Thanks to the rapid business adoption of large language models (LLMs), a humanities degree could be your competitive edge for future AI jobs.
Yes, your eyes don’t deceive you. If you studied English literature, medieval studies, anthropology, or political science in college, take heart. Your day in the tech spotlight is coming!
Historically, the natural and most common route to get and succeed in a tech job is to train in computer science, math, or engineering. GitHub certifications and knowledge of various programming languages have certainly helped more applicants get jobs than expertise in 19th century American history or musical theory. STEM jobs, in my experience, form the backbone of most tech companies’ organizational charts. My own company, Informed, is a case in point. Most of my colleagues are engineers or data scientists. As a former American Studies major who attended law school, my background is atypical.
Effective AI Use depends on Diverse Real World Knowledge
However, as companies actively embrace AI across their business, the needed skill set is going to change. Ethan Mollick, in his fascinating book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, remarks that humanities graduates will be uniquely well-positioned to extract insight from frontier AI models.
As Mollick notes, “our new AIs have been trained on a huge amount of our cultural history and are using it to provide us with text and images in response to our queries. But there is no index or map to what they know and where they might be most helpful. Thus, we need people who have deep or broad knowledge of unusual fields to use AI in ways that others cannot, developing unexpected and valuable prompts and testing the limits of how they work.”
To get diversity of outputs from AI, companies need diversity of inputs from their teams. If a company is overweighted with engineers, its ability to leverage AI solutions will suffer.
Humanities Majors Will Diversify the Insights from LLMs
The truth is that humans often follow standard tropes. Have you ever played the game “Celebrity,” where people write celebrity names and throw them in a pile for others to guess? It’s surprising how often the same names repeat. AI reflects this tendency toward banality in human choices. Without careful prompting, AI tends to select similar ideas repeatedly.
Companies with teams reflecting deep and diverse knowledge bases will likely succeed over those with more monochromatic educational backgrounds. Humanities majors are well positioned to use their background to become highly effective “coders” of AI. Mollick notes, “To get the AI to do unique things, you need to understand parts of the culture more deeply than everyone else using the same AI systems. So now, in many ways, humanities majors can produce some of the most interesting ‘code.’”
Yes, to succeed with AI, you should absolutely immerse yourself in the technology. But to get a competitive edge, maybe you should also go to a museum or read a book.
