AI sponsors the marriage of humanities and engineering: Microsoft declares that advanced technology requires humanities knowledge. From their recent book, The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and Its Role in Society:

At one level, AI will require that even more people specialize in digital skills and data science. But skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions. If AI is to reach its potential in serving humans, then every engineer will need to learn more about the liberal arts and every liberal arts major will need to learn more about engineering….

As automation and AI take on tasks that require thinking and judgement, it will become increasingly important to train people — perhaps through a renewed focus on the humanities — to develop their critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and reasoning.

For a related post, see here.