Why technology needs Shakespeare

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse on September 29, 2015. 

While our technology companies have begun addressing the gap they appear to be flipping Snow’s question around

In a July 2015 article,  Forbes magazine reported how a number of tech companies like Facebook and Uber have recently begun recruiting more non-technical graduates than tech ones. It appears that they think that “liberal arts thinking makes them stronger.” For instance, as Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack Technologies) noted, studying philosophy taught him how to write really clearly and also - even more significantly - to follow arguments all the way down “which is invaluable in running meetings.” Forbes cites observations also from how graduates from some universities in the last decade were tracked on LinkedIn. Only 30% of graduates from Northwestern University, for example, secured jobs in engineering or information technology. Most of the rest ended up with career paths in such fields as sales and marketing, education and business development in Silicon Valley.

Forbes compares this development to how the automobile revolution of the 1920s gave rise to positions - besides car assembly itself - also in marketing, driving instructors and construction of roads. The Second Machine Age, a book by two MIT professors that Forbes refers to, argues that today’s technology will similarly create new ways of working “in which technology takes care of routine tasks [while] people concentrate on … generating creative ideas and actions in a data-rich world.” In a similar vein, Michael Osborne, an Oxford professor in machine learning, indicated recently on BBC that “creativity, social intelligence and manual dexterity were the three characteristics that protected jobs from automation.”

In a 1959 lecture, C.P. Snow famously lamented the lack of interplay between the “two cultures” of science and humanities. He felt that this was “a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.”

Two academics from UC Berkeley, Anthony Cascardi and Fiona Doyle have argued that this disconnect is reflected also in the relationship between research universities and the public. They contend that Snow worried too about the “absence of intellectual involvement” in technological progress. Cascardi and Doyle note that a cross-disciplinary approach to science and the humanities on the other hand fosters a positive change in the way we approach the needs of society. It is heartening to note that at least some political decision-makers are aware of the value of such an approach. Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia, for instance, highlighted in a 2014 speech highlighted in a 2014 speech that the two cultures disengagement left unchecked could lead to an erosion of an understanding of the fundamental issues of liberal democracy.

When Snow talked about the gap between science and humanities he appeared to assign slightly more importance to science rather than the latter. He illustrated his main argument by noting that he had been provoked to ask some "highly educated" people how many of them could explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Snows adds that he was “asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare?” It appears while our technology companies have begun addressing this gap - unwittingly or not - they are apparently flipping Snow’s question around: instead of asking someone to explain the Second Law, they would rather ask: Why is Shakespeare important for science and technology?

Image Credits:

William Shakespeare: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Wheel: Amartya Beg (Own work)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0

(Photo Composite by Author)