Suddenly, AI’s tech titans are talking up humanities. Wishful thinking or just a guilt trip?

May 17, 2026 — 1:00pm

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Humans may be on the way out. But at least the humanities are back. Or so some of the tech gods tell us.

After decades of dismissing liberal arts and humanities studies as useless, and insisting that the mastery of science, engineering, maths and tech is essential to future success, the tech world is coming around to the idea that learning about human nature could be a valuable asset in the coming artificial intelligence revolution.

As it turns out, tech jobs may be drying up after years of students rushing to computer science. Who needs to code? AI does that for you.

What AI can’t do — yet — is the stuff that makes us human: empathy, emotion, psychology, critical thinking. “What a piece of work is man,” Hamlet said, describing an intricate and infinite creature.

“I think AI is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in New York and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”

He said he was shocked that students last semester had been hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of AI comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.

Daniela Amodei, a co-founder of Anthropic, told ABC News that “the things that make us human will become much more........

© The Age