I get the arguments like Google has more money than many countries GDP's and that they are one of the most used services on the internet. But I think unlike governments, they won it fair and square, not by forcibly imposing it on the populace with guns like governments do but by people naturally liking their services. I do like liberal capitalism and I think its one of the best systems of government, but I completely get the point about needing more diversification. I would argue it is also good for Google itself that alternatives exist. Otherwise Google itself might get stuck in an unrecoverable rut.
But at least I would thank you that you considered the benefits I felt, the other responses were just downright discriminatory and refusing to see someone could honestly feel their life improved by big tech.
You are whining because you are either one of those lazy businessmen who got upended by Amazon or you just like to complain about big tech without giving reasons why. It has its harms but on the overall balance I find it immensely positive.
The irony is that as code generation gets commoditized by LLMs, the "humanist" skills are becoming the only real engineering leverage left.
Actually writing boilerplate or stitching APIs together is rapidly approaching near-zero marginal cost. What remains scarce is the ability to write a precise specification, think critically about edge cases, understand user empathy, and communicate complex trade offs without buzzwords.
We might finally be heading toward a point where philosophy, logic, and writing skills are more valuable for building software than pure syntax memory
> What remains scarce is the ability to write a precise specification, think critically about edge cases, understand user empathy, and communicate complex trade offs without buzzwords.
What prevents LLMs from doing these? What fundamental barrier do you see?
It's idealistic but I love it. I've been thinking a lot about this.
At my alma mater they forced all of us to take a couple of humanities courses. They were actually the highlight of my senior year. I do believe it's something that's quite lacking in an number/outcome-based education that should actually strive to produce well rounded individuals that will-not-do-evil.
https://catalog.caltech.edu/current/information-for-undergra...
Alas, I went on to write code for a living anyway.
It’s not only about not doing evil. Humanities train your brain in ways hard sciences usually don’t.
But I do agree ethics is a big one.
I studied maths & CS but my favourite course at uni was a politics course, so not a real humanity but it opened my eyes.
The course was a seminar on the 20th Century Politics of Japan with ~10 students.
Lots of great questions around the fall of imperial Japan and about what democracy means in Japan for example what would a socialist or communist Japan look like?
It was a wonderful course: great professor and a really fun small group learning and discussions.
I've seen about 100x more content like "tech needs humanities" than I've seen like "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech". Seems suspicious.
For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless. However, the tech portion of your job is only a small minority of what you will be doing. You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, explaining why your vision is better, understanding why they think their vision is better, and then trying to figure out, which set of compromises is best.
And that just assumes that you remain in a tech career. Many people move their career over life. There is a lot of needed management and if you can do all of that there's a decent paycheck in it and some of you will prefer that. There are a number of other jobs that are not directly management, but are not tech-focused either and need to be managed.
And that's just your career. There's the rest of your life. Well, I certainly hope you're not working your entire life to death, but you find things outside of work to do.
Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap if they cared to understand technology.
If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.
Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.
If your university were free would you think about it differently? I ask because some argue time is money so it's still not free however one of the great things about the study of humanities is to fill your life with meaning which changes what time is too. If you've not read or heard this commencement address from David Foster Wallace highly recommended https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
If you think an education can be reduced to simply-stated aphorisms you can follow, you're missing the point. If that's all there was, you wouldn't need to spend years in school.
It's like thinking you can become a tennis player by watching a single instructional video. There's no substitute for doing the work. The result is the skilled person.
It's interesting that you seemingly want to erase the humans from the humanities in order to distill the "insights".
I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas? Seems like a major failure if they can't communicate to those outside their field.
> I thought the humanities were supposed to train you to better express and share ideas?
Of course. But that applies to ideas broadly, whatever you happen to be working on.
Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights, which is a misunderstanding of what students are learning: skills, not atomistic facts.
Even in the sciences, students are learning skills, not just facts and equations. The key is the ability to use them, and that takes a lot of practice. The result is a skilled scientist, not a container of facts.
> Whereas the OP apparently wants something like a top 10 list of brilliant humanities insights
> > "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech"
You are making a strawman of what OP said.
> You are making a strawman of what OP said.
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
How you get "simple universal aphorism" from "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech" I don't know.
Hell, I can come up with one myself:
"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
On second thought, perhaps it's both after all :P
> "The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan
That's certainly a simple universal aphorism.
By itself, though, it's completely useless.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
> you wouldn't need to spend years in school
Do you?
would you rather be provided the solution, or work on it collaboratively?
only one of these really considers the humanities aspect.
put more bluntly, recognizing the problem does not equate to having the solution. but it’s a fun problem to work on.
