.
In the 2016, Harvard University president Drew Faust delivered an address to 800 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The nature of inquiry fostered by the humanities, she said, “teaches us how to scrutinize the thing at hand, even in the thick dust of danger or drama or disorienting strangeness… it imparts skills that slow us down—the habit of deliberation, the critical eye, skills that give us capacity to interpret and judge human problems; the concentration that yields meaning in a world that is noisy with information, confusion, and change. The humanities teach us many things, not the least of which is empathy—how to see ourselves inside another person’s experience.”
Known not only as the training ground of American Army officers, West Point is also one of the premier Liberal Arts institutions in the United States, and a university where hardened future officers also read great literature and spend a semester studying history of the military art. As Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Mayer, a philosophy professor and Associate Dean at West Point explains, “our graduates are best prepared for our uncertain and interconnected world by completing a core curriculum that brings together STEM and humanities disciplines in a way that develops a broad array of abilities and perspectives. This is why our philosophy majors take engineering, information technology, physics, and calculus courses, and our engineering majors take philosophy, literature, psychology, and political science courses.” Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson describes the sciences as the study of all that does exist, and the humanities as the study of all that could possibly exist. At West Point, graduates are forced to grapple with both.
The notion of a liberal education has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with liberating the mind by exposing it to a wide array of topics and methodologies, by forcing the student to grapple with, and debate what brings them to the edge of comfort. It forces upon the graduate a period of radical self-inquiry. It is indeed the idea that education is not just an investment in transactional skill, or an insurance product that mechanistically generates graduates with vocationally fortified cognitive skills. It is in equal part a consumption product, or something meant to be enjoyed. It is something to slow us down, force us to question our values and beliefs, and make us better citizens of the world. It gives us a toolbox from which to draw when the world takes an unforeseen turn, and adaptability is required. A typical liberal arts graduate leaves university with exposure to mathematics and logic, the natural sciences and the social sciences in equal measure to the arts and humanities. Even at great schools like Stanford University, known for its engineering and computer science, many students opt for a year long, freshman option called SLE, or Structured Liberal Education. In this program students read and debate great works of literature and philosophy, and engage with classical texts such as Homer’s The Illiad, or Dante’s Inferno. Even as an electrical engineer, it is difficult, if not impossible, to graduate without having crossed paths with Descartes and Dostoevsky, Jung and Joyce, Hobbes and Hemingway.
“I’m not worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans,” Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in his 2017 commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “I’m more concerned with people thinking like computers without values of compassion.” Indeed today, as we play tug of war between the promise and the peril of technology, we overlook that technology is not an exogenous creation. Rather it is endogenous, entirely reflective of human values. Technology may be agnostic in the abstract, but it is also deeply pro-cyclical when it comes to the human values, propensities, sensitivities and biases baked into ones and zeros. There is nothing objective about technology, and mere “big data” does nothing to mitigate the fallibility of outcomes generated from, and interpreted by human beings. Idealistically, technology might one-day supplement human judgment, mitigating bias and nudging us the right way. But this very optimistic scenario is predicated on what, and who decides, these very human values. More pessimistically, we might merely focus on what the technology can do without recognizing that its only value inheres in our ability to point it in the right direction. What it should do is the normative, values-based question for which we need many inputs into our technology, diversity of background, outlook, and methodology factored into education and hiring.
The most important investment we can make in the technological era is one of self-reflection, humility, and empathy. While we invest in science, technology, engineering, and math, so called STEM education, let us not forget that building is meaningless without an understanding of context, grounding in human problems, and a firm grasp on values. The gravest threat to humanity is not robots; it is humanity itself, accelerated by technology.
“Keep your own Iliad under your pillow,” Faust advised the cadets on a steel-gray day. “Lead, also, on behalf of the liberal arts—of the traditions of human experience and humane insight that they represent. Recognize the importance of the attributes they have given you, mark their presence in your lives, advocate for them in the lives of others… be the world’s best force for the humanities—and thus for human possibility.” We need not fear robots, but we might fear those sleeping with iPhones under their pillows. We might all take a lesson from president Faust to engage with technology, but also lead on behalf of the humanities and liberal arts, for they are the very things that give human life meaning.
