Maybe the Future Will Only Have the Liberal Arts and Engineering: Thoughts on a 3Blue1Brown Video

AI translation notice: This English version was translated from the original Chinese article with AI assistance. Some nuances may differ from the original.

Tonight I watched 3Blue1Brown's video “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Devote Yourself to Mathematics,” and it stirred up some feelings. I will record them briefly here. I have put the link below so everyone can watch it directly.

After finishing the whole video, I want to start with an attention-grabbing hot take: if we really do reach the point 3Blue1Brown describes, where AI is stronger than humans at everything humans do, then from that point on all learning will become liberal arts.

Fun fact: in English, both the arts and the liberal arts are called Art.

So when people in China say they are studying the liberal arts, they could equally say they are studying art. Which means that in the future, mathematics could become a so-called “liberal art” as well.

Push that condition a little further, and all research—physics, chemistry, even every other kind of theoretical work—could become a liberal art. In the future there will be no distinction between the liberal arts and the sciences, only between “arts” and “engineering”. One is learning theory; the other is landing theory in practice and interacting with the real world.

At that point, university will no longer be a stage of educational attainment, but a higher-order club—one where the entrance ticket is an assessment you have to pass. Everyone inside is passionate about learning, wants to learn, and likes discussing with people who share that passion, to socialize and to connect.

The reason people join this club in the first place is that they were infected by people who carry that kind of passion—just as my original motivation for building this blog site came from being inspired by many like-minded people online who actually put their ideas into practice. University would then no longer be simply a few years you have to put aside in order to land a better job.

This seems to loop back to how aristocrats studied science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Under the development of AGI, productivity advances, and with it comes a reasonable new mode of distribution. Because the means of production would no longer be owned by fixed capital; they would be generated by AGI. The relations of production would change as well, and distribution would necessarily change with them.

Given a good distribution mechanism, people would no longer worry about making a living, and could pursue the things they love. Those who love painting would paint, those who love sports would play sports, or those who love studying mathematical theory would study it, turn theory into practice, or even just spread the joy of learning and rope more people in, or simply teach it to children.

In the end, all of it becomes a kind of “service industry,” or a way of life that people enjoy.

At that point, doing research would be like what The Craftsman describes: the reason for doing something well is simply that you want to get it done, and so you do it well.

The inner impulse to “do a job well for its own sake.”

Of course I know this is idealistic, but it really does sound lovely, doesn't it?

With AGI developing continuously, perhaps the whole industry, the whole society, has realized that it is going to have to change. Look at current policy: many graduate students no longer need to write a thesis, and instead have this “Outstanding Engineer” training mechanism. All of these are changes produced in order to adapt to social development.

In my view, when it comes to social development, holding fast to the unchanging in order to meet every change rarely works; against the patterns of history, it has almost never happened. We are going to change in any case, and only by changing constantly can we use new ideas to solve new problems.

If we do not know what it will turn into, why not imagine it as something a little better?

—Written on a night tormented by linear algebra (transcribed from speech)