The Dallas Morning News
August 18, 2026
We Need the Humanities in the Age of AI
Technology can answer how. Humans must know why.
By Kyle Ogden
Artificial intelligence may be the most consequential tool human beings have created in generations. It promises to accelerate discovery, expand access to knowledge, increase productivity and help us solve problems that have long resisted our best efforts. We should embrace that promise.
There is, appropriately, a great rush toward an AI-powered and increasingly agentic future. Businesses are investing. Universities are adapting. Governments are considering how to encourage innovation while managing risk. Individuals are learning how to use machines that can write, analyze, organize and increasingly act on their behalf.
That rush should be matched by an equally intentional movement toward a deeper understanding of what makes human beings unique.
Artificial intelligence is a tool. A human being is a living, embodied and morally responsible person, capable of love, suffering, wonder, conscience and purpose.
Think of this as the barbell challenge of the AI age. On one end is what AI is or is becoming, what it can do and how we can use it well. On the other is what AI is not and will never be, and we must deepen our understanding of the human capacities that give technology meaning and direction.
The stronger one end of the barbell becomes, the more important the other becomes. AI can generate answers, but human beings must decide which questions are worth asking. It can identify patterns, but we must determine what those patterns mean. It can recommend a course of action, but we remain responsible for deciding whether that action is wise, just or humane. AI can increasingly tell us how. Human beings must still understand why.
This is why the rise of artificial intelligence magnifies the importance of the humanities. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics help us understand mechanisms, processes and systems. They teach us how things work and enable us to build extraordinary things. The humanities — philosophy, literature, history, languages, the arts and related disciplines — help us ask why those things matter, what purposes they should serve and what consequences may follow from their use.
These are complementary forms of knowledge. The engineer may design the system, but society must decide what the system is for. The programmer may optimize an algorithm, but someone must determine which outcomes deserve to be optimized. The machine may calculate what is efficient, while human judgment determines what is good.
Oscar Wilde famously described a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The line offers a useful warning for our technological moment. AI may become remarkably good at calculating prices, probabilities and likely outcomes. Value — what is worthy, beautiful, fair or sacred — requires judgment.
And judgment is cultivated. We develop it through experience, relationships, mistakes, responsibilities and encounters with lives different from our own. The humanities deepen that development by allowing us to borrow the experience of others. Literature lets us inhabit minds and circumstances we may never encounter personally. History shows us how ambition, fear, prejudice, courage and hope have shaped societies. Philosophy teaches us to examine our assumptions and ask what we mean by truth, justice, freedom and the good life.
These disciplines give us more than information. They enlarge our capacity for interpretation.
That capacity will become increasingly important because AI outputs arrive without wisdom of their own. Between an AI-generated answer and a human action lies a chain of responsibility: input, output, interpretation, decision, action. The machine participates in the first two. Human beings remain accountable for the rest.
This is especially important because AI can produce language that sounds confident even when it is incomplete, distorted or wrong. It can reflect biases found in its training material, overlook cultural nuance or mistake what is statistically common for what is morally appropriate.
To use AI responsibly, we must ask enduring humanistic questions: What counts as evidence? How do we know what we claim to know? Whose experience is represented? Whose is missing? What assumptions are embedded in the answer? Who benefits? Who bears the risk?
Even prompt writing — the seemingly technical skill of instructing an AI system — is fundamentally an exercise in rhetoric. The quality of the response depends on the clarity of the question, the precision of the language, the framing of the problem and the intentions of the person asking.
Communication is becoming a form of system control. In that world, the ability to think carefully and write clearly becomes a form of technical competence. As AI grows more capable, distinctly human capacities — judgment, discernment, moral reasoning and wisdom — grow more valuable.
The proper response is to advance on both ends of the barbell.
First, we should reinvest in humanities education. Students need scientific and technological fluency, and they also need history, literature, philosophy, ethics and the arts. Preparing young people for the future means preparing them to operate intelligent machines and to exercise sound judgment about their use.
Second, businesses, universities, governments and civic institutions should integrate humanistic thinking into AI and workforce preparation. Technologists should be in sustained conversation with philosophers, historians, artists, sociologists and ethicists. Alongside the question, “Can we build it?” we must also ask, “What kind of human future are we building?”
Third, each of us should renew our own commitment to the examined life. We should read more deeply, think more slowly, converse more thoughtfully and make room for beauty, reflection and wonder. As machines become faster, human beings may need to become more deliberate.
We all have an opportunity to participate in this renewal. Thanks-Giving Square, with its distinctive focus on human flourishing, can help create spaces where technological progress is joined with reflection on meaning, responsibility and the kind of society we hope to become.
AI may free us from many routine tasks. The great question is what we will do with that freedom. We could use it merely to produce more, consume more and move faster. Or we could use it to become more thoughtful, more creative, more compassionate and more fully human.
Artificial intelligence may transform what we are able to do. The humanities will help us remember who we are—and decide who we wish to become.
Kyle Ogden is president and CEO of the Thanks-Giving Foundation.