Humane sciences obviously suggests a focus on humans—how we think, love, create, connect, worship, gather, contest, unite, divide, struggle, suffer, exult, rejoice, and overcome. At their best, the humane sciences constitute the careful, penetrating, exuberant study of God’s children across the full gamut of their mortal experience. Such study, I contend, remains indispensable, no matter how fast technology advances or how diffusely it permeates our society.
Not having any special (or unspecial) qualifications to address this topic, I naturally began my preparations by posing to ChatGPT the following query: “Please provide 500 words on why the social sciences and humanities still matter in a world of AI.” The response was (predictably, by now) not bad. The first paragraph reads as follows:
In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) and technology, the social sciences and humanities remain essential for addressing the human, ethical, and societal dimensions of these advancements. While AI offers immense potential for automating tasks, processing vast datasets, and even simulating certain human behaviors, it cannot replicate the nuanced understanding, creativity, and moral judgment that are central to the social sciences and humanities. These fields provide crucial insights into human behavior, culture, ethics, and social systems—areas that are necessary to ensure that AI serves society responsibly and equitably.
Not, as I say, bad—though I note the self-referential nature of the concluding sentence. We need the humane sciences, the argument goes, to optimize AI’s functionality or, more ominously, to shield us from its dangers. I certainly agree, but I also maintain that the humane sciences serve values entirely independent of AI and that part of their enduring vitality will consist in pointing us to a world outside of and beyond AI.
The AI essay highlights as “one of the primary reasons the humanities and social sciences matter . . . their role in fostering critical thinking and ethical reasoning.” Moreover, the machine continues, “the social sciences are indispensable for understanding the societal impact of AI.” Social scientists, we are told, provide “insights . . . critical for developing policies that mitigate the negative impacts of AI-driven automation.”
The humanities, for their part,
cultivate creativity and empathy, qualities that are becoming more important as AI takes over routine tasks. While AI excels at performing repetitive or data-driven work, it struggles with tasks that require empathy, artistic creativity, or complex human interaction. . . . As automation reduces the need for certain technical skills, there is an increasing demand for professionals who can think creatively, work in teams, and engage with diverse viewpoints.
The humanities and social sciences both “offer essential contributions to questions of human identity in the age of AI,” an age that will “raise profound questions about what it means to be human.” Those questions will require insights from “philosophy, anthropology, and psychology,” among other disciplines.
In its summary and concluding paragraph, the AI essay notes that although “transforming many aspects of life, it cannot replace the critical, ethical, and creative functions that the humanities and social sciences provide. These fields remain essential for guiding the responsible development of AI technologies, understanding their societal impacts, and preserving the human qualities that distinguish us from machines.”
There’s some good stuff here—though I confess that I find that final us more than a little chilling—all neatly digested in a model five-paragraph essay: an introduction with a thesis, three substantive paragraphs substantiating discrete elements of that thesis, and a concluding paragraph restating and summarizing the thesis.
If I were to quibble with this essay, it wouldn’t be with its substance so much as with its feel. This machine-produced prose feels, well, mechanical. With justified astonishment that a machine could complete my impromptu task so swiftly and so well, I still have a hard time imagining that a human being could have written it—or rather, I have a hard time imagining the human being that could have written it— and for the very good reason that no human being did write it.
Now I want to invite you to engage in a thought experiment. Think of a favorite writer—someone whose prose prances, whose imagery leaps, whose narratives inspire, whose arguments convince, whose language stirs or sings or slashes or soars.
Now think about the voice you hear in your head when you read this writer’s work.
Now think about the image you form in your mind of the speaker whose voice you hear.
My guess is simply that there is a voice, and there is a speaker. And my thesis is that the reason this writer produces that effect on you is that behind his or her writing, there burns a human soul.
Let me give you an example. This comes from the end of George Orwell’s long essay about Charles Dickens. (Orwell, of course, is someone who warned about the dangers of untrammeled technology and who insisted on the irreducible sanctity and freedom of the human soul.) Orwell’s essay on Dickens was written in 1940, a year into the Second World War:
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, [Orwell concludes,] one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face “ that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
This paragraph’s impact on me is physical. It sets my spine a-tingling. Here, clearly, is another strongly individual writer. I cannot escape inferring that there is a touch of aspirational autobiography in Orwell’s description. In any event, these are words that could never be written by a machine about others whose works could never be replicated by a machine. They are words that could only be produced by a striving, defiant, generously angry soul. I know something about the soul that wrote these words because the soul itself is inscribed in them.
