Tech Needs Humanists More

eeigenBasis about 2 hours ago 91 commentsRead Article on passo.uno

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

79% Positive

Analyzed from 1970 words in the discussion.

Discussion (91 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

tanhle•about 1 hour ago

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.

DanielVZ•26 minutes ago

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.

chris_swart•29 minutes ago

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.

0xDEAFBEAD•30 minutes ago

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.

bluGill•12 minutes ago

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.

lapcat•14 minutes ago

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".

ChickeNES•7 minutes ago

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.

lostmsu•11 minutes ago

> you wouldn't need to spend years in school

Do you?

mattgoupil•43 minutes ago

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.

ChickeNES•about 1 hour ago

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.

bbor•39 minutes ago

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.

ChickeNES•36 minutes ago

Well yes, I chose the elimination of human labor.

bluGill•11 minutes ago

That's easy to say, but the reality is that we have no clue how to get there.

moolcool•about 1 hour ago

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.

pet_the_bird•about 1 hour ago

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.

Liftyee•about 1 hour ago

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.

hyfgfh•40 minutes ago

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"

ChickeNES•19 minutes ago

Why? Things have never been better on Earth, meanwhile we have people in the thread romanticizing life hundreds of years ago.

princewills_1•about 1 hour ago

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.

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

I have better hopes about China at least. I hope the Chinese people haven't fallen to hysterical psychoses about "AI doom".

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

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.

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

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.

lapcat•39 minutes 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.

nnevatie•about 1 hour ago

Good luck selling this to the tech companies that are so hard-stuck to the other end of the spectrum right now.

themgt•33 minutes ago

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

b3ing•28 minutes ago

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

delis-thumbs-7e•about 1 hour ago

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.

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

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.

TFNA•33 minutes ago

It was the rediscovery of Aristotle, not Plato, that made the big impact on the Western European Renaissance.

DanielVZ•39 minutes ago

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.

hardbass•30 minutes ago

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

sevenzero•about 1 hour ago

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.

ChickeNES•about 1 hour ago

> "human first thoughts"

And what exactly do you define those as?

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

What are the examples of evil tech?

askonomm•about 1 hour ago

Pretty much anything Microsoft does, for example.

ungovernableCat•about 1 hour ago

Autonomous flying drones, mass surveillance, AI trained to deny health insurance claims

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

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.

hardbass•about 1 hour ago

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.

ElProlactin•about 1 hour ago

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.

neuroticnews25•about 1 hour ago

When I was young, I used to think that humanists are just unproductive people wasting time on unfalsifiable bullshit. I still think that.

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

You needed the philosophy of science to give you that term "unfalsifiable".

crabbone•about 1 hour ago

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 ;)

Papazsazsa•about 1 hour ago

Then you're still young.

eugenepavlov•43 minutes ago

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

ChickeNES•31 minutes ago

> 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?

ls-a•about 1 hour ago

Tech was inhumane before AI. to come and suggest this now only when AI started hurting your butt means you are a fake liar