I’m already not driving my son to school (in my Tesla self-driving mode). Now Tesla has introduced cars sans steering wheels, and with that wheel literally gone so goes the small but meaningful bit of responsibility for the archetypal parent chauffeur. What’s a golf mom to do if my driving services aren’t needed?
This existential question: “Who am I and what is my purpose?” seems to be sinking in rapidly for everyone. Venture capitalist Matt Shumer’s warning: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job” - should send chills up our spines. Work isn’t just a way to make money, it’s deeply tied to purpose, identity and even moral duty. It justifies our place in the social order. The problem we face isn’t just displacement, it’s disorientation.
Making matters worse, our education systems - the universities and schools we’ve built - may be preparing young people for jobs that are vanishing. If we’re not already negligent in the way we’re teaching them, we’re at least outdated.
But yet in all this - there seems to be a silver lining. James Miller, who specializes in the intersection of global religions, nature and ecology, is a professor of Humanities at Duke Kunshan University in China. He believes we may see the rise of new Renaissance men and women. A Renaissance man is someone who’s well-rounded with proficiency across multiple disciplines to bring about invaluable insights through cross-referencing and connecting different forms of knowledge. Leonardo da Vinci integrated art, engineering, philosophy, anatomy, etc. into a unified attempt to understand the world. Society has, sadly, moved away from that.
Modern society, for good reasons, has organized itself around expertise. You don’t want untrained people performing surgery or designing bridges. So we built systems of credentialing, of specialization, of ever-narrowing competence. You need to pass the bar to be a lawyer; you need certificates to be a financial planner; you need a medical license to practice medicine, and so on. This worked out sometimes.
So-called experts, in actuality, know more and more about less and less. They haven’t always made the best assessments. Take for instance, Paul Ehrlich, who recently passed away at 93. He was a celebrated expert whose dire Malthusian prediction about overpopulation led to fear and destructive policies. He didn’t lack intelligence, but he did lack perspective.
Even the American Founders - like Benjamin Franklin - were not narrow specialists. They were broadly educated, philosophically informed, and technically capable - which in many ways helped them lay the governing foundations of the greatest country in the world.
So the question is: Have we specialized our way into a corner? And can AI - ironically - provide a way out? What if AI is bringing back the modern polymath?
For James, if this is the future - AI handling certain forms of technical depth - then his students have to learn what their tasks should be. That takes a lot of critical thinking! They’re not thinking less, but they’re shifting their thinking to a new and different paradigm. One that integrates, compares and synthesizes across domains. James still requires students to read, say Shakespeare, line by line. That discipline still matters. Then they do something new - they put Shakespeare in dialogue with different traditions, say a classical Chinese poet. Suddenly, something new emerges. Patterns and connections form. The students aren’t just analyzing, they’re synthesizing.
This may be the beginning of a new kind of literacy. One could argue, of course, that something is lost. Depth, for one. But it’s not obvious that hyper-specialization has truly helped society. Maybe, just maybe society should applaud the new generation of Renaissance men and women, and teachers like James who are helping to instruct them.
To learn more about James, here’s his profile. You can also read more about his experiment teaching religion with AI. Here’s a student’s review of the course.
Interview coverage —
2:30: AI challenges in traditional humanities education. Trade-offs in cognitive development.
5:50: Embracing AI in the classroom. Interpreting AI’s analysis across disciplines.
8:04: The downside of hyper-specialization and the upside of AI - making bridges across different scholarly or cultural divides.
9:15: Lacking the ability to generalize is a deficiency. The Renaissance people of the past.
10:30: The general resistance or fear of how best to use AI tools in the school setting.
13:40: Requiring students to embrace AI. The challenge: produce good prompts to produce things that are valuable.
14:30 - Using AI to create summaries of material and make connections between them.
16:25 - Deliberately losing some cognitive learning but gaining something else.
17:47 - Producing a creative project about religion (new forms, kinds), using AI.
23:34 - How do you define religion and what are elements that are consistent across all religions?
26:25 - The role of truth and sacrifice in religion.
27:27 - When students create a new religion, is suffering a part of it?
31:03 - Chatroom called “Moltbook” - a social network for AI agents.
34:34 - The conditions that make religions spread?
44:17 - ChatGPT gives you the words, much like God gives us the word. Divine inspiration from the Holy Spirit or ChatGPT?
48:35 - Is there a religious revival around the world?