This is true, I submit, of all superior writing. It was Buffon, the French naturalist of the 18th century, who famously wrote that “Le style c’est l’homme même”—style is the man himself. I might amend this to say that style is the soul transcribed in words. For this reason, AI will never have style, however efficient or competent the text it produces. It will always operate at least one remove from the human soul. It will never provide more than an imitation of the real thing, however sophisticated or refined the imitation.
Well, fair enough, you might respond, but who cares about style? And why on earth would you talk about style to a group of social scientists—a group whose sometimes jargon-laden prose has, in some instances, been censured as rebarbative and inscrutable? And who are you, a lawyer and a bureaucrat—two groups whose guilds have been even worse offenders on all these fronts—to pontificate about style?
On the latter charge, I have no defense. On the former, I note for one thing that many seminal thinkers across the social sciences, including in law, have been masters of language. Think of Alexis de Tocqueville, a founder of modern political thought, whose French prose scintillates with epigrammatic elegance and with brilliant aperçus. Think of Max Weber, a founder of modern sociology, whose forceful German prose is often difficult but who could, when the occasion required, rise to impressive rhetorical heights. Think of Sigmund Freud, a founder of modern psychology, whose German is so supple and so strong that every year the German Academy for Language and Literature awards a Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose.
When I was a graduate student, I read on a Berlin bus Freud’s introduction to his lectures on psychoanalysis. Freud wrote of “die Zauberkraft der Worte”—the sorcerous power of words. He recognized that power, and he practiced such sorcery. Think further of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a legal titan whose judicial opinions exhibit a trenchant, lapidary beauty and whom Joseph Epstein has designated the best letter writer in American history.
But again, who cares about style? I rejoin, whoever cares about souls. To defend that rejoinder, I need to say something about the restored gospel’s doctrine of the soul and to offer a brief Restoration basis for the humane sciences.
In the end, I hope to highlight what the humane sciences can provide and what AI can never replace.
John Tanner, one of my predecessors as BYU’s academic vice president, once argued that the two great commandments—to love God and to love our neighbor—both point toward study of the humane disciplines. With respect to the first great commandment, he said this:
Since humans are part of the created order, indeed creation’s capstone, and since we are fashioned in the image of God, anthropology (i.e., the knowledge of the human) certainly holds a place along with cosmology and theology as proper objects of study for [a Latter-day Saint] scholar seeking to love God with one’s mind.
With respect to the second great commandment, he said this:
Surely the imperative to love our neighbors as ourselves implies an obligation to understand our neighbors—their culture, history, language, science, and so forth. For how can I love another “as myself” whom I do not understand, or at least desire to understand, well? Neighbor-love implies an obligation to engage in humanistic learning.
Likewise, [Dr. Tanner continues,] the second commandment implies a responsibility to care about our neighborhoods, including the cultural conditions that shape us and our neighbors for good and ill. . . .
Neighbor-love thus requires thoughtful engagement with culture.
“Thoughtful engagement with culture” is, of course, a nice summary phrase for the humane sciences at their best. We cannot, I submit, discharge our Christian duty to love our neighbor as ourselves by means of artificial intelligence—still less can we thus discharge our duty to love God with all our heart, might, and mind.
May I suggest that the humane sciences remain indispensable even in a world of artificial intelligence— especially in a world of artificial intelligence—because of what they can do for humanity and to humanity. Understanding why requires pondering revealed truths about God’s eternal plan of salvation. In the restored gospel, we find stirring and definitive answers to the questions of what we as humans are and what we are meant to become.
We are intended, in short, “to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize [our] divine destiny as heirs of eternal life.” To become what God wants us to become. To forge an eternal character and to foster eternal relationships—for “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory.”
Aristotle famously asserted that man is by nature a social animal, a zoon politikon. Aristotle didn’t know the half of it. Thanks to the restored gospel, we know that human beings are spirit children of heavenly parents, endowed with premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose—a purpose centered in sacred sociality, in ties of affection and covenant bonds.
