Episode 309: What’s the Use of Your Humanities Degree in an AI World?

So, said an uncle to a student of mine, you’re getting a history degree, huh? When you graduate, you gonna get a job in a history store?  The numbers show that the uncle’s jab is winning. As friend of the podcast Jon Lauck has demonstrated in a Fall 2022 editorial in the Middle West Review,  the number of history majors in US colleges and universities has dropped by more than 50%. Departments have begun to shrink as a consequence of this, and that shrinkage shows no sign in many institutions of stopping until numbers hit zero. And it’s hard not to believe that fueling this is the question of where you are ever going to use that history degree–or any liberal arts degree. Add to that disheartening news of the recent arrival of ChatGPT, followed closely by New Bing, AI programs that promise to write every term paper that any professor ever contemplated assigning, and there doesn’t seem to be a point to the liberal arts Today I’m talking with my old friend Brent Orrell, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in (among other things) workforce and retraining programs, and preparing youths for jobs–and of late he’s also been thinking a lot about the impact of artificial intelligence on work, labor, and vocation. He’s been a guest on the podcast, back in episode 169, and he has his own podcast, Hardly Working, which I recommend to you for all your labor, workforce, and vocation needs. The accompanying picture was created by AI image generator DALL-E 2, which was asked to "create a painting in the style of Vermeer of a young woman working in a history store." "For Further Investigation Two articles from Brent on technology, AI, and work: "Brave New Technology" and "The Federal AI Shambles" At Inside Higher Education, Susan D'Agostino has basically cornered the Higher Ed AI beat. On October 26, IHE posted her article "Machines Can Craft Essays. How Should Writing Be Taught Now?", and that was followed by another, and another, and yet another, until the most recent (as of this podcast's drop) "Chat GPT is Here. But Most Faculty Lack AI Policies." HUMANITIES WORKS: Myths and Realities about Humanities Majors The Knowledge Navigator Video from Apple–an amazing piece of speculative fiction. Though as outlandish as any movie when it comes to depicting a professor's office.