Why the Humanities Are More Critical Than Ever in the Age of AI

What use are the humanities? That blunt, almost accusatory question has ricocheted across university halls and social media in recent years, gaining a new, urgent pitch since ChatGPT and DeepSeek vaulted large language models into the popular imagination. Students are flocking to engineering—above all to the new, AI-adjacent disciplines—while mathematics enjoys renewed prestige for its links to finance and data science. Medicine keeps its steady draw because lives are palpably at stake. And the humanities? Literature drifts to the margins, history quietly recedes, philosophy keeps its ascetic posture, law’s popularity slips, and even journalism—once a lively, public-facing craft—has been riven by economic collapse and epistemic controversy. If not for civil-service exams or the lure of a stable post, many humanities majors might never have attracted so many applicants in the first place.

This is not merely anecdotal. Institutional choices mirror the cultural mood. In autumn 2024, Harvard’s undergraduate college dropped at least 30 courses across more than 20 departments—most of them in the arts and humanities. Around the same time, Fudan University sharply reduced its humanities intake to a mere 20 percent of its student body; the university president cited shrinking applicant pools and perceived societal demand. From public attitudes to job listings to curricular planning, the humanities are in a palpable, quantifiable retreat.

But disciplinary fashions wax and wane. Over the past two centuries, scientific modernity has steadily siphoned off the humanities’ explanatory authority. Big language models now stomp on the accelerator: they can produce fluent prose, mimic stylistic virtuosity, and simulate logical argument with astonishing fluency. If the humanities are reduced to wordplay, stylistic flourishes, and the summarization of existing texts, how can they possibly compete with machines that generate such copy at near-zero marginal cost?

The answer begins by recognizing that different fields have different meta-tasks. Engineering is inherently goal-directed: it shapes the physical and digital world to achieve specified ends, and its cardinal virtue is efficiency. The natural sciences seek to translate the messy, qualitative world into numbers, to map phenomena to mathematical laws so that complexity becomes tractable and predictable. The humanities, however, have a distinct and irreplaceable meta-task of their own: they are the primary engine for the production, critique, and stewardship of meaning.

Meaning-production is not a luxury; for Homo sapiens, it is structural. We are, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett put it, “meaning-makers.” We do not live by calculations alone. Science can tell us how to travel to Mars; engineering can build the rocket. But only the humanities can help us decide whether we should go, what kinds of futures are worth pursuing on that red dust, and how to live with one another—fairly, justly, purposefully—while we are on the journey. Through concepts, critique, narrative, and moral imagination, the humanities make sense of ends, not merely means.

Why, then, is the contemporary appetite for meaning so diminished? One profound reason is the triumph of quantification. Modern science has converted almost every measurable quality into numbers—color becomes wavelength, sound becomes frequency, smell becomes molecular concentration. This has been a powerful tool for manipulation, but a reductive one for living. When value is flattened to cash, and success to pay packets, the fundamental question “Why?” is too often eclipsed by “How much?” The relentless logic of the market and the compression of attention into ever-shorter digital moments have produced a culture of the immediate, the ephemeral, and the transactional.

Contemporary life is increasingly dominated by what we might call pointillist time: a series of discrete, clickable instants without narrative cohesion. Short-form dramas, livestream commerce, viral clips—none of these are designed to invite retrospective reflection or patient continuity. In such a climate, the long narratives—ethical, historical, philosophical—that give shape to a life and a society lose their purchase. Young people, anxious about jobs and livelihoods in a precarious economy, are understandably pragmatic. If a degree does not help make the rent, what good is it? The result is a collective shrinkage of horizons: less appetite for big stories, and fewer investments in the critical and empathetic capacities that sustain them.

The social cost of this shift is not just aesthetic. When we stop supplying the shared memory, interpretive frameworks, and nuanced vocabularies for understanding our experience, a deep existential malaise follows. The epidemics of depression, anxiety, and a host of “time-disordered” maladies are not merely medical; they are symptoms of a meaning deficit. People still yearn, often inarticulately, for things that outlast a payday: dignity, purpose, solidarity, transcendence. The humanities supply those things—or at least the essential tools to discover and debate them.

But what about AI? Won’t large language models simply manufacture meaning at scale, rendering humanists obsolete? They can, indeed, mimic sentiment, assemble convincing narratives from vast datasets, and synthesize arguments with superhuman speed. But their core architecture remains a probabilistic token predictor. It forecasts the next most likely word given a prior context. This is an extraordinary feat of engineering, but it is not the same as having a lived body, a history of embodied perception, or a moral imagination forged in communities over centuries.

Machines do not experience redness, grief, shame, or awe. They do not possess what philosophers call intentionality—the directedness of consciousness toward objects and meanings, rooted in a shared world of care and consequence. They simulate the surface features of meaning; they do not anchor them in the moral and sensory continua—the pain of a tragedy, the joy of a reunion, the solemnity of a promise—that make meanings endure and matter. An AI can generate a poem about love, but it cannot know the heartbreak that gives the poem its weight. It can summarize the Nicomachean Ethics, but it cannot exercise phronesis—practical wisdom—in a moment of moral dilemma.

This is not to romanticize the humanities as a static, pristine sanctuary. Far from it. To earn their keep in the age of AI, the humanities must be more rigorous, public-minded, and exacting than ever before: they must offer surgically attentive critique, panoramic historical perspective, crystalline logic, a keen ear for the nuances and deceptions of language, and a capacity to produce new, robust concepts that help us navigate novel dilemmas. In the age of algorithmic abundance, humanists must reassert the vital craft of meaning-making: translating technological and social complexity into intelligible public narratives, defending the public sphere against the flattening of all values into data points, and constructing the ethical frameworks that must guide our technological deployment.

We possess a rare, fragile gift: a species-wide capacity to ask “why,” to make sacrifices for ideals beyond selfish calculation, to preserve a collective memory that stretches back millennia and dreams forward for centuries. Let us not squander this gift on the altar of novelty, nor outsource it to machinery that cannot shoulder the weight of our moral inheritance. We must reinvest in the humanities not as a sentimental indulgence, but as an urgent social technology—the only discipline equipped to remind us who we are, what we have been, and, most critically, why certain futures are worth choosing over others.

So when the next student asks, “What use are the humanities?” we should answer plainly: they are the instruments by which we refuse to be reduced to mere processors of data and consumers of convenience. They are the practice ground for judgment, the archive of human folly and triumph, and the workshop where we build the vocabularies for our lives. They don’t just teach us how to think; they give us the reasons to remain human.

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