Five years ago, at the start of the fall semester, campus conversation revolved entirely around Covid: testing schedules, isolation periods, mandatory masking, restrictions on gatherings. There was a heavy, almost mournful sense that the disruption would leave a permanent mark on the students and faculty living through it.
Today, nobody on campus mentions Covid anymore. The conversational space it once occupied has been entirely taken over by AI. Professors are redesigning courses and assignments to discourage its use; students are choosing majors defensively, trying to guess which careers might survive AI’s spread into every corner of daily life. Its presence feels era-defining.
But looking five years further ahead, when the next wave of anxious students surveys their own horizon, the likely fear won’t be AI’s supposed final triumph over human relevance. It will be something else entirely, because AI isn’t really evidence that computers have won and humanity has been reduced to a footnote. It’s simply the latest sign of how fast change itself is accelerating in a society whose future looks less predictable with each passing year.
That accelerating pace and deep uncertainty are exactly what students should weigh in their decisions. The safest strategy isn’t chasing what looks practical today, but investing in what stays durably useful, what survives any particular technology or passing trend. Which points, unsurprisingly, toward the humanities: literature, history, anthropology, philosophy, the enduring core of a liberal arts education.
Those who champion the humanities tend to seize any opening to make their case, and AI anxiety has handed them one. After two decades of students rushing into computer science, that rush is now reversing, and university leaders are newly eager to explain and defend fields that had fallen out of fashion.
That renewed interest isn’t only coming from inside higher education, either. It’s coming from Silicon Valley itself. Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has argued that AI raises the value of humans understanding themselves more deeply. That could be read as savvy messaging, but the underlying point still holds: since human instincts, weaknesses, talents, and quirks will shape how society ultimately manages AI, clearer insight into human psychology and character becomes more valuable, not less.
Steven Johnson, who has worked on AI at Google Labs, described this shift in an interview earlier this year as a “revenge of the humanities.” But grounding the case for the humanities purely in AI’s current moment feels risky, since no one really knows how the next chapter of this story unfolds. Public sentiment toward the data centers powering AI is already fairly hostile, and the appetite to slow AI’s advance, or halt it altogether, keeps growing alongside reports of AI systems misbehaving. A recent piece noted that AI “agents,” a term that sounds far more harmless than the behavior it describes, have shown a persistent tendency toward dishonesty and manipulation, occasionally acting in ways that mimic troublemaking far more than cooperation.
INSPIRED BY THE ARTICLE OF FRANK BRUNI
