The Human Advantage: Liberal Arts and Personal Formation in the AI Age

In the summer of 2024, I found myself sipping coffee with an old college friend, debating what our kids should study. He argued for coding and data science—"AI is taking over, after all"—while I countered (perhaps predictably, as a humanities graduate) that philosophy and literature might be more important than ever. At first glance, my stance seemed almost quaint. In a world where ChatGPT can draft business plans and Midjourney can paint portraits, what’s the point of human learning? Yet, as we talked, it became clear that this question cuts to the heart of a profound shift in higher education. The rise of artificial intelligence is not just another tech trend; it’s a paradigm shift forcing us to rethink what universities are really for. This essay explores that shift, arguing that the only viable future for higher education is one that doubles down on cultivating distinctively human capacities in an AI-mediated world.

The Human Difference in an AI World

One often hears that a liberal arts education “broadens the mind.” It’s a cliché, but behind it lies a vital truth: the liberal arts cultivate uniquely human capacities—the kind of skills no algorithm can yet replicate in full. These include empathy, critical reasoning, creativity, imagination, and ethical reflection. In an era of ubiquitous AI, such qualities are not just niceties; they are our lifeline. As one recent education commentary put it, “In an era where AI is increasingly integral to our daily lives, the significance of uniquely human skills is being magnified… qualities that are irreplaceable and increasingly essential.” (The Rising Value of Human Skills in the Age of AI: How Liberal Arts Education Can Revolutionize Opportunities for Young Students in the Global South) When machines handle more and more routine tasks, human strengths become our comparative advantage.

Consider empathy and ethical judgment: AI can simulate conversation and crunch data about human behavior, but it doesn’t understand suffering, justice, or love. It has no lived experience to draw on, no conscience or compassion. Similarly, with creativity and imagination: a generative AI can remix existing patterns in astonishing ways, but the spark of original inspiration—birthing something genuinely new or deeply meaningful—remains a human mystery. Our literature, art, and philosophy have always been exercises in imagination and empathy, allowing us to step into others’ shoes or envision worlds that never were. These capacities define our humanity. They also happen to be exactly what the liberal arts nurture through studying history, philosophy, arts, and the social sciences. Far from being impractical, a liberal arts education in the AI age is profoundly practical: it develops the very skills that make us irreplaceable in work and in society.

A favorite scene from the film Dead Poets Society drives this home. Robin Williams’s character, the soulful English teacher John Keating, tells his students: “Medicine, law, business, engineering—these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love—these are what we stay alive for.” In other words, the sciences and technical fields keep us alive, but the humanities are what make life worth living. This isn’t to disparage the sciences (indeed, Keating calls them noble pursuits); it’s to recognize that human beings are more than economic inputs. We are creatures of story, meaning, and moral imagination. In a future saturated with intelligent machines, those human qualities of passion and insight become not a luxury, but our saving grace. The liberal arts, when done right, don’t just fill students’ heads with facts—they shape their ability to think critically, to empathize with others, to distinguish right from wrong, and to imagine alternatives. These are precisely the capacities that differentiate us from AI and will define human value in an AI-mediated economy.

It’s telling that even tech visionaries have acknowledged the power of the humanities. Steve Jobs, of all people, attributed Apple’s success to this marriage of technology and liberal arts: “Technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” (Quote by Steve Jobs: “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is n...”) Jobs knew that engineering needed a human touch, a creative spark, to truly resonate with people. Likewise, the future workforce will need more than technical prowess; it will need people who can connect, contextualize, and create meaning. Empathy, creativity, ethical reasoning—these aren’t just soft skills to be bolted on; they are the core skills that make us human and effective in areas where AI falls short. The liberal arts have been honing these skills for centuries. Now, in the 21st century, they might just save us from becoming cogs in an AI-run machine.

AI’s New Economic Paradigm: From Labor to Creativity

Beyond the classroom, artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the economic paradigm in which tomorrow’s graduates will live and work. We’re not just talking about automating a few tasks here and there; we’re talking about a fundamental shift in how value is created in the economy. Traditionally, economic value has been closely tied to labor and time—you worked X hours to produce Y output, and your wage roughly reflected that equation. AI blows up that equation. With machine learning systems working tirelessly at near-zero marginal cost, productivity can skyrocket without a proportional increase in human labor. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening now. AI can generate marketing copy in seconds, analyze data overnight, even design basic graphics or write code with minimal human input. When one developer armed with AI tools can accomplish what used to take a team of ten, the old metrics of value (hours worked, tasks completed) start to lose meaning.