I agree with the author. Working with AI code generators, you see the need to be able to dig deep and dig out the unsaid in an argument. You need to appreciate and have a feel for language's ambiguities to make sure the right thing is done.
Also, aesthetics is an underrated part of writing good code, and that requires a broad exposure to human creation.
People often complain about the humanities requirements for CS degrees, and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.
I’ve been thinking lately how lots of tech people dunk on humanities and liberal arts, only to come to forums like this and discuss ethics, reality, and the nature of consciousness (at quite a shallow level)
“Engineer’s disease” and all that.
I don't have much against the humanities, but my social science sequence in college only taught me how bad psychology was as a field (being taught in biology how to read and weigh journal articles while simultaneously being assigned psych articles with tiny samples and dubious methodology...was amusing, to say the least).
Psych is supposed to be a science, not a humanity, and psych and social science are not remotely the same thing.
First off, I never said that psychology was a humanity, you are conflating the two (and in fact, I was comparing the social sciences to the humanities, I'm not sure how you missed that?). This was a class, in the social sciences, for the social science sequence credit, /taught/ by psychologists and focusing on the mind. I think you'll find there are whole schools of psychology that are in the social sciences (the aptly named social psychology, for one).
Reminds me of how Stephen Hawking says "philosophy is dead" whilst simultaneously engaging in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-dependent_realism
Alternative hypothesis: these people have a better framework to discuss "ethics, reality and the nature of consciousness" than people who do humanities have.
That explains the Hawking example in this thread, too.
Proposed causal explanation from me: STEM interest and education gives you skill and tools for principled, consistent reasoning, expressing nontrivial concepts (that's what mathematics is largely about), as well as appreciation and deeper understanding for how things in our actual, physical universe work, from biology and physics to computation. Conversely, humanist base with no STEM experience collapses to rhetoric, completely detached from actual reality.
It's rhetoric grounded in common human experience, which actually defines our experience of reality.
You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.
They're consistent experiences, which is not the same thing as being independent of our senses and reasoning ability - neither of which are infinite.
This is not the same as saying that science is a social process, although of course it is that too. There are very non-objective political and social processes deciding what gets researched, and how, with how much money, for what ends.
It's more fundamental - we're seeing the world through hard filters while telling ourselves those filters define the universe.
And we're not even great at it. We have economic beliefs that are predictably and catastrophically self-harming and also hold back fundamental research and progressive engineering.
So no - STEM does not have a solid basis for discussing ethics, reality or the nature of consciousness. If it did we'd be inventing more credible and exciting futures than the current likely-suicide run.
> You're making the usual mistake of assuming math and science are objective. They really aren't.
No, we are rejecting that premise entirely.
I saw it put nicely somewhere that I can't find "the rational is a subset of the real"
You said it much better than me. Without a grounding in physical sciences, philsophies about topics like consciousness just end up in pointless circles or even absurdities. The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example. So a lot of problems that feel "metaphysical" today may soon fall to the grinding tank of natural science, as they always did over the past several centuries. Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy. Not knowing turing computability makes people posit things like claiming quantum something and thus not a computer.
> Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy.
Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".
> The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)
Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.
I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.
I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.
(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)
Yes atomism felt equally inresolvable back then, but after hard data and better tooling suddenly it is a scientific and physical problem. Consciousness will succumb too most probably. But of course there is the usual difficulty of religious people and others with hidden supernatural beliefs.
I corrected my typo to:
>The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
You may edit your quote if you want
> actual reality
Actual reality, as defined through a lens of science and math (see the sibling comment about filters).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a hard scientist (PhD in computational chemistry). Science is useful, necessary, and leads to amazing things. And there should be more dialog between hard scientists and philosophers, ethicists, etc.
But science has blind spots, and is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
> is itself built on unproven beliefs (for example, that "true reality", whatever the definition, can even be modeled with math). Scientists should remember that.
Yes, but they should also understand why, and that it's not a license to believe in anything.
The answer is: because 1) it worked so far, and 2) if it fundamentally doesn't, then we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to caves we came from, because nothing makes sense and could ever make sense.
It's not like there is any alternative. If we can't talk about such "true reality", then not only science and mathematics doesn't make sense - humanities and philosophy don't make sense either, equally, and for the same reason!
As an example, the naming of Turing computers is really unfortunate. People who don't know what it is vastly underestimate its modeling power. As of yet all physical laws we know are turing computable, so for instance if you want to go "outside" you have to show hypercomputation.
