Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age; Fortune, September 19, 2026

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez, Fortune; Anthropic billionaire cofounder Jack Clark studied literature, not code—and says liberal arts degrees will win in the AI age

"Liberal arts comeback

At the same time, there is some evidence a liberal arts degree is becoming more relevant, at least in tech. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, said earlier this year a liberal arts education will be important for developing the soft skills that are still needed when other work is delegated to AI.

“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 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."

Let Children Get Bored Again; The New York Times, February 2, 2019

Pamela Paul, The New York Times;

Let Children Get Bored Again

Boredom teaches us that life isn’t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency.

"Kids won’t listen to long lectures, goes the argument, so it’s on us to serve up learning in easier-to-swallow portions.

But surely teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn’t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails. One day, even in a job they otherwise love, our kids may have to spend an entire day answering Friday’s leftover email. They may have to check spreadsheets. Or assist robots at a vast internet-ready warehouse.

This sounds boring, you might conclude. It sounds like work, and it sounds like life. Perhaps we should get used to it again, and use it to our benefit. Perhaps in an incessant, up-the-ante world, we could do with a little less excitement."

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age; The New York Times, May 10, 2018

Ramin Bahrani, The New York Times;  

Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age

[Kip Currier: Looking forward to seeing this May 19th-debuting HBO adaptation of Ray Bradbury's ever-timely Fahrenheit 451 cautionary intellectual freedom tale, starring Michael B. Jordan as a book-burning-fireman-turned-book-preserver.]

"Bradbury believed that we wanted the world to become this way. That we asked for the firemen to burn books. That we wanted entertainment to replace reading and thinking. That we voted for political and economic systems to keep us happy rather than thoughtfully informed. He would say that we chose to give up our privacy and freedom to tech companies. That we decided to entrust our cultural heritage and knowledge to digital archives. The greatest army of firemen will be irrelevant in the digital world. They will be as powerless as spitting babies next to whoever controls a consolidated internet. How could they stop one person, hiding in his parents’ basement with a laptop, from hacking into thousands of years of humanity’s collective history, literature and culture, and then rewriting all of it … or just hitting delete?

And who would notice?"