Last year Microsoft Research reported on the 10 jobs most threatened by artificial intelligence. Should I, dear reader, be running scared?

Historians are No. 2 on the list. The report says 91% of what historians do is pretty much covered by AI queries. Uh-oh. I majored in history in college and went on to get a master’s. In the movie “Animal House,” Bluto laments throwing “seven