Humanities in the Machine
canopic jug writes:
Software engineer, Blain Smith, was written an essay discussing the role of a well-rounded education has had in creating the ICT ecosystem we have today. In it he describes quite a few luminaries, although he did miss Perl's creator, linguist Larry Wall. He is highly relevant because, for a couple of decades, Perl was the glue that held the Internet together which enabled the explosive growth from the mid-90s through the mid-00s.
The founders of your field read philosophy and wrote essays and studied classical languages and asked questions about consciousness and beauty and the nature of human thought. They did not do these things because they had spare time or because someone made them. They did them because they understood, implicitly or explicitly, that building machines worthy of human trust requires understanding what it means to be human.
That understanding is not going to come from another tutorial, another side project, or another Hacker News thread. It is going to come from the long, slow, sometimes difficult work of engaging with the humanities. Read philosophy. Read literature. Read history. Study how humans have thought about ethics, about power, about communication, about what it means to build something that lasts. Sit with those ideas long enough to let them reshape how you approach your own work.
The tradition that produced Lovelace's poetical science and Hoare's classical mind and Dijkstra's handwritten essays and Hopper's insistence that computers must speak to people is not dead. But it is diminishing, generation by generation, as the field grows further from its roots. You have the opportunity to reverse that. Not by going back to school, necessarily, but by taking the humanities seriously enough to let them into your professional life, your design decisions, your code reviews, your conversations with the people who will use what you build.
The machines we build reflect the minds that build them. If those minds are nourished only by technical knowledge, the machines will be technically competent and humanistically hollow. If those minds are broad, curious, and grounded in the long tradition of human thought, the machines will be something better. They will be worthy of the people who depend on them.
The choice, as it has always been, is yours.
That raises the question if a well-rounded education is even possible on either side of the pond these days given the radical changes in recent decades to tertiary education and the institutions formerly tasked with delivering advanced studies.
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