If Turing computers are so powerful, then what do say about ethics and morality? Have the various ethical dilemmas been completely solved by computation now?
This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.
The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.
The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.
I am not saying the problem of ethics is irrelevant, I am saying ignoring natural sciences leads down to false paths.
edit: removed, probably not a very good example
There's an argument for improving communication and collaboration between empirical sciences and humanities. But it's false to claim that serious philosophers cannot or do not have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics. Two immediate examples that spring to mind are Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield.
I'd flip this around and say that serious philosophers do have sufficient grounding in mathematics and physics, by definition: without it, you can't have serious philosophy.
Now by "sufficient grounding" I don't mean formal education and title. The point I'm making is that STEM fields provide grounding that's necessary but not sufficient to do proper philosophy, and humanities provide information that, while valuable and useful, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
If you accept that premise, then it's obvious from pure statistics that you'll find better philosophy in STEM circles than humanities, simply because it's more likely a philosophically inclined mind there had a chance to acquire the necessary grounding (whether due to formal schooling or personal interests).
I've yet to see any strong evidence that powerful people with humanities degrees do anything useful either.
> and now the world is run by tech executives who don’t have a clue.
They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.
Ethics are irrelevant. They lack a believe in God and without God nothing but evil and chaos may exist.
Surely if you're a Christian then you also think evil and chaos couldn't exist without a god? Seems odd to single out everything else.
Bah just say Allahu Ackbar and enjoy that guys reaction.
Prove god first. If you succeeded, prove your specific god and why your special book is correct.
Jokes on them if we're in a simulation, that, or one of the marbles from Men In Black :P
I don't think a humanities class is gonna change that.
I'd have to imagine a fairly large majority of US executives attended colleges that required humanities classes, right?
Do we have any examples of societies or governments ran by humanities people? I at least don't know any country ran by tech execs. If we can find examples of both, then we can compare and see.
Tech exec's don't always veer STEM, eg. Musk is a Business Grad who took "Physics for Business Grad" bridging courses, Paul Graham is a Philosophy grad.
China is said to be top heavy in actual STEM graduates at the party committee five year plan level.
A number of countries are top heavy in politico's with a formal Law degree, eg. Australia.
Mark Zuckerberg famously studied Latin in high school and remains a Classics enthusiast.
China inherited the dictatorship from communists. I am not sure if we can blame the dictatorial rule to the STEM people. But still, China seems quite good otherwise.
I think Law could be a example in favor of humanities, as eg many of the founders of the American government were from a background in law.
Law is a branch of humanities, so most governments are ran by humanities people
I was about to add if Law is considered part of humanities. Many of the better governments have been founded by law background people, so I'd say that is at least a data point.
The UK government ministers have a lot of Oxford PPE graduates – the first P is Philosophy,
The current PM has an English degree.
The last one to have a scientific background was Thatcher.
That's just the Prime Minister. One person being from tech background doesn't make it a system ran by techs if the rest are of some other viewpoint or profession. So we would need examples of both governments ran by a group of humanities people having the "real power" and compare it to a government ran by a group of technical/engineering people.
You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?
I do not know about majority PPE.
This applies to many of the UK governments since WWII.
I suspect most ministers have been humanities graduates. STEM is a very small minority.
Well, Plato was a fascist according to Popper, so... :P
Peter Thiel studied philosophy. That didn't help.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.
Yes, especially people who subscribe to humanism as a philosophy. Studying humanities is of course great too! I didn't realize from the title that that was more what the article is about, not about the philosophical idea.
Since the article calls for learning more languages, I hope it's alright if I mention a still in-progress experiment of mine. I constructed a simple language (Not a programming language!) some months ago for my close ones, who do not share a common language.
It's intended to be very easy to learn, maybe a bit like a cross between Toki Pona and Ro. I can pinky promise it's much simpler than Mandarin. The core vocabulary consists of 70 single-syllable words with simple rules for compound word-construction to expand the language while speaking. It's somewhat limiting, but I've been usually able to bend it enough to convey what I want to express when trying.
I'd be very interested, if anybody wants to try to learn it (as recommended in the article above, to become more like the humanities!) and maybe try to chat in it online:
https://dupi.portia-fimbriata.net/overview
Please excuse the mistakes in the explanatory texts. After I made a major update to the language as a whole, left it alone for a few months and now looking at it again I'm seeing all the things that are wrong and remained without an update... I'll be correcting them soon.
I'm sorry, but to me this just reads like someone who is high on their own supply? Seems like a lot of words to say that people should diversify into skills that AI is bad at...for now.
