Every day there is a flurry of media coverage about machine automation and the latest industry to be taken over by artificial intelligence (AI). But how credible and imminent are these threats? And how should we, as forward-thinking leaders in education, consider both the potential impact of these new technologies, and how we can prepare students for them?
The counter-intuitive truth in all of this is that the liberal arts are becoming more, not less, important. This is not to say that technical literacy, even fluency, is not important. But the argument that Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) is now the antidote to relevance in our future economy is overblown; STEM is necessary, but not sufficient.