Our capacity to cultivate such connections is immensely enhanced by understanding them, and our understanding is enormously enriched by the humane sciences, properly undertaken—especially when such study is illuminated by the glorious light of the Restoration.
President Russell M. Nelson has written of his time as a young researcher in the pioneering days of cardiovascular surgery:
During those early days of research on the heart, [he recalls,] I came across some verses in the Doctrine and Covenants that resulted in a major epiphany for me, opening my mind to new possibilities for my heart research.
The verses that caught young Dr. Nelson’s attention came from sections 88 and 130 in the Doctrine and Covenants. Section 88 declares that “all kingdoms have a law given; And there are many kingdoms; for there is no space in the which there is no kingdom; and there is no kingdom in which there is no space, . . . And unto every kingdom is given a law; and unto every law there are certain bounds also and conditions.” And section 130 builds upon these principles by noting that “when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.”
When I read these verses in tandem, [President Nelson explains,] my young research-focused mind exploded with possibilities. “Surely,” I thought, “there must be laws, or truths, that govern the beating heart.” If we could discover those laws and then “obey” them, the results would be positive. It was the very idea that absolute truths, or divine laws, exist—and that following them would produce desirable results—that gave me new hope about discovering ways to repair a defective heart.
I do not believe that these principles are limited to the natural sciences. President Nelson promises: “If you adhere to the laws or truths that govern any particular behavior, discipline, or activity, you will achieve the outcomes you desire.”
I believe that there are divine laws that govern human aspirations and attachments of every kind—familial and friendly, social and societal, political and poetic, religious and romantic, artistic and aesthetic—and that it will be surpassingly difficult in this fallen sphere to uncover them without the assistance of humane studies, aided and illuminated by the light of Christ. I submit that the deep truths about the human condition can be discovered and articulated only by humans—and only, in the end, through the rigorous combination of perspiration and inspiration, toil and prayer, study and faith to which Brigham Young University is unalterably committed. Artificial intelligence might regurgitate or imitate such truths, but it will never unveil or express them. The humane sciences thus remain indispensable to exploring and expounding the laws that govern human souls and the ties between and among them.
Alexander Pope spoke only a half truth when he wrote:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
This, to repeat, is only half the truth. But I insist with dogmatic insistence that the proper students of humankind are humans.
I want to close with an illustrative anecdote. A year ago, BYU hosted Mr. Itzhak Perlman, who at age 79 remains the world’s most celebrated living violinist. Having contracted polio in early childhood, Mr. Perlman’s life has been a constant struggle and triumph over physical limitations. Still, as I watched him mount the stage of BYU’s new concert hall, maneuvering his motorized wheelchair with his left hand and cradling his precious Stradivarius with his right, I thought he looked physically broken. Age and ill health seemed to have taken their toll.
The music he produced that night was breathtakingly beautiful—haunting, majestic, transcendent, sublime. My wife, Lia, wrote in her diary, “I learned tonight what worship means.” We heard through Mr. Perlman’s Stradivarius the singing of a splendid soul. I reflected later that, by his own stratospheric standards, the performance was likely imperfect. At 78, perhaps his fingers could not do what they did at 68 or 48 or 28. And yet this was his gift—God’s gift to him and through him to us—and he would worship with that gift so long as his fingers could command that remarkable instrument to give voice to his marvelous soul.
It was a profoundly human moment. Perhaps someday AI will evolve to produce perfected music—fluent, fervent, without flaw. But it will never, through music or any other medium, give us the spirit of Itzhak Perlman, or indeed of any other soul. Most of us, of course, have nothing like Mr. Perlman’s gifts. But the revelations affirm that “to every [soul] is given a gift by the Spirit of God.”18 Those gifts are precious, not because they are peerless but because they are ours—because they represent our unique and consecrated offerings before the throne of grace—a sacred medium by which we express our love to God and enact our love for neighbor.
To come full circle: I contend that the AI’s 500-word essay on the indispensability of humane studies affirms, by its own limitations, the indispensability of humane studies. Perhaps that essay was better than this talk. Certainly, it has the virtue of being shorter. But this talk—flawed, meandering, long-winded, and dull—has been the work of a fellow human, a compatriot soul, a comrade in the fellowship of the human condition. We need humane studies to ennoble the human condition and to enrich the human conversation.
