The Case for Humanities Education

This essay is taken from my original post on EverythingHuman.

At the World Economic Forum in January 2026, Palantir CEO Alex Karp stirred debate by declaring that artificial intelligence would “destroy humanities jobs,” urging a pivot toward purely vocational and technical training. It’s a common sentiment these days: if a degree doesn’t translate directly into a job on day one, why bother?

But I think that perspective misses something fundamental, especially right now.

As AI takes over routine coding, data analysis, and technical tasks, writing off the humanities as an “impractical luxury” is a huge mistake. The skills we learn from the humanities aren’t becoming obsolete; they’re becoming the very things that make us uniquely human. Neglecting them doesn’t just hurt our career prospects in the long run, it quietly degrades our quality of life, narrows our culture, and weakens our democracies.

Finding Meaning (Not Just Optimization)

Engineering and technical fields are great at answering the how — how to build a faster system, optimize an algorithm, or streamline a process. But the humanities force us to ask the why.

You can optimize a system all day, but code alone can’t tell you what’s actually worth building, or how to live a good life. Engaging with philosophy, ethics, and literature gives us a space to wrestle with existential questions, build emotional resilience, and figure out who we are. Without that, life quickly turns into a series of technical problems to solve rather than a life to actually live.

Culture, Art, and What AI Can’t Fake

The humanities and the arts are essentially the shared memory of human experience. When you listen to Mozart, look at a Van Gogh painting, or read Dostoevsky, you’re connecting with real human struggle, beauty, and nuance. Generative AI can mimic the style of past artists by matching statistical patterns, but it doesn’t feel anything. It has no lived experience, no heartbreak, no genuine perspective.

The same goes for history. History isn’t just a list of dates to memorize — it’s a mirror. Studying history helps us notice cycles, spot systemic mistakes, and understand how human societies react under stress. If we abandon historical scholarship in favor of pure technical utility, we risk cultural amnesia, losing the ability to reflect on where we came from or where we’re going next.

Why Democracy Needs Critical Thinking

A healthy democracy doesn’t run on passive consensus. It requires citizens who can think independently, question authority, and cut through noise and propaganda. When education becomes purely about training people for jobs, we risk producing great technicians who never learned how to question the systems they work within.

This reminds me of a quote from philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities:

”…Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens.”

Without the critical inquiry that humanities cultivate, it’s all too easy for a society to slide into passive consumerism, echo chambers, and algorithmic manipulation. Staying intellectually curious and critical isn’t just an academic exercise, it’s how we protect a free society.

The Real Value of the Humanities in an AI World

Ironically, the hyper-pragmatic view that “only STEM matters” is starting to backfire. Basic technical skills — writing boilerplate code, parsing spreadsheet data, running standard analyses — are exactly what AI is best at automating.

What AI can’t do is ask the right questions, synthesize context from wildly different fields, show genuine empathy, or diagnose deep social problems.

Real innovation almost never comes from mechanical execution alone. It comes from people who can combine technical know-how with humanistic perspective. Rather than rendering the humanities obsolete, the rise of AI makes them more essential than ever. They remind us not just how to work, but how to think, feel, and live.