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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.
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.
Do you?
Also, aesthetics is an underrated part of writing good code, and that requires a broad exposure to human creation.
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.
“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.
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?
They do have a clue, what's missing is any sort of belief in the value of ethics.
> 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
And what exactly do you define those as?
If you mean things like being overly agreeable to government requests or aiding Israel in Palestine, then I can agree.
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?