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.
But I do agree ethics is a big one.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> > "here's a brilliant humanities insight which can be applied to tech"
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.
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
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.
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.
Also, aesthetics is an underrated part of writing good code, and that requires a broad exposure to human creation.
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.
“Engineer’s disease” and all that.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
edit: removed, probably not a very good example
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...)
>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
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).
They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.
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.
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.
The current PM has an English degree.
The last one to have a scientific background was Thatcher.
You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?
This applies to many of the UK governments since WWII.
I suspect most ministers have been humanities graduates. STEM is a very small minority.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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"
You really can't see /any/ possibly good outcome?
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.
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.
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.
Søren Kierkegaard predates the things you're mentioned, while neither (say) David Chalmers nor Michael Polanyi would have any trouble with them.
Michael Polanyi seems a bonafide physicist, I'd be fine with his works on consciousness.
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.
( 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 prevents LLMs from doing these? What fundamental barrier do you see?