Article by Hetan Shah: “…Given AI’s exponentially growing ability to solve well-defined, data-rich problems, it is plausible that employers will place more of a premium on the skills the humanities offer, such as critical and creative thinking. Anthropic’s co-founder Daniela Amodei recently said: “I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever . . . this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human — understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick — I think that will always be really, really important.”
It would be ironic if universities cut these subjects just as demand turned a corner — switching from literature to AI-prompt engineering may turn out to have been a poor trade. And it would be bad for society if we made these subjects the preserve of the wealthy. Our research at the British Academy shows emerging regional “cold spots” where it is no longer possible to study particular humanities courses at a reasonable distance from home. This is increasingly important as nearly a third of prospective students — often the poorest — intend to stay at home while they study.
Cutbacks in universities are also affecting humanities research, where the UK is world-leading, which contributes in a broad way to building a thoughtful and prosperous society. Historians can guide us on why our policymaking is the way it is, so we can try to learn from the past. Philosophers are thinking about responsible use of AI in multiple contexts, including the creation and preservation of artworks. Academics feed into the development of video games such as the globally successful Hellblade, which had a reader in Scandinavian history as its historical adviser to provide an accurate account of Viking society and beliefs.
You might think these research cutbacks in universities are the exercise of market forces, with the strongest departments surviving. But it is more complicated than that because of the complex cross-subsidies within higher education. Financial instability is largely driven by the drop in high-paying international students and the erosion in the value of tuition fees by inflation over the past decade. Caught up in the crossfire of this instability and through no fault of their own, some of the top-ranked humanities research departments are closing, while our analysis shows the number of early-career academics in the humanities has fallen by 20 per cent over the past decade…(More)”.
