AI may be restoring the importance of the liberal arts degree, at least according to the cofounder of one of the industry’s biggest players.
“That’s turned out to be, like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted,” he added.
For young people trying to figure out where they fit in the increasingly AI-fueled economy, their best bet may be learning to ask the right questions, he added.
“The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting if you collided different insights from many different disciplines,” he said.
Clark claimed young people should avoid pursuing basic or “rote programming” and added that the degrees that are going to become even more relevant in the future are the ones that involve “synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that,” he said.
For young people, the influx of AI across industries poses a significant risk as they are still trying to establish themselves in the workforce. During the same interview Monday, Clark admitted, “I see potential weakness in early graduate employment in some industries,” without specifying which industries. He hedged his comments by saying, “I haven’t seen anything beyond that,” regarding AI-linked layoffs, although he emphasized AI will upend businesses and how business is conducted.
“Metacognitive skills will be very important—flexibility, adaptability, experimentation, thinking critically, being able to challenge things. Developing critical-thinking skills requires friction, doing things that are hard, doing deep thinking,” Teevan told the Wall Street Journal.
Michael Oakes, the executive vice president for research and economic development at Case Western Reserve University, told Fortune that a classical liberal arts degree will be important because it develops workers who can navigate deep nuance and culture—qualities he said AI cannot replicate.
“As AI lowers the barrier to technical execution, the labor market premium is shifting toward a human layer of rigorous critical reasoning,” Oakes said.
“When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was like a great job prospect?” Clark said. “But it turns out that now it is.”