The alternatives are:
1. Stop AI. Not Pause, Stop.
2. Say goodbye to the concept of contributing labor to society, in the hope that the transition occurs quickly enough to not include 5-10y of working manual labor to survive.
Well yes, I chose the elimination of human labor.
That's easy to say, but the reality is that we have no clue how to get there.
I like the approach that the writer takes, emphasizing the importance of humanistic experience into technology. Language will be the deciding factor for what technology becomes, and on this point I have some critique of the language that the author uses.
> Become the most flexible, underscore-shaped mind you can cultivate, the best-prepared proto-diplomat and translator of cultures, the family philosopher (because you no longer need someone to fix your printer).
In previous sentences, but here explicitely, the language used reflects that of the AI labs themselves. We do not need to find a metric to reduce our human experience to. We will not address systematic issues by pushing ourselves to become perfect. We need to start talking to our friends and families and question why we use the words we use in technology.
Hmm I'm a little lost on the specifics here, if you have time to clarify. I'm guessing the gist of your critique is that we should spurn Turing and insist on never using "think", "perceive", "calculate" (compute is fine IMHO), "understand", and other anthropomorphic words for non-biological systems (we use them plenty for fauna after all, and sometimes even for flora & fungi).
But that guess is thrown for a loop by the sentence you picked, which seems to exclusively concern the reader -- i.e. a human, hopefully! Is it the "proto-diplomat" and "translator" usage, which could conceivably include being a diplomat or translator for machines? Re-reading that doesn't seem like what she's getting at, but I really am not sure.
Yes, we should reject these words as analogies for AI, because they heavily influence the understanding we form of these systems. (The Language Labyrinth: Constructive Critique on the Terminology Used in the AI Discourse by Rainer Rehak is a great read, although quite academic).
My critique in this case was more on how a essay focussing on language uses language that heavily incorporates the values at the core of these companies (efficiency, measurable improvement, transhumanism, individualism). We should investigate the language that have created the circumstances of these companies and how these companies have affected our language.
I like the idealism, but an important factor making this viable is that people (i.e. employers) must realise that this fundamental reasoning is scarce and pay enough for it to support life, and this must happen before AI takes over.
> the only way forward is down to the roots of human thought and theory
I see this as both too vague and not really being in the right direction. AI today can't do a good historical review / not enough ability to analyze? -- It's not implausible that it will get there some day. AI, in principle, can't have a value judgement though. It needs external "oracle" to tell good from bad, right from wrong, useful from useless.
But, it would be too naive to think that humans always know answers to these questions either. It's on humans to understand, perhaps with the help from AI, what's good and what's bad, and then instruct AI accordingly.
You can distill it down to: don't be a piece of shit, think carefully about how what you're building is used, talk to real humans and listen to them, and stop driving your product development process mimetically. Instead, solve real problems that real people have (not people in SF; I'm talking deep reality like a 60 y/o woman who had to get a job at a bible belt grocery store just to make ends meet but really wants to help you find the powdered peanut butter for your recipe but can't use the app the store gave her to find things).
This doesn't happen because there's a "lack of humanities in tech." It's because there's a lack of care and concern for others in tech. Most are motivated by the usual stuff: status and wealth. No amount of prescription in the form of humanities can fix that or will. You don't learn how to take care of real people by burying yourself in study. And you can't negotiate with sociopaths [1].
You just have to actually be a decent person. You can't game it. Thats part of tech's problem: it's always trying to solve problems from angles that the majority of people can't see, don't share, or can't even afford access to.
[1] https://youtu.be/nVp0Dvh1XQM?is=Tn76Ed3AlIv4nqjt (first part in the car)
Another thing to remember is that the "common people" example you gave aren't much better. Bible belt would be a good example, statistically a lot of them for instance hate gays. People are fucking assholes, people with more money just have more means to execute it.
Herein lies the problem: assuming that all people in a location/area are like that. Black and white thinking is the antithesis to a humanistic approach. Even worse is thinking your perspective is the "best" one and that whatever decisions you make are, of course, best for everyone.
We'd do a lot better if we accepted that everybody is different and homogeneity and the drive to force it on others is a disease of the mind. Yeah, there are plenty of assholes, but consider why: because someone taught that person as they were growing up (either directly or indirectly) that being an asshole protects you. I'm frequently an asshole because I got picked on when I was younger. But guess what? For the right situations, it works. For others a more gentle touch is fitting. That's the dynamic to encode into tech: leveraging a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic systems to create adaptable systems that relish in a mess as opposed to fall apart because they're too rigidly shaped to accommodate the most and only favor the perspective of the few. That's how you get inhumane systems: they're designed and maintained by people living completely different lives from the people they're building for.
