AI is an opportunity, not a disaster, for humanities graduates

Jeong Gwa-ri

The author is a literary critic and honorary professor at Yonsei University.

A recent nominee for a senior government post sparked public outrage when, in response to a question about public health, the nominee said, “I don’t know because I was a humanities student.” I have little interest in politics, but I care deeply about the survival and frustrations of the humanities. Behind such a casual remark lies a chronic problem in Korean education. It is also connected to the widespread expression munsong, shorthand for “I’m sorry I studied humanities,” which emerged amid worsening job prospects for humanities graduates as science and computing came to dominate the 21st century.

Korea has traditionally divided students into mun-gwa, broadly the humanities and social sciences track, and i-gwa, the natural sciences and engineering track. Although the boundaries have become less rigid, the distinction remains deeply embedded in education and popular culture.

The Western root of mun-gwa is what was called the liberal arts. As the name suggests, its purpose was to educate free people: not slaves trained in practical occupational skills, but people intellectually equipped to seek truths about the universe, participate in civic life and think independently.

In East Asia, the humanities traditionally encompass literature, history and philosophy. The “Great Learning,” one of the Confucian classics, describes a progression from investigating things and extending knowledge to making one’s intentions sincere and mind upright, then cultivating oneself, ordering the family, governing the state and bringing peace to the world. Humanities learning, in other words, concerns integrated knowledge rather than isolated facts. Someone educated in this tradition who knows nothing about materials affecting public health has simply failed to study the humanities properly.

Yet Korea’s education system discourages such integrated knowledge. That may sound odd. Even the college entrance system, often criticized for sharply separating humanities and science students, includes common mathematics requirements and requires students to study across fields. At least formally, it provides some exposure to different areas.

The problem is that Korean education treats knowledge not as nourishment for the mind but as disposable material to be used immediately and discarded. Once the college entrance exam is over, students forget much of what they learned and concentrate on their majors, which appear more directly useful for their careers.

The consequences are serious. I have repeatedly seen brilliant humanities students who entered top departments at elite universities become unable, after a decade in the workforce, even to factor a quadratic equation.

Moreover, the foundation of education is learning how to ask questions. Questions must arise from students’ own thinking. Only then can learning become personal experience, and only internalized experience becomes part of us.

Multiple-choice questions asking students to select an answer predetermined by an examiner cannot accomplish that. The late poet Kim Chun-su once said he took a test containing a question about his own poem and scored 48 points. What purpose does storing such answers in one’s head serve?

This tendency has only intensified. Humanities graduates in Korea often regard science as little more than hearsay, while science graduates may no longer remember the poetry of Kim So-wol or Han Yong-un, better known by his pen name Manhae. Intellectual writing consequently tends to remain confined to individual disciplines, with inspiration from other fields often considered out of reach.

Then came AI. At its current level, AI’s greatest advantage is that it is something of a know-it-all. Could that ability help Koreans escape the abandoned mines of their own specialized knowledge?

AI, I believe, offers an extraordinary opportunity to retrieve knowledge from our youth that we threw into the trash. With its help, we can build analogies between our specialties and other fields, allowing thought to branch outward with extraordinary freedom.

There are only two conditions.

First, we must understand the fundamentals of how AI works. Understanding here means more than possessing logically organized knowledge: It means becoming sufficiently familiar with it through repeated practice to use it comfortably. To ask AI for gifts, we must know how to handle it. That learning should begin with the digital foundations of AI: repeatedly practicing choices between A and B, constructing the chain of choices as carefully as possible, then trying to connect A and B.

Second, rather than merely demanding answers from AI, we should converse with it. As everyone knows, AI, compelled to provide an answer, sometimes confidently produces falsehoods. Its responses therefore require constant verification.

More importantly, conversation trains us to ask questions about the world. Questions allow us to imagine different possible worlds. Answers fix the world in place. Questions create it.

With those two conditions in mind, the idle wordplay and seemingly empty imagination often associated with humanities graduates can instead become an inexhaustible resource for creating something new. Sand can become silicon — both contain the element silicon.

The miscellaneous knowledge accumulated through humanities study may then “grow luxuriantly, as if in pride,” to borrow from Yun Dong-ju’s poem “Counting the Stars at Night” (1948). Perhaps the age of munsong — apologizing for being a humanities graduate — can give way to what I would call munrang: an age when humanities people can stand proud in a rapidly changing intellectual landscape.