About the author: Scott Hartley is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the best-selling author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a Financial Times business book of the month and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company’s Bracken Bower Prize. Prior to venture capital he worked at Google, Facebook, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia University.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
a global affairs media network
In the Robot Era, Keep a Copy of The Iliad Under Your Pillow
Ancient Greece scene. Black figure pottery. Ancient Greek mythology. Gods of an Olymp Classical Ancient Greek style
January 19, 2018
In the 2016, Harvard University president Drew Faust delivered an address to 800 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The nature of inquiry fostered by the humanities, she said, “teaches us how to scrutinize the thing at hand, even in the thick dust of danger or drama or disorienting strangeness… it imparts skills that slow us down—the habit of deliberation, the critical eye, skills that give us capacity to interpret and judge human problems; the concentration that yields meaning in a world that is noisy with information, confusion, and change. The humanities teach us many things, not the least of which is empathy—how to see ourselves inside another person’s experience.”
Known not only as the training ground of American Army officers, West Point is also one of the premier Liberal Arts institutions in the United States, and a university where hardened future officers also read great literature and spend a semester studying history of the military art. As Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Mayer, a philosophy professor and Associate Dean at West Point explains, “our graduates are best prepared for our uncertain and interconnected world by completing a core curriculum that brings together STEM and humanities disciplines in a way that develops a broad array of abilities and perspectives. This is why our philosophy majors take engineering, information technology, physics, and calculus courses, and our engineering majors take philosophy, literature, psychology, and political science courses.” Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson describes the sciences as the study of all that does exist, and the humanities as the study of all that could possibly exist. At West Point, graduates are forced to grapple with both.
The notion of a liberal education has nothing to do with politics. It has everything to do with liberating the mind by exposing it to a wide array of topics and methodologies, by forcing the student to grapple with, and debate what brings them to the edge of comfort. It forces upon the graduate a period of radical self-inquiry. It is indeed the idea that education is not just an investment in transactional skill, or an insurance product that mechanistically generates graduates with vocationally fortified cognitive skills. It is in equal part a consumption product, or something meant to be enjoyed. It is something to slow us down, force us to question our values and beliefs, and make us better citizens of the world. It gives us a toolbox from which to draw when the world takes an unforeseen turn, and adaptability is required. A typical liberal arts graduate leaves university with exposure to mathematics and logic, the natural sciences and the social sciences in equal measure to the arts and humanities. Even at great schools like Stanford University, known for its engineering and computer science, many students opt for a year long, freshman option called SLE, or Structured Liberal Education. In this program students read and debate great works of literature and philosophy, and engage with classical texts such as Homer’s The Illiad, or Dante’s Inferno. Even as an electrical engineer, it is difficult, if not impossible, to graduate without having crossed paths with Descartes and Dostoevsky, Jung and Joyce, Hobbes and Hemingway.
“I’m not worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans,” Apple CEO Tim Cook stated in his 2017 commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “I’m more concerned with people thinking like computers without values of compassion.” Indeed today, as we play tug of war between the promise and the peril of technology, we overlook that technology is not an exogenous creation. Rather it is endogenous, entirely reflective of human values. Technology may be agnostic in the abstract, but it is also deeply pro-cyclical when it comes to the human values, propensities, sensitivities and biases baked into ones and zeros. There is nothing objective about technology, and mere “big data” does nothing to mitigate the fallibility of outcomes generated from, and interpreted by human beings. Idealistically, technology might one-day supplement human judgment, mitigating bias and nudging us the right way. But this very optimistic scenario is predicated on what, and who decides, these very human values. More pessimistically, we might merely focus on what the technology can do without recognizing that its only value inheres in our ability to point it in the right direction. What it should do is the normative, values-based question for which we need many inputs into our technology, diversity of background, outlook, and methodology factored into education and hiring.
The most important investment we can make in the technological era is one of self-reflection, humility, and empathy. While we invest in science, technology, engineering, and math, so called STEM education, let us not forget that building is meaningless without an understanding of context, grounding in human problems, and a firm grasp on values. The gravest threat to humanity is not robots; it is humanity itself, accelerated by technology.
“Keep your own Iliad under your pillow,” Faust advised the cadets on a steel-gray day. “Lead, also, on behalf of the liberal arts—of the traditions of human experience and humane insight that they represent. Recognize the importance of the attributes they have given you, mark their presence in your lives, advocate for them in the lives of others… be the world’s best force for the humanities—and thus for human possibility.” We need not fear robots, but we might fear those sleeping with iPhones under their pillows. We might all take a lesson from president Faust to engage with technology, but also lead on behalf of the humanities and liberal arts, for they are the very things that give human life meaning.
About the author: Scott Hartley is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the best-selling author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a Financial Times business book of the month and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company’s Bracken Bower Prize. Prior to venture capital he worked at Google, Facebook, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia University.
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