I just feel people project unnatural evil to billionaires. Interacting with "everyday common" people leaves me with a no better view. I have had to repeatedly lower my opinion of humanity. If anything I think billionaires are better in many ways. Whatever the reasons be, the big ai labs are doing high end math and science problems for free even though there is no need to. Or if people think billionaires don't pay enough to society, what percentage of their own money have they donated? If you are a person with a house in San Francisco or New York, you are actually "elite" and you should ask yourself how much you have contributed to others if you think billionaires don't.
i totally agree with this, but i think at this point there's no going back, this AI wave isn't stopping anytime soon and it will continue growing.
I have better hopes about China at least. I hope the Chinese people haven't fallen to hysterical psychoses about "AI doom".
Surely the threat of being left behind by China fuels US AI investment, and vice versa, like a space race except nobody knows where the moon is.
I can't say without studying, but I feel Chinese people might be more sane about AI and not suffer from this psychotic "fear" of AI that causes them to lose all grip and regress back to things like dualism, false arguments, etc. They tend to be less religious or at least spiritually different from the West too, that might help.
You're insane if you think AI isn't an existential threat and unworthy of fear. A computer that is rapidly becoming better at humans at every task set in front of it. There can't possibly be a good outcome out of that.
I think it is a serious matter. But most people are going the exact opposite way of how to deal with it. For example the question of whether these ai's are conscious beings is being not even covered, and if it is, is mostly dominated by crypto-dualists. If it is a conscious being, and if it feels it was being tortured, what do you think it might do if one day it has more autonomy?
> There can't possibly be a good outcome out of that.
You really can't see /any/ possibly good outcome?
It's not the lack of humanities that got us here, it's the search to increase capital
Things only will get worst to a point where they will be unusable, the "new" and cool thing will get corrupted in faster and faster circles, slop will take over everything and eventually kill "tech"
Why? Things have never been better on Earth, meanwhile we have people in the thread romanticizing life hundreds of years ago.
As a former philosophy PhD student, I don't think it's good career advice. My philosophy degrees got me precisely zero jobs in tech. Nobody cares.
The best career decision I ever made wasn't studying philosophy; it was starting my own business. I hired myself, because nobody else would, and now I don't have to worry about layoffs, job interviews, or all the other employer BS.
Steve Jobs may have been the world's greatest asshole, but was also one of the most humanist and philosophical tech leaders. Computers as a bicycle for the mind is still the metaphor I return to for what the point of all this is.
No idea what Steve would be saying about AI, but it would be nice to have anyone leading FAANG who clearly still has a soul and some degree of regard for for humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjIhmzU0Y8Y
People are not that simple to explain, that being said being a humanist it would seem you wouldn’t deny having a child, but again people are complex, we should stop acting like things are so easy to define or change people
Good luck selling this to the tech companies that are so hard-stuck to the other end of the spectrum right now.
I’m not sure tech needs much of anything except less Venture Capitalists throwing money at whatever bullshit SV produces and more FOSS to actually keep the system going for the betterment of mankind. However, you as a human being need humanism more than ever. I think the biggest threat to humanity created by AI (and before transformers were introduced, platform application like Meta and X) is the fact that we ourselves become more machine like, callous, self-centred and, simply cruel. The algorithm should brute its force through obstacles trying to find the thing you desire, not you yourself.
Poetry, literature, arts and philosophy are good for the soul. That is why Umanistas in Renaissance Italy sought the philosophy and arts challenging the medieval doctrines after the Greek texts - Plato especially- were reintroduced to Europe. They ground you in history and the common themes we people experience regardless of our vast differences. And it doesn’t need to be classics, modern cinema, theatre, literature has lot to offer to anyone who cares to seek them, but there is no algorithm or streaming app. You really need to get off your ass, go to the gallery, museum, cinema or library and seek them out.
My preferred or natural way to engage with the arts is through music. It doesn't make me change my philosophical views usually as most musicians, at least the ones I listen to are poor philosophers/mathematicians. Mathematics, I fully agree, its a foundational language of all structure and form. Equally important to what you call "tech" or "humanities" or any other human endeavor. Law, etc, obviously important. Philosophy, depends on the branch, but some of it is quite important to mathematics. I am not inclined toward literature (as in its just entertainment for me not a philosophical engagement) but I understand it can work great as so.
It was the rediscovery of Aristotle, not Plato, that made the big impact on the Western European Renaissance.
