While AI and humanoid robots grab international headlines, we begin to witness growing signs of a rebellion against the inhumanity of it all.
Who among us hasn’t recently experienced the following AI interactions? An automatic parking lot machine spouting, “Thanks for your business!” Or AI voices answering calls to businesses ranging from physicians’ offices to Home Depot, asking in that fake nice tone, “How can I help you today?”
The “help” involves 18 misunderstandings before you maybe, perhaps, actually speak to a human.
The coming revolution will take form overtly, from protests against massive data centers to litigation against tech firms. We will surely see more coordinated union actions, such as writer and artist strikes intended to prevent companies from using AI to replace human workers or to lower wages. We could even see actions against Big Tech infrastructure reminiscent of the 19th-century Luddites who smashed factory machinery with sledgehammers in nighttime raids.
Confirming the coming dissent, Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties, told New York Times opinion writer Maureen Dowd1 that:
American society will turn against them [big tech] in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived.
On a covert level, we can expect dissent to take the form of introspection, of reflecting on life. People will become more interested in life itself, existence, what it means to be alive, and what it means to be aware of their own death. Philosophy, literature, art, and similar fields in the humanities will teach people about such themes, which are relevant to all human beings. International society has neglected these topics for decades, busy instead training technicians to run the machines.
Wieseltier, offering validation again, proclaims that:
Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities.
Over the past decade, the humanities have been quietly disappearing from American higher education through a subtle kind of institutional attrition. Universities facing declining enrollments have eliminated majors in philosophy, history, English, religious studies, classics, and foreign languages. Between 2015 and 2025, undergraduates pursuing humanities degrees fell by 28 percent, while the number pursuing engineering degrees increased by 32 percent.2
What began as a series of budgetary decisions at individual universities begins to look, from a distance, like a fundamental reorganization of American higher education. It takes on a circular quality. Immersed in a fever of commodity fetishism and sold on the need to earn high incomes, fewer students choose the humanities. As a result, universities reduce faculty and courses; diminished departments become less attractive to students; enrollments fall further; and administrators gain justification for further cuts.
The humanities don’t speak the language of employability, measurable outcomes, and return on investment. They ask students to encounter the minds of people distant from themselves, to tolerate ambiguity, to examine history, language, morality, beauty, suffering, and meaning. But, in truth, universities teach students little about what really matters in life, like love, or family, or community.
How ironic that Dowd documents that even Big Tech itself is realizing that learning about human nature matters. They’re now turning to hiring philosophers, English professors, and the like while eliminating some roles for technicians and software engineers. Who needs to learn how to code when AI can do it for you? But AI cannot do what makes us human: feel empathy, show emotion, and display critical thinking and social judgment.
Drew Lichtenberg3, a theater professor at Johns Hopkins University, told Dowd that:
The cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends.
Only we humans can apprehend a captivating novel, an excellent film, a striking sculpture, a moving painting. Reed Hastings, a founder of Netflix, thinks the days when STEM swallowed universities have already ended. He tells parents that:
The best defense today is [for students] to be broadly educated so they can adapt to the changes coming. A.I. is better at rational thinking than it is at emotional depth. The last job that A.I. will get is stand-up comedian.
Let’s hope our fears of AI, robots, and drones will finally trigger more reflections on these more personal, emotional topics. The message is hardly new. In 1955, a group of scientists and philosophers issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto to express their worries that the development of nuclear weapons—then modest compared to the thousands of thermonuclear warheads arming numerous countries now—required us to think more about ethics. The authors thought that technological development way outpaced the evolution of how we treat one another. The manifesto insisted that:
We have to learn to think in a new way.
Now, 71 years later, we are called more urgently than ever to reflect on much more than just making money. Using AI, for example, is like having a superpower. But it cannot address the issues that require more serious attention: how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, and how we treat the planet that graciously hosts us.
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References
Dowd, M. (2026). What A.I. Kant Do. New York Times. Published May 16, 2026.
American Academy of Arts & Sciences. (2026, September 8). Enrollment data signal more humanities degree declines ahead. Humanities Indicators. American Academy of Arts & Sciences
American Academy of Arts & Sciences. (2025). The academic humanities today: Findings from a new national survey. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. National humanities survey