# In This Labor Market, Humanities May Be More Desirable Than STEM > Source: > Published: 2026-08-18 23:04:06+00:00 # In This Labor Market, Humanities May Be More Desirable Than STEM ### Recent “AI-native” candidates were described by one finance employer as “alarmingly shallow.” For as long as I can remember, people with mathematical, analytical, or engineering skills were always compensated more than those who had “softer” humanities or people-centric skills. At one of the tech companies that I worked for lifetimes ago, for example—a blockchain startup likely committing fraud—all of our work was in service of the software developers. We were shown videos of sweat-stained Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer chanting “developers, developers” to motivate us. In that era, it seemed that *not* having people skills or emotional intelligence was actually perceived as a mark of genius. All pendulums that swing one way are bound to swing back the other, however! This week, a [viral excerpt](https://x.com/buccocapital/status/2089339284100677949) from a Financial Times article caught my attention. In the excerpt, a “financier” speaks to the FT journalist about vetting new hires. Specifically, vetting recent young entrants to the job markets who have never known work without AI. The employer told the reporter that while the “AI natives” he initially interviewed appeared “wildly impressive,” they were actually “alarmingly shallow.” “Critical thinking,” he continues, is the most important hireable skill—a skill that humanities graduates seem to have more of at the present than STEM ones. This employer is not the first to speak of humanities as a more marketable skill in this new age. A few months ago, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings admitted that in the age of AI, we will all seek emotional experiences from humans—-that no one wants to watch a bunch of robots play basketball. Even Daniela Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, claimed in an interview a few months back that Anthropic looks 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.” For all the talk of “getting left behind if you don’t use AI,” an emphasis on the humanities right now actually makes complete sense. Because when you have a tool such as AI that can predict the predictable parts of a job, it’s unfortunately the preference of some current employers to employ the predictive tool rather than to employ you. What humanities teaches you, though, is how to adapt to the less predictable—-given its inherent study of the historically unpredictable human being. It allows for acknowledgment of the spaces in-between that require nuance and context, context that AI frequently lacks. Because for all the rare books AI can shred and read, it is quite literally not able to read a room. For instance, take a person who needs to think swiftly in a meeting based on the unpredictable actions of another human being. That person’s behavior could be the difference between landing a contract or not. In countless ways, there is simply no replacement for the intuition of a human, with a library of physical and emotional lived experiences. This is not to say that people in STEM can’t solve complex problems—nor that AI can’t try to emulate human intuition or originality. It just means that an understanding of the unpredictable human psyche will be more coveted when “predictability” is abundant. That we’ll see people who produce work without a huge AI footprint as having conscious and problem-solving minds—minds able to create new pathways for creativity, boundary-crossing, and connection-making. If you look at the needs a lot of employers have these days—especially tech companies—they are rooted in skills of persuasion and communication. This is in part because the general public is not responding to data centers and late-stage capitalism. It’s also because we can sometimes tell if something feels unoriginal or inauthentic. I’ve never met someone who felt good about consuming slop. Speaking of unoriginal: it’s also becoming uncool in the culture to use AI for everything. Gen Alpha even coined the phrase “that’s so AI” in reference to someone who is unoriginal. Will there be a “humanities” bootcamp, an analog to those coding bootcamps that sprung up to train people for entry-level software developer roles? Probably not. (In part because a “humanities bootcamp” is a bit oxymoronic.) But at a very high level, there may be a merging of the left and right brains—like a course I recently read about at the University of Colorado Boulder that is co-taught by a mathematician and a Renaissance scholar. Because I’m not sure that STEM people and humanities people should exist in competitive silos, especially in tech. Perhaps instead of hiring one or the other, these people should be partnered together. **What else we’re paying attention to…** Investigative outlet 404 Media placed an [Airtag](https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/) in a rare book that they suspected was on the path to training AI. The book was traced to an Amazon facility where they shred the books and feed them into large language models. (On the door of the Amazon facility was a Tyrannosaurus Rex eating a book.) AI companies, realizing they are not very popular across political affiliation and demographic, are trying a new line of messaging: to [pitch themselves](https://www.businessinsider.com/fidji-simo-ai-curing-diseases-cancer-pots-dario-amodei-2026-8) as the cure to cancer. Google [bought all](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/business/google-spirit-airlines-data) of Spirit Airlines’ data for $10 million to train its AI. Walmart workers [are correcting](https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-workers-new-responsibility-correcting-ai-errors-retail-2026-7) AI errors: “An online fulfillment worker told Business Insider she hasn’t been able to pick general merchandise orders as quickly as the AI app says she should, in part because of the AI-generated route through the store.”