Anthropic cofounder says studying the humanities will be ‘more important than ever’ in the age of AI

In an interview with ABC News that aired on Saturday, she said the number of jobs that AI could do without help from people is “vanishingly small.” At the same time, even the most cognitively challenging tasks that humans excel at can also be augmented by AI.

“I continue to believe that humans plus AI together actually create more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs,” Amodei added. “And then I think it will also open the aperture to a lot of access and opportunity for many people.”

That doesn’t mean the future employment landscape will require a technical background. Indeed, the release of Anthropic’s latest AI-coding tools sparked a massive selloff among tech stocks this past week as the technical expertise needed to write and maintain code is expected to fall sharply.

For her part, Amodei majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After working briefly as a Capitol Hill staffer, she pivoted to the tech sector, joining fintech company Stripe then OpenAI. In 2020, she left the AI startup to cofound Anthropic, where Daniela is the president and manages alongside her CEO brother.

“The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important,” she told ABC News. “And what I mean by that is when we look to hire people at Anthropic today, we look for people who are great communicators, who have excellent EQ and people skills, who are kind and compassionate and curious and want to help other people.”

That echoes what JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said about the growing importance of “soft skills,” such as having a high emotional quotient.

While AI will still eliminate some jobs, young people should lean into critical thinking and communication skills, including how to write well and how to perform well in a meeting. If they can get those right, “You’ll have plenty of jobs,” he said in December.

At the end of the day, Amodei said, people still enjoy interacting with other humans, with very smart and capable AI complementing them.

“I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” she explained. “A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important. And I think the ability to have critical thinking skills and learn how to interact with other people will be more important in the future, rather than less.”

To be sure, more Gen Zers are abandoning college as a necessary step in a successful career path, turning instead to trade schools and working in hands-on fields like manufacturing, construction and maintenance.

But for those still on the white-collar track, other tech leaders have similarly highlighted the importance of soft skills.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told Fortune in 2023 that when generative AI fully integrates into the workforce, it will put a premium on abilities like collaboration, judgment, and critical thinking.

And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in November that as AI takes over more analytical and technical tasks, emotional intelligence and empathy are becoming increasingly important.

“IQ has a place, but it’s not the only thing that’s needed in the world,” he said on an episode of Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner’s MD Meets podcast.