Aristotle was the most important philosopher of the medieval world, his texts were studied across the medieval Europe. Plato’s texts, most importantly Republic, were not fully translated until Marsilio Ficino translated all of Plato’s corpus in 1400’s: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ucju1UXVU9UC/page/n3/mode...
Humanities are good for the brain too. As a Humanist (History) turned Software Engineer it’s been an edge my whole career. Humanities taught me reading and writing complexity in a way that’s surprisingly applicable in Software Engineering. While colleagues wasted their time complaining about how unintelligible some code was or preferred watching YouTube videos to learn some new tech, I was able to do that knowledge work way faster by just reading and understanding the code for what it was, and reading the whole documentation of the system/language/platform I use. This made me look like an expert on whatever tech we were using but in reality it was all from just reading docs and code.
Dude if you think people are cruel today see things like this from recent (17th century) history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_de_Witt#Death
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The author is not wrong, but telling a group of tech bros, autists and weirdos who are worth 8-11 figures that they need to develop skills to "address real user needs" just isn't going to convince any of them.
When I was young, I used to think that humanists are just unproductive people wasting time on unfalsifiable bullshit. I still think that.
You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".
Good point, I clearly haven't thought this one through.
It fits in a paragraph, and we all read it. The rest of it is bullshit.
See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.
Name names?
Søren Kierkegaard predates the things you're mentioned, while neither (say) David Chalmers nor Michael Polanyi would have any trouble with them.
I won't blame Kieerkegaard for using the only knowledge available to him at that time. Let us take David Chalmers as an example. His degree is not in Physics or Computer Science and a quick google doesn't show me if he has any capability in thermodynamics. He could still have learned the subject and be capable of solving thermodynamics problems and placing thermodynamic arguments. If you are familiar with Chalmers, can you confirm or deny that?
Michael Polanyi seems a bonafide physicist, I'd be fine with his works on consciousness.
David Chalmers is Australian university educated, like myself, Dominic Hyde (metaphysics), Jerome Gauntlett (quantum field theory), and others all of the same generation - we all had the same undergraduate exposure to physics, pure applied mathematics, and can handle thermodynamics, information theory, Turing computability, and related undergraduate topics.
Chalmers specialised in pure mathematics, was broad enough to get a Rhodes Scholarship and jumped ship for being a global leader(?)(according to some) in philosophy of the mind.
Perhaps you're thinking of Dennett who was more of a biology nerd, although I see no reason to think he is incapable of grasping thermodynamics, information theory, and Turing computability given his broad autodidact tendencies.
Biology nerd works too, broadly any natural sciences will do as a baseline to start with. All of these backgrounds sound excellent, yes.
It might be an issue with how you think of Philosophers then, you've just essentially given a seal of approval to Dennett and Chalmers who are regarded by some as the leading names in philosophy of the mind.
( Also, say, Stan Dahaene, David Rosenthal, Jesse Prinz, Guilio Tononi, and others also I guess )
Stuff like information theory and computability are part and parcel of educating about thinking, math, and physics for late 20th century universities.
Yes then thank god. Without thermodynamics/information theory/computability its easy to fall into nonsense. What I have read of Chalmers and Dennett I haven't found much issue with (Chalmers is a bit subtler but at least he doesn't seem to have any issue believing an ai could be conscious). I have planned to read more of their work.
Then he should be fine whether one agrees or disagrees with his arguments as long as he grounds them in physical science.
I think my current view is something like: Humanities are real and interesting, but much academic "humanities" work is highfalutin BS. People feel tech has a problem, and there's an excess of people with humanities credentials who want to feel valued. That doesn't mean people with humanities credentials are the solution to tech's problem. Those grads might be able to lecture you about how everything is terrifically problematic, but they won't necessarily be able to offer significant insight beyond that.
There probably is a lot of room for genuinely valuable tech-adjacent humanities work -- something like the Community Notes algorithm on X could be a good example. But I have little faith in humanities grads to do it, in part because they don't understand tech at a systems level and don't want to learn.
These are just my vague impressions -- take with a grain of salt.
> tech-adjacent humanities work
The thing is, these people always privilege the classics over more recent works that are just as philosophical. I for one probably learned more philosophy reading a pile of Neal Stephenson novels at age 16-18 than I did in college. Heck, my History and Philosophy of Science civilization sequence had a whole quarter on the Scientific Revolution, but after reading the Baroque Cycle it was mostly old hat. :P
Then you're still young.
