AI is increasingly automating coding, and this could mean that other — somewhat neglected — fields of study could soon find their time in the sun.
As large language models rapidly diminish the barrier to entry for software development, American neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris suggests that the technical ability to write code is becoming secondary to the vision required to deploy it. Harris argues that we are approaching a “revenge of the humanities,” where the most valuable assets in a tech-driven economy will not be syntax mastery, but refined aesthetic judgment and a deep grounding in the liberal arts.
“My expectation now is that there’s going to be something like the revenge of the humanities,” Harris noted. “What the world is going to need are well-educated generalists with good taste—good aesthetic taste. People who have read good books, gone to good museums, had good arguments, can make good arguments, and can create companies using robots that have learned to code.”
According to Harris, the ultimate goal of this technological shift is the production of things that benefit and elevate our collective experience. “We’re going to want a beautiful culture,” he explained. “We’re going to want human curation of increasingly powerful tools put to good purpose. I would be much more bullish on a degree in philosophy or even English literature, quite frankly, at this moment than perhaps certain STEM fields. I would certainly put computer science in that category.”
This shift marks a departure from the “learn to code” era that defined the last decade of career advice. If AI can handle the heavy lifting of backend architecture and debugging, the competitive advantage moves upstream to the conceptual layer. The value of a philosophy or literature degree in this context is the ability to navigate ethics, narrative, and human desire—the “human curation” Harris identifies as the missing link in purely algorithmic production.
We are already seeing the early tremors of this disruption in the labor market. While engineering roles remain high-paying, the massive layoffs across the tech sector suggest a recalibration of how many pure developers a firm actually needs. As coding becomes a commodity, the “well-educated generalist” is becoming the new power player. Industry leaders are beginning to recognize that soft skills and critical thinking are no longer just “nice-to-haves” but are the primary filters for determining which AI-generated products actually resonate with a human audience. The future of tech may belong less to the person who can build the engine and more to the one who knows exactly where the car should go.