The Humanities Are the Moat
Dr Sam Illingworth
The humanities teach us how to judge and understand what AI produces, skills that AI cannot copy. Twenty years of cutting humanities education left many people able to use AI but unable to evaluate its work. To stay wise in an AI world, we must read deeply and think critically, like the humanities teach us.
17 Jul 2026
I have a PhD in atmospheric physics. I spent a decade measuring greenhouse gases from satellites. The technical skills got me the job. The thing that made me good at it was reading poetry. Because poetry trained me to notice what was not being said in a dataset, to sit with uncertainty instead of resolving it prematurely, to read the same output three times and find a different meaning each time. Every critical decision I made as a scientist was an act of interpretation, not computation.
The skills the market had dismissed turned out to be the ones the machines could not do. Judgement. Interpretation. The ability to read between the lines of something that presents itself as neutral. The capacity to hold two contradictory ideas and decide, slowly, which one matters more. The willingness to sit with ambiguity instead of resolving it.