Imagine graduating with a liberal arts degree as the age of AI dawns. That’s the mindset I faced when addressing the Temple University College of Liberal Arts (where I’m an alum) earlier this month. Truth be told, no one knows what will happen with AI, including those who are building it. I took an optimistic view based on one core truth: As amazing as AI might become, by definition it cannot be human, and therefore the human connection we homo sapiens forge with each other is unique—and gives us an edge.
Here’s the speech:
I am thrilled to address the Temple College of Liberal Arts Class of 2025. You have prevailed under the curse of living in interesting times. You coped with Covid in high school and your early years here, navigated your way through the noise of social media, and now face a troubling political climate. The last part of that resonates with me. I attended Temple University at a time of national unrest. Richard Nixon was our president, the war was raging in Vietnam, and the future seemed uncertain.
But there is one concern that you have that I or my classmates could not have conceived of when we graduated over 50 years ago: the fear that artificial intelligence would perform our future jobs and render our career dreams useless.
I didn’t touch a computer keyboard during my four years at Temple. It wasn’t until almost 10 years after my graduation that I finally interacted directly with a computer. I was assigned a story for Rolling Stone about computer hackers. I was energized and fascinated by their world, and decided to keep writing about it.
Not long after my article was published I ventured to MIT and met Marvin Minsky, one of the scientists who came up with the idea of artificial intelligence at a summer conference at Dartmouth in 1956. Minsky and his peers thought it would only be a few years until computers could think like humans. That optimism—or naivety—became a punch line for many decades. High-level AI was always 10 years away, 20 years away. It was a science fiction fantasy.
Until about 20 years ago or so that was still the case. And then in this century, some computer scientists made breakthroughs in what were called neural nets. It led to rapid progress, and in 2017 another big breakthrough led to the terrifyingly capable large language models like ChatGPT. Suddenly AI is here.
My guess is that every single one of you has used a large language model like ChatGPT as a collaborator. Now I hope this isn’t the case, but some of you may have used it as a stand-in for your own work. Please don’t raise your hand if you’ve done this—we haven’t given out the diplomas yet, and your professors are standing behind me.
Much of my time at WIRED the past few years has been spent talking to and writing about the people leading this field. Some refer to their efforts as creating “the last invention.” They use that term because when AI reaches a certain point, supposedly computers will shove us humans aside and drive progress on their own. They refer to this as reaching artificial general intelligence, or AGI. That’s the moment when AI will, in theory, perform any task a human can, but better.
So as you leave this institution for the real world, this moment of joy may well be mixed with anxiety. At the least, you may be worried that for the rest of your work life, you will not only be collaborating with AI but competing with it. Does that make your prospects bleak?
I say … no. In fact my mission today is to tell you that your education was not in vain. You do have a great future ahead of you no matter how smart and capable ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And here is the reason: You have something that no computer can ever have. It’s a superpower, and every one of you has it in abundance.
Your humanity.
Liberal arts graduates, you have majored in subjects like Psychology. History. Anthropology. African American, Asian, and Gender Studies. Sociology. Languages. Philosophy. Political Science. Religion. Criminal Justice. Economics. And there’s even some English majors, like me.
Every one of those subjects involves examining and interpreting human behavior and human creativity with empathy that only humans can bring to the task. The observations you make in the social sciences, the analyses you produce on art and culture, the lessons you communicate from your research, have a priceless authenticity, based on the simple fact that you are devoting your attention, intelligence, and consciousness to fellow homo sapiens. People, that’s why we call them the humanities.
The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.
This is something that even Silicon Valley understands, starting from the time Steve Jobs told me four decades ago that he wanted to marry computers and the liberal arts. I once wrote a history of Google. Originally, its cofounder Larry Page resisted hiring anyone who did not have a computer science degree. But the company came to realize that it was losing out on talent it needed for communications, business strategy, management, marketing, and internal culture. Some of those liberal arts grads it then hired became among the company’s most valuable employees.
Even inside AI companies. liberal arts grads can and do thrive. Did you know that the president of Anthropic, one of the top creators of generative AI, was an English major? She idolized Joan Didion.
Furthermore, your work does something that AI can never do: it makes a genuine human connection. OpenAI recently boasted that it trained one of its latest models to churn out creative writing. Maybe it can put together cool sentences—but that’s not what we really seek from books, visual arts, films and criticism. How would you feel if you read a novel that shifted the way you saw the world, heard a podcast that lifted your spirit, saw a movie that blew your mind, heard a piece of music that moved your soul, and only after you were inspired and transformed by it, learned that it was not created by a person, but a robot? You might feel cheated.
And that’s more than a feeling. In 2023, some researchers published a paper confirming just that. In blind experiments human beings valued what they read more when they thought it was from fellow humans and not a sophisticated system that fakes humanity. In another blind experiment, participants were shown abstract art created by both humans and AI. Though they couldn’t tell which was which, when subjects were asked which pictures they liked better, the human-created ones came out on top. Other research studies involved brain MRIs. The scans also showed people responded more favorably when they thought humans, not AI, created the artworks. Almost as if that connection was primal.
Everything you have learned in the liberal arts—the humanities—depends on that connection. You bring your superpower to it.
I’m not going to sugarcoat things. AI is going to have a huge impact on the labor market, and some jobs will be diminished or eliminated. History teaches us that with every big technological advance, new jobs replace those lost.
Those jobs will exist, as there are countless roles AI can never fill because the technology can’t replicate true human connection. It’s the one thing that AI can’t offer. Combined with the elite skills you have learned at Temple, that connection will make your work of continuing value. Especially if you perform it with the traits that make you unique: curiosity, compassion, and a sense of humor.
As you go into the workforce, I urge you to lean into your human side. Yes, you can use AI to automate your busy work, explain complicated topics, and summarize dull documents. It might even be an invaluable assistant. But you will thrive by putting your heart into your own work. AI has no such heart to employ. Ultimately, flesh, blood, and squishy neurons are more important than algorithms, bits, and neural nets.
So class of 2025, let me send you out into the world with an expression that I encourage you to repeat during these challenging years to come. And that is the repetition of the simple truth that will guide your career and your life as you leave this campus. Here it is: I. Am. Human. Can you say that with me?
I Am Human.
Congratulations, and go out and seize the world. It is still yours to conquer. And one final note—I did not use AI to write this speech. Thank you.
(You can see me deliver the speech here, in full academic regalia.)
