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The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
The connection between humanism and technology will require people and institutions with a breadth of vision and a commitment to interests that transcend their field. Before that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit... See more
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
And yet, despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing... See more
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
“The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Apple is a humanistic tech company. It’s also the largest company in the world.
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
How can humanities and tech meet without one corrupting the other?
Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their... See more
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
Self destructive doubt, when it is an academic’s job to doubt?
Needless to say, humanists’ understanding of technology is partial at best. The state of digital humanities is always several categories of obsolescence behind, which is inevitable. (Nobody expects them to teach via Instagram Stories.) But more crucially, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology... See more
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
Why “inevitable”? Why not keep up? What characteristic of the humanities causes it to resist modernization?
The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era.
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence.
Stephen Marche • The Undergraduate Essay Is About to Die
“Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.”