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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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 theoretical 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 would argue it helped a lot. He is (somehow still) one of the few people in SV who has opinions about the role tech should play in society beyond amoral "growth at all costs." I don't agree with many of his opinions, but he is out there influencing the future of tech and society. I think the world would be a much better place if we had a couple dozen people in the SV elite with Thiel's willingness to wrestle with the questions of tech and society, but varying viewpoints, varying levels of empathy, and varying feelings about the importance of winning individually relative to succeeding collectively.
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 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
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.
The issue is, I don't think that university humanities courses generally contribute much to a person's moral development, and if they do, it's not always necessarily in a positive way (as anybody who has taken enough university humanities courses can tell you). Interest in the humanities is something that should be cultivated much earlier in life to really have an effect; if your first serious encounter with philosophy is in senior-year philosophy gen ed classes, it's probably not going to do much good, and might actually do harm (e.g. the person who takes psychology 101 and starts over-confidently diagnosing all their friends and family with obscure mental illnesses, the person who takes ethics 101 and decides that 20th century utilitarianism is a perfect system with no downsides, not to even mention the culture war stuff which is the not-so-subtle elephant in the room).
I loved probably 2/3rds of my gen ed courses back during my college years, but this was entirely due to an existing appreciation for the topics (history, literature, physical sciences), and around 1/3rd of them were worse than useless (I cannot remember a single positive lesson I took from them other than a sense of nihilism about the university's faculty hiring standards).
If the goal is moral development, few things will develop a person's morals than actually living and struggling in the real world, and college is NOT the real world. I have some half baked opinions about the degree to which university education produces a lot of adult children with arrested development due to an extended adolescence. If on the other hand, the goal is a classical liberal arts education, which I am quite sympathetic towards (at least in theory), I am skeptical that taking a handful of university humanities courses is the ideal way to accomplish this.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> For the tech portion of your jobs, humanities is mostly useless.
I don't think anyone argued differently, the actual question is, are humanities good for anything at their current state of development?
> You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, [on, and on, and on, how there's a world outside of technology]
That doesn't automatically qualify these humanities as some sort of aid. Looking at the social developments in the last few decades, things appear to be going downhill and accelerating. Humanities seem to be contributing to that trend, or at least completely unable to reverse or slow it down.
Some of the best examples of extremely powerful forces in tech being grounded in the humanities (though perhaps not humanism) come from the legacy of Peter "don't go to college" Thiel. Thiel himself has an undergrad in philosophy, and at Paypal he hired a bunch of folks with backgrounds in political science, law, economics, and other "softer" sciences. People like Keith Rabois (Poli Sci), David Sacks (Economics) and Chad Hurley (Fine Art) ended up becoming very influential to both the economics and the culture of Silicon Valley.
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/
> 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.
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.
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[ 11.7 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadBefore 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.
And what exactly do you define those as?
They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.
The current PM has an English degree.
The last one to have a scientific background was Thatcher.
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.
“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.
No, we are rejecting that premise entirely.
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).
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 theoretical 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.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
But I do agree ethics is a big one.
I loved probably 2/3rds of my gen ed courses back during my college years, but this was entirely due to an existing appreciation for the topics (history, literature, physical sciences), and around 1/3rd of them were worse than useless (I cannot remember a single positive lesson I took from them other than a sense of nihilism about the university's faculty hiring standards).
If the goal is moral development, few things will develop a person's morals than actually living and struggling in the real world, and college is NOT the real world. I have some half baked opinions about the degree to which university education produces a lot of adult children with arrested development due to an extended adolescence. If on the other hand, the goal is a classical liberal arts education, which I am quite sympathetic towards (at least in theory), I am skeptical that taking a handful of university humanities courses is the ideal way to accomplish this.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_de_Witt#Death
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.
Also, aesthetics is an underrated part of writing good code, and that requires a broad exposure to human creation.
What prevents LLMs from doing these? What fundamental barrier do you see?
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"
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjIhmzU0Y8Y
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.
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.
I don't think anyone argued differently, the actual question is, are humanities good for anything at their current state of development?
> You will be spending a lot of time working with other people, [on, and on, and on, how there's a world outside of technology]
That doesn't automatically qualify these humanities as some sort of aid. Looking at the social developments in the last few decades, things appear to be going downhill and accelerating. Humanities seem to be contributing to that trend, or at least completely unable to reverse or slow it down.
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.
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.
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)
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.