Discussion: The AI Era Liberal Arts
What do students need to know?
A quick programming note: I’m [mostly] taking the month of January off from publishing on Substack to work on some other writing projects. Paid subscriptions are paused during this time.
Do we need a new set of liberal arts?
Classical education was split into two courses of study. The trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) covered reason, and the quadrivium covered number: arithmetic is number-itself, geometry is number-in-space, music is number-in-time, and astronomy is number-in-space-and-time.
Pythagorean thought still exerts itself on our society through the vestiges of these liberal arts in our common curricula today. But, while they are useful, they are echoes of Medieval Christian metaphysics, not a set of subjects designed for the 21st-century student. ChatGPT, something, something.
This is a favorite question of mine, and a recent tweet I stumbled on seemed an interesting take on the subject.1 (N.B. This does not represent a general endorsement of this author or his views.) The relevant section:
If you properly prepare [your children] to be free men, what skills will be lucrative or useful twenty years from now is irrelevant, because they will be prepared to learn them.
In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are:
Logic: how to derive truth from known facts
Statistics: how to understand the implications of data
Rhetoric: how to persuade, and spot persuasion tactics
Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject
(Practical) Psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others
Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets
Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue, and proactively take action to pursue it.
…
Worry less about which "career skills" AI will take over, and more about whether you are training to be, and training your kids to be, high-agency, perceptive, self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.
The inclusion of “investment”, “pop psychology,” and “agency” are too hustle-bro for my tastes, but the focus on thriving in uncertainty resonates. At any rate, this complete list of 7 arts is a great jumping-off point for discussion.
So:
Which of the 7 liberal arts would you replace?
What do you think of Davison’s list?
What subjects, if any, are essential to the modern citizen?
Are there other frameworks out there that deserve attention?
I’ll share my response in the comments and would love to hear your thoughts.
I think you have created some good ideas on the future in a world driven by AI and understanding the importance of a liberal arts education. We can’t eliminate liberal arts and think that AI will be the answer to everything. We will always need to balance reason and moral purpose. Engineers and engineering was created to help math work, physics works and analytics will be very important along with ethics. I think the day of psychology and marketing is very limited in the future of advanced technology and AI. Logic will always be important. I think you’ve introduced some good ideas. My hope is that the importance of liberal arts education can continue but evolve to meet the needs of the future what that may be.
I’d keep the Trivium. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are perennial subjects, particularly when interpreted broadly, as discussed in my post Trivium Night. They teach students how to gather information, order it, and then present it as argument.
But number has changed significantly. Namely, that we have much more control over it than in the past. We can act with number in the same way we can argue with reason. We still need to learn “arithmetic” in the same way we need to learn “grammar,” but there’s much more room on the argumentative end that isn’t captured in the original quadrivium.
To that end, I would make two replacements.
Information, which is number in noise, would replace Geometry. This would include skepticism, generalizability, statistics, and probability. These skills are essential to gathering reliable information and operating in a world of disinformation.
Technology, which is number in contraptions, would replace Astronomy. This would include applied physics, engineering, and building or fixing systems. What I’m interested in here is less in the pure mathematics and more in the how-things-fit-together aspect of it all. How does civilization rely on arbitrary protocols to push itself forward?
I think Arithmetic and Music are as fundamental as ever, and it’s not clear to me that something like “psychology” would be a good replacement. Music, in particular, has something essentially human worth salvaging academically. It is so direct, so powerful, a force on the human psyche that being able to explain music through an educational philosophy is a baseline requirement to know that it’s capable of doing work.