Perishable Code, Enduring Minds
This week, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, was booed as he delivered a commencement address to the University of Arizona’s graduates. He told graduates that AI would "touch every profession" and urged them to embrace it, famously saying, "When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on." To a stadium full of roughly 10,000 graduates facing an incredibly daunting entry-level job market, the message was widely criticized as tone-deaf "AI cheerleading." Students felt the billionaire tech investor was minimizing very real economic anxieties about automation, eliminating the exact jobs they had just spent four years training for.
While it is true that AI will probably touch every profession, it does not mean that AI is going to eliminate entire sectors of the economy. In its 2025 jobs report, the World Economic Forum estimated that human-centered roles, such as therapists, counselors, teachers, professors, coaches, and writers, are among the fastest-growing job sectors. In a world in which technology advances daily, why does the WEF make such a prediction? Because businesses will need people who can think critically, communicate effectively, and understand human behavior and history. Businesses exist because people influence other people.
Let’s think about this further. A cancer patient can use AI to write a care plan, but an AI agent cannot sit with them and comfort them when they are scared. AI can analyze a poem, but the chances of it writing one that will bring you to tears is slim. AI can summarize history, but it can’t explain the nuances of human behavior. AI can handle the routine and predictable. But human behavior is unpredictable. Who may fare best in the AI economy? Creative people, and people who study arts and humanities.
Over the past 50 years, higher education has transformed in the public consciousness from an institution meant to develop civic responsibility, critical thinking, and a well-rounded mind into a strict financial investment. Under this hyper-financialized lens, a degree's value became directly tied to its immediate, starting salary. Because a software engineer or data analyst yields a clear, immediate salary metric, STEM was championed, while fields like philosophy, history, or literature, whose long-term benefits are harder to quantify in a spreadsheet, were branded as financially irresponsible "luxury" majors.
The foundational economic argument for pushing students into STEM was the promise of scarce, high-paying jobs. However, basic supply and demand dictates that flooding the market with technical graduates dilutes their bargaining power. This article from the New York Times highlights the obstacles that recent computer science grads are facing when trying to secure post-graduate employment.
The STEM versus humanities debate is a false binary. The path forward leads to an intellectual crossroads where science and technology converge with the arts. True innovation has always occurred at this exact intersection. Designing a user interface requires an understanding of human psychology; deploying automated medical diagnostics requires a rigorous bioethical framework; managing global supply chains requires deep historical and geopolitical knowledge.
The graduates booing Eric Schmidt were not rejecting technological progress; they were rejecting the absolute commodification of their futures. They were pushing back against a reductive philosophy that views human beings merely as agents of profit. The hyper-financialized educational model that promised absolute security through narrow specialization is showing its cracks.
As we cross the threshold into the AI economy, the irony is becoming clear. The very disciplines that were vilified as impractical luxury majors are emerging as the most practical defenses against professional obsolescence. By reclaiming the value of a well-rounded mind, one that is literate in both data and the human experience, we can build a world where technology serves as a tool for human flourishing and innovation, rather than a replacement for it. The future belongs not to the machine, nor to the worker who tries to mimic it, but to the thinkers who possess the durable human skills to guide it.