[hnfong]

> it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter

It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.

Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.

[TexanFeller]

Ethics is an important thing to ponder and AI may bring certain ethical questions to the forefront. Although the subject is important, it's not clear to me its questions are even well defined and answerable, or even if so if humanities folks are the most well equipped to help answer them(I'd sooner bet on biologists studying behavior through the lens of evolution). Basic questions like what are or should be the basic principles/axioms of ethics have no clear and agreed upon answer. Whether there could be any universal sense of morals/ethics or if we can never agree because of variation in genetics and maybe it's relative to culture are oft debated.

[skissane]

> Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.

I absolutely don’t think the humanities and social sciences are useless-I think they have a lot of value.

But nowadays there seem to be two main approaches to them: (1) the modernist traditional social sciences approach, which tries to approximate the rigour of the natural sciences, to as great an extent as the subject matter will permit; (2) the postmodernist critical theory approach-which is inclined to denounce that rigour as harmful/oppressive/etc. Big fan of (1), absolutely see its value; very sceptical of (2).

[hnfong]

I share your sentiment in general, but (unfortunately?) I've dabbled enough in the humanities to be able to empathize on how the postmodernist approach might make sense in some contexts.

So I end up working in $BigTech and making half-serious jokes about how capitalism is the cause of modern woes on Facebook...