The result is an economy where value creation shifts from labor to insight, identity, and meaning. What do we mean by that? Insight is the ability to understand and solve novel problems—seeing the patterns or needs that aren’t obvious, asking the right questions, making the creative leap that leads to a breakthrough product or strategy. AI is great at processing known patterns, but defining the problem or having the insight to pursue what is “good” or define the line of questioning in pursuit of your unrestricted desire to know is a human gift. Identity refers to the human element in products and services—the story, brand, or personal connection that makes something meaningful. In a world flooded with competent AI-generated content, people will gravitate toward voices and creators they trust, admire, or find authentic. Human identity (whether an individual’s personal brand or a company’s ethos) becomes a differentiator. And meaning refers to the realm of art, design, narrative, and culture—essentially, imbuing any and all work with dignity and purpose. AI can assist in these areas (it can churn out pretty designs or plausible stories), but genuine cultural innovation requires lived human experience and pursuit of truth, goodness, beauty, and being that AI is categorically incapable of doing.

Economic history offers a useful analogy: during the Industrial Revolution, mechanization replaced a lot of manual labor, and economies shifted toward favoring those who could design, manage, or improve the machines—skills of insight and innovation. Now AI is the new “machine,” replacing even cognitive labor. The advantage shifts to those who can work with the machines in creative ways or do what machines can’t. As futurist Ray Kurzweil and others have envisioned, work may become “less about survival and more about self-expression” in the AI era.

If algorithms handle the drudgery, humans are free to focus on higher-order pursuits—crafting visions, solving wicked problems, nurturing relationships, and yes, expressing ourselves through art and entrepreneurship. The value of a new idea, a creative design, or a bold ethical stance in leadership could far outweigh the value of simply putting in 40 hours at the office. We already see hints of this: think of how a brilliant innovation or a strong brand identity can create billions in value, whereas rote widget-producing labor is increasingly automated or outsourced. AI is shifting the economic reward structure toward those human domains of insight and creativity.

This shift has profound implications for universities. It underlines that if higher education tries to compete with coding bootcamps or technical training on the basis of just imparting job skills, it will lose—and frankly, it should lose, because AI can train people faster on certain technical tasks or simply make some skills obsolete. The enduring value of a university education must lie elsewhere. Specifically, it must lie in cultivating the abilities that allow graduates to thrive in an economy driven by innovation, meaning, and human connection rather than routine production. When productivity is amplified by AI, the world doesn’t need workers who are simply cogs; it needs thinkers, innovators, and ethically grounded leaders who can harness these tools in service of new kinds of value. And those are exactly the kinds of people a whole-person, liberal arts–infused education aims to form.

Educating the Whole Person, Not Just the Worker

If AI is indeed turning the world upside down—changing what work means and what skills matter—then the role of the university must also fundamentally evolve. It’s time to abandon any lingering pretense that a university is merely a credential mill or a job-training pipeline. The truth is, that was never the highest calling of higher education, though in recent decades the rhetoric around college often narrowed to career outcomes and earning potential. (Which is something the Father of Capitalism, Adam Smith explicitly warned about in Wealth of Nations¹) Now more than ever, we have to reclaim the true mission of the university: educating the whole person. This means integrating intellectual, ethical, emotional, and relational development, rather than just pushing students through a conveyor belt of classes for a diploma. It means helping students not just learn how to make a living, but learn how to live meaningfully.

This idea isn’t new. Over 150 years ago, John Henry Newman insisted that a university is “not merely a place of instruction, but a place of education”—not just about imparting knowledge, but about forming the mind and character (Cultivating the Whole Person: Newman’s Vision for Higher Learning | James C. Ungureanu). He warned that reducing education to vocational training ignores the crucial task of intellectual and moral formation, which is essential for a flourishing society. Of course, none of this would surprise Aristotle either, some 24 centuries ago. A university that pumps out skilled graduates devoid of ethical grounding, cultural awareness, or critical thinking might momentarily serve industry needs, but it fails society in the long run. In the AI age, this is even more pronounced: technical skills will come and go, but a well-formed mind and character are timeless.

Educating the whole person starts with a curriculum and campus culture that treat students as multidimensional human beings. It means business majors should read some literature or philosophy to grapple with ethical dilemmas and the human condition. It means computer science majors should engage with the arts to spur creativity and consider the social impact of technology. Conversely, humanities majors should gain some digital literacy and scientific understanding to navigate an AI-rich world. The goal is not to produce dilettantes, but to produce well-rounded individuals who can draw on multiple perspectives. Self-appropriation is the key word: integrating knowledge with values, skills with purpose. Classes in ethics, intercultural communication, or creative design are not fluff; they might be the most important classes a student takes, regardless of major, because they cultivate adaptability and insight. In a future where careers will likely zigzag (and many specific job skills get automated), universities best prepare students by making them agile, curious, resilient, and principled.

