In the classic “Star Wars” film “Revenge of the Sith,” the culmination of a thousand-year conspiracy results in the Sith’s revenge on the Jedi Order, transforming Anakin Skywalker from an overlooked apprentice into one of the franchise’s central characters: Darth Vader. Today, Darth Vader embodies the humanities major.
The Sith, a group of aliens in the “Star Wars” universe, represent an ancient order seeking justice and widespread acknowledgement of the power they wield. Anakin’s transformation from a Jedi apprentice to a Sith Lord marks not only a drastic rearrangement of character dynamics, but also a significant ideological shift. What was once neglected is now impossible to ignore. At STEM-focused schools like Northeastern University, humanities majors take on the form of up-and-coming Jedi apprentice Anakin Skywalker, soon to be Vader. With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, humanities majors will become more important than ever.Â
In today’s world, AI prevalence is on the rise, offering efficient solutions to many of our problems while simultaneously adding fuel to others. One major threat posed by mass-scale AI use lies in the workforce. The World Economic Forum found that increased professional AI use could displace 92 million jobs by 2030, with fields like computer science, data analysis and mathematics among the most affected. This is not to say that these disciplines will lose their value entirely; AI will never be able to fully replicate human capability, even in technical professions. Still, we may experience a rearrangement of what those jobs look like.
In a podcast snippet uploaded to Instagram in March, author and philosopher Sam Harris referred to this shift as “the revenge of the humanities.”
“My expectation now is that there’s going to be something like the revenge of the humanities … What the world needs are well-educated generalists who can create companies using robots that have learned to code, that produce things that we actually want that benefit our culture,” Harris said. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into daily practices and professional routines, jobs that center around a single technical skill may be reshaped by a computer’s ability to perform that same task.Â
By using the word “generalists,” Harris points toward the humanities as a broad field of study and alludes to its growing value. Expansive academic disciplines that focus on culture, history, language, and the human experience through transferable analytic skills remain incredibly important to modern society. As a Northeastern student majoring in English with minors in cultural anthropology and linguistics, I have seen this work in action. No matter how carefully you phrase a prompt, AI-generated content will never measure up to authentic human writing (and any college professor would say the same). A large language model can be trained to soak up as much information as possible about literature, cultural studies and philosophy, but without genuine human input and lived understanding of the significance that knowledge holds, how much is truly being accomplished aside from educating an apathetic machine?
All this to say, humanities majors are not to be overlooked, especially in the age of AI. The ability to explore how people across cultures view our world through the lens of religion, language, the arts, philosophy and countless other fields of study is key to fostering empathy for the people we meet, live with and work alongside on an everyday basis. At a school as vibrant and diverse as Northeastern, I am often surprised by how limited people’s perceptions of students’ fields of study can be. No, for the hundredth time, I am not an engineering major. I am a proud humanities major, and after one too many classes hidden away in the Snell Library basement, I think it is time for the revenge of the humanities.Â