CHSS Dean Ann Ardis shares why education in the social sciences and the humanities matters more than ever in this age of increasingly smart machines.
I was recently asked to deliver remarks on the role of the liberal arts in an age of increasingly smart machines. It’s a question that feels both timely and urgent, as artificial intelligence continues to reshape how we work, learn, and govern, and as conversations about education often struggle to keep pace with those changes. That urgency becomes especially clear when we look to contemporary hiring practices, where skills long cultivated by the social sciences and the humanities, as core components of a liberal arts education, are being recognized as essential rather than secondary.
Today’s hiring managers, including those at big tech companies, are looking to hire people with what used to be described as “soft skills”: communication and inter-cultural competencies; research, critical analysis, document design, and information assessment skills; problem-setting as well as real-world problem-solving skills; teamwork and conflict management skills; a sense of ethics, judgement, and empathy.
In practice, these are not “soft” skills or easy-to-acquire skills at all. They are power skills, human superpowers even, that cannot be easily automated. And their deployment in the design and management of AI technologies is key to the notion of human/machine “complementarity” that AI experts like Ken Goldberg have written about.
Top executives at Microsoft have observed: “As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, [I would add: linguistics, anthropology, sociology], art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.”
As recently as February, Anthropic cofounder and president, Daniela Amodei, who majored in English as an undergraduate, spoke in an interview with Fortune about how uniquely human qualities will be more critical in the age of AI, not less.
At a recent Modern Language Association networking meeting for deans of the humanities, I had a chance to learn more than what is publicly available right now about the lawsuit that MLA, the American Historical Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies are pursuing against the government for DOGE’s cancellation of 1400 NEH grants (including seven at George Mason) with a total value of $100M. If you’ve seen the recent coverage of this in Inside Higher Ed, you’ll know that document discovery exposed DOGE’s use of ChatGPT to tag “DEI” grants—without instructing the large language model on how to define DEI.
As a result, a $350K grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina was cancelled because “improving HBAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections,” and aligns “with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” A project co-hosted by the University of Oregon and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln supporting local newspaper digitization and preservation programs was marked “yes” as related to DEI because the “initiative seeks to enhance digital newspaper programs, making them more accessible and customizable.”
Human-centered innovation at CHSS
Across our college, faculty are at the forefront of emerging technologies, research, and teaching through their work on AI and ethics, for example, and on human interaction with robots. Faculty in the English Department are developing “Analog Writing” and “Writing-with-AI” activities to help students experiment with conventional and technologically assisted writing practices in our first-year writing course for multilingual writers. Psychology faculty in human factors and applied cognition are researching human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. And George Mason’s Center for Humanities Research recently concluded a year-long “AI & the Humanities” workshop series.
Education in the social sciences and the humanities matters more than ever in this age of increasingly smart machines. And our faculty’s teaching and research in these new arenas of capaciously multidisciplinary collaboration at the forefront of technological innovation represent vital and urgently needed contributions to our students’ development as critical thinkers who can bridge technological innovation with human context.
As a dean of a college of humanities and social sciences at an access-oriented public Tier 1 research university, let me conclude by saying: the future is now. AI is already transforming every walk of life and raising important questions for society, the economy, and governance. The notion of human/machine “complementarity” that offers the brightest, most optimistic vision of a future for our world, will necessarily depend on our finding ways to anchor “next generation” technological development in the human-centered core values and competencies that a modern liberal arts education offers.