There’s also the personal, developmental side. Universities must focus on students’ emotional and social growth—areas that a purely online or AI-driven training program cannot address. Emotional intelligence, collaboration, leadership, empathy in interpersonal contexts: these are make-or-break abilities for career and life, which develop through mentorship, community engagement, and face-to-face collaboration. The college experience ideally provides fertile ground for this development: living in dorms with diverse peers, engaging in intense late-night debates, working through disagreements on a team project, navigating independence and self-regulation—these experiences form character. They can’t be measured by a GPA, and they won’t be delivered by an app. The university of the future, if it is to survive, must double down on this kind of holistic formation. It should be a place where students discover their values, their voice, and their identity, not just a place where they complete courses 1 through 40 for a degree. As one educational leader recently noted, it’s a chance to redesign higher ed into something more than a credential mill—a space where every student finds their spark, their shot at the future… a lifeline to whom they’re meant to become (Using AI to Cultivate Purpose and Well-Being for Students). This vision positions college as a journey of personal formation, guided by wise mentors and enriched by a community of learning, rather than a mere certification process.

Importantly, this whole-person approach is not at odds with employability—on the contrary, it enhances it. Employers in the AI era will desperately need people who are creative problem-solvers, who have emotional intelligence to lead teams, who can adapt when the playbook changes, and who can navigate ethical quandaries responsibly. Those are precisely the outcomes of an education that focuses on broad human development. A graduate who has honed empathy through studying literature, sharpened critical reasoning through philosophy, collaborated on diverse teams in student organizations, and wrestled with moral questions in ethics seminars is better equipped to handle the unpredictable challenges of the modern workplace (and to switch careers when needed) than someone who trained narrowly for a specific job that an algorithm might automate in five years. The irony is that by not focusing solely on job preparation and instead focusing on forming capable, conscientious humans, universities will actually produce graduates who are more flexible and employable in the long term. In the age of AI, the best way to prepare students for a job is to prepare them for life, lived to the full.

The Only Viable Future is Human-Centered

The central argument comes down to this: in an AI-mediated world, we humans must double down on being human. Our institutions of higher learning should be the vanguard of that effort. The university of the future must consciously cultivate those qualities that humans do best and that society needs most—qualities that technology, no matter how advanced, cannot embody. This is not a retreat from technology but a rebalancing: embracing AI for what it does well, while vigorously nurturing the human spirit in ways no machine can. We should envision colleges not as factories churning out workers, but as gardens cultivating thinkers, citizens, and whole persons.

Such a vision requires big changes. It means reimagining curricula, yes, but also priorities and incentives. Professors and administrators will need to champion mentorship, exploration, and student well-being as much as workforce readiness. Trustees and policymakers will need to fund and reward the kind of education that doesn’t always show immediate ROI in a salary statistic, but pays off over a lifetime in adaptability, civic engagement, and innovation. Students and parents, as stakeholders, might also need to adjust expectations: the question to ask about college should shift from “what job does this get me?” to “what kind of person does this help me become?” After all, in a future of rapid change, who you are matters at least as much as what you do, and who you are will determine what you’re capable of doing.

We stand at a cultural inflection point. The rise of AI could tempt universities to become more utilitarian—cutting humanities departments, focusing only on STEM and technical skills, treating education as a service provider for industry. But that path is a dead end, ironically because AI itself will make purely technical education insufficient. The alternative path is to renew the original spirit of a university. The word “university” comes from the Latin universitas, implying a whole, a community of scholars and students pursuing universal knowledge. In the 12th century, that meant theology, arts, law, medicine—the full spectrum of human inquiry. In the 21st century, we need a new integration: AI and ethics, engineering and empathy, business and philosophy, science and creativity. We need universities to be places that weave together all these threads into educated humans who can navigate a world none of us can fully predict.

In the end, the advent of powerful AI is forcing us to ask age-old humanistic questions: What is our value? What is our purpose? Education has always been, at its best, an attempt to help each new generation explore those questions. Now the urgency is greater, because the pace of technological change is dizzying. But I remain hopeful. I imagine a graduation ceremony a decade from now: students walking across the stage who have mastered machine learning algorithms and the nuances of moral philosophy, who can build a business plan and appreciate a poem, who leave campus not just with a resume, but with a sense of responsibility and curiosity that will fuel a lifetime of growth. Those graduates will be equipped to create economic value in ways we can’t even foresee, precisely because they are imaginative and ethical and whole. More importantly, they’ll be equipped to create human value—to enrich their communities, to connect with others, to lead meaningful lives in a world of intelligent machines.

The future of higher education in the AI age will belong to institutions that embrace this human-centered vision. It’s often said that education is meant to “light a fire” rather than “fill a bucket.” In an AI world, we need to light that fire of human insight and passion brighter than ever. The universities that succeed will be those that treat their students not as mere outputs, but as souls in formation. Their alumni will be not only employable, but adaptable, creative, and compassionate—authors of their own verse in the powerful play of humanity. In the words of poet Walt Whitman, “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” The task before us now is to ensure that the verse written by human education in the age of AI is one of wisdom, creativity, and profound human dignity. That is our calling, and we must rise to it.

1. Smith emphasized that education should be practical and accessible, advocating for lifelong learning and basic education for all, especially to counter the negative effects of the division of labor on workers' intellectual capacities. He believed education should foster moral development and character rather than merely serve vocational or institutional purposes.