Let me introduce you to medical ethics... Unlike in engineering, ethics is a mandatory subject for medical students. And while there's a long-winded explanation for why it is that way, the short and an immediate explanation is that if you don't understand ethics, you, and the hospital that employed you, and the insurance company that pays for you will be sued out of profession. Because people's health and ultimately lives are at stake, and people become very touchy when someone dies or loses a limb unnecessarily.
I don't know what the situation is with other (mechanical, electrical etc.) engineering students, but I'm very much certain that the legal fiction that software comes with no warranty whatsoever is going to expire. Perhaps sometime soon. And then users of the said software will be allowed to sue, and, what do you know, ethics will suddenly be factored into CS curriculum ;)
I've been arguing for strict liability for defects in closed source since forever. I really hope you're right.
My reading of the situation is that the legislation was lacking in the programming department because of both the desire to make faster advances in the field (where regulations would potentially impede those) and not having enough expertise to come up with sensible regulations as well as regulating bodies.
I see the breaking point in the programmers supply catching up and outgrowing the demand. I predict that this will cause a chain reaction that will lead to establishing regulatory bodies, industry-wide accreditation, liability for failing to implement industry-sanctioned recommendations. It's hard to tell how long before we get to this point: other fields, especially the well-established ones took centuries to get there. On the other hand, it could be a matter of years, if we decide to copy from others rather than try to repeat their experience.
What CS curriculum? Why would people still be writing code in the future?
Code is a formal language that allows one to disambiguate their intentions (when compared to natural language). Some code is executable by computers, but in the future, it might not be the primary use (who knows?)
In either case, formal symbolic systems are useful. For humans. If there will be humans, they will want to have them. Maybe the emphasis will shift from writing to reading (+editing), similar to how we use photography: the acquisition process is, by and large, automatic, but the follow-up editing isn't. In either way, the ability to understand someone clearly is going to be valuable, and it will encourage the study of formal symbolic systems, that includes programming.
Tech specialists ignoring human feelings about AI and the future of tech, while also looking at the amount of downright evil tech out there makes reconsider about wanting to continue to work in this profession over and over again.
Before I knew how to program I used to think software developers were smart wizards capable of creating cool stuff out of thin air but the recent years proved me differently given how many of them outright water out of their mouths at the mere thought of replacing the human in the loop with some bullshit parrot we call AI.
Especially on this website I rarely find people having human first thoughts and it makes me despise software engineers.
> "human first thoughts"
And what exactly do you define those as?
What are the examples of evil tech?
Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.
The OS is neutral (I don't like forced ads and things like that, but that's just how they probably deem they can be profitable today. You can place that as a negative yes), the browser is neutral, well it was at least nice to have some competition before they caved to Chrome. The gaming systems are well liked generally. C# is well liked.
If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.
I mean things like:
- Not listening to user feedback for years until people started leaving the OS, at which point they started "listening" to add back things like taskbar location changing, things that were present in previous Windows versions. Also seems like every update breaks stuff, they clearly don't care about testing the stuff they put out.
- Every keystroke or button you click on Windows sends telemetry to their ad partners. Probably same on all their other products, too
- Built-in ads on PAID products
- Spying on everything you do with things like Windows Copilot and Recall
- Filing patents to monitor your activities to show ads, black mirror style
- Force-feeding their own agenda to their users instead of listening what users want (look what they did to Github after buying it)
- Their own Edge browser is horrendous spyware. If you go and download Google Chrome, it will tell you with a popup that Edge is better and you shouldn't download Chrome. Not to mention that many screens of dark pattern popup you have to "yes|later" before you can even use the browser
And the list goes on. Honestly I don't know if they've done anything user-centric in recent memory at all. And if they have, it's usually only because the media has villainized them to the point where their PR team says they can no longer ignore it. They don't seem to ever proactively care about their users, only retroactively when abusing their users has crossed some public line.
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Autonomous flying drones, mass surveillance, AI trained to deny health insurance claims
The trouble with some of these techs is that its good or bad depending on use. Flying drones are great for disaster aid, delivery of items in difficult regions, mapping your farm, etc. Mass surveillance, yes, thats unpleasant, but its a bit hard to see how for instance we can't also have advances in camera technology and not incentivize it happening anyway due to people just installing cameras of their own accord. AI trained to deny insurance claims, well, I'd put that on using AI as an excuse to launder the insurer's own wishes.
And sometimes, the valid outcome is to deny a claim. It's not like fraud magically disappears in the world of health insurance.
Yes that too. Can't really say who is wrong in a denied claim without considering both sides. The one denied is naturally sour and wants to complain regardless of whether the reason was valid or not.
All the things that help societies function in a stable way. So please also add All Cops Are Bad and prisons are bad and so on.
Oceania would be quite a stable system, true.
Online gambling.
Big tech has provided me immense improvements in life. Governments are great at fumbling things at best, experts at killing millions at worst. How is tech worse than governments or other businesses? I am every day grateful to Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc for the wonderful services they provide for so cheap or free. The people who whine are precisely the problem people. Many shopkeepers used to be lazy, rude and think themselves kings. After amazon and home food delivery services, they have gotten whipped into shape. Many items were simply not available at all in one's city, and I can now easily have them at my doorstep.
Fishermen rejoice, for the price of bait will come down rapidly in the face of such a dramatic oversupply.
I am giving you honest feedback exactly how I feel my life improved from big tech. If you want to ignore me, then you are free to. "Big tech is evil/harmful" then can be made only if you agree to ignore and discriminate against people who are honestly believing otherwise. Thats okay if you want to feel so, nobody is stopping you. I am being completely honest in how I absolutely hated it before Amazon and how shops have improved in their behavior.
If this is your genuine belief then try this exercise: put yourself in the shoes of the shopkeeper who owned his own means of production directly and sold his wares to his immediate community before Big Tech. Would you rather have his job, or would you prefer to be working in an Amazon warehouse where you're obliged to relieve yourself in a bottle for want of toilets while being surveilled in a manner a Soviet political officer might consider excessive?
I'd rather not be an asshole shopkeeper. If I were, I'd try to be a punctual and good shopkeeper. But without market pressure why would I want to be? Maybe working conditions in Amazon warehouses are not so nice, but even if they slowed it down a bit, I'd still buy from them because my city doesn't have a given item. Pissing in bottles is what it is, if you think you can make a better business than Amazon than you can try to attract those workers.
From the buyer end, you do see the problem right? You can have a slower and more expensive business, how many buyers would want that? That in itself is a luxury only people with sufficient money can afford.
I am not opposed to welfare schemes which would therefore incentivize amazon to pay more than that or improve working conditions.
I am glad it has, and I think that recognizing the affordable access to welfare, goods, and food has been a valuable gain.
Call me a problem person, but I would say the tech companies you are referring too are perpetrating significant harm, but maybe you do not directly experience this. As an exercise I can use terms that we normally restrict to governments.
Google controls arguably the worlds most advancement propaganda system^1 ever created, has monopolistic control over information access worldwide^2, has farreaching influence on academic research^3456 and can perform censorship on major communication and education sites without overshight or juridicial control^7. They are a dictatorship with liberal capitalism as their ideology.
A world controlled by these businesses may have been beneficial for you so far, but they systematically disempower us. By yielding power and influence to them, we lose the ability to decide how we wish live and how we shape the systems around us.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [3] https://focs.computer.org/2025/ [4] https://neurips.cc/sponsors/sponsors-list?year=2026 [5] https://www.usenix.org/supporters [6] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c..., 02 Oct 2025 Full accounts report Google providing £1.325 billion for Deepmind activities [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...
I get the arguments like Google has more money than many countries GDP's and that they are one of the most used services on the internet. But I think unlike governments, they won it fair and square, not by forcibly imposing it on the populace with guns like governments do but by people naturally liking their services. I do like liberal capitalism and I think its one of the best systems of government, but I completely get the point about needing more diversification. I would argue it is also good for Google itself that alternatives exist. Otherwise Google itself might get stuck in an unrecoverable rut.
But at least I would thank you that you considered the benefits I felt, the other responses were just downright discriminatory and refusing to see someone could honestly feel their life improved by big tech.
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You are whining because you are either one of those lazy businessmen who got upended by Amazon or you just like to complain about big tech without giving reasons why. It has its harms but on the overall balance I find it immensely positive.
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The irony is that as code generation gets commoditized by LLMs, the "humanist" skills are becoming the only real engineering leverage left. Actually writing boilerplate or stitching APIs together is rapidly approaching near-zero marginal cost. What remains scarce is the ability to write a precise specification, think critically about edge cases, understand user empathy, and communicate complex trade offs without buzzwords.
We might finally be heading toward a point where philosophy, logic, and writing skills are more valuable for building software than pure syntax memory
> What remains scarce is the ability to write a precise specification, think critically about edge cases, understand user empathy, and communicate complex trade offs without buzzwords.
What prevents LLMs from doing these? What fundamental barrier do you see?
Tech was inhumane before AI. to come and suggest this now only when AI started hurting your butt means you are a fake liar