Keith Raffel

Last year Microsoft Research reported on the 10 jobs most threatened by artificial intelligence. Should I, dear reader, be running scared?

Historians are No. 2 on the list. The report says 91% of what historians do is pretty much covered by AI queries. Uh-oh. I majored in history in college and went on to get a master’s. In the movie “Animal House,” Bluto laments throwing “seven years of college down the drain.” I guess the good news is maybe I only wasted six.

Eventually, I pivoted to writing, with five novels published and another coming next year. And of course, there’s this weekly column. According to Microsoft Research, writers and authors rank No. 5 on the list of endangered professions.

I’ve taught a college course on AI’s effect on society and, with due deference to those at Microsoft, they are missing the point. A background in history or English is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed, preparation for the Age of AI.

In 2017, Mark Cuban, an early internet billionaire who won fame as a panelist on “Shark Tank,” said, “There’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming.” He was validated less than a decade later when Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said in 2025, “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”

Both software veterans and pioneers in AI can rely on the same secret weapon: a mind trained by the study of history and literature. My old boss Thomas Siebel, who sold his software company to Oracle for $6 billion, was a fellow history major. He says advice to study only STEM in college is “a bunch of bunk.” He still reads history “to expand his understanding of the past as he prepares for the future.” In grappling with AI, shouldn’t we know how society confronted other new technology waves from the railroads to the programmable computer?

Daniela Amodei, the co-founder and president of Anthropic, the AI company whose last round of financing valued it at almost $1 trillion, studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s said, “In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important.”

Amodei hits the nail on the head. AI emulates a human by vacuuming up huge databases of what humans have done before. AI might do calculus better than its discoverers Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz ever could, but it could never have made the leap to discover calculus in the first place. That takes human creativity and inspiration.

The late Susan Wojcicki, longtime CEO of YouTube, said she saw technology as a way to extend the creativity she’d learned pursuing an undergraduate degree in history and literature. On top of that creativity, the study of both history and English teaches critical analysis, looking at problems from different perspectives, asking questions and keeping an open mind.

In 1967, 5.7% of college graduates majored in history. By 2019, the number was down to fewer than 1.2%. In just the past five years, the number of English majors has dropped 25%.

Have creativity and humanity gone right down with them?

If we want to retain our humanity as artificiality spreads, we don’t need fewer students of our past and our literature. We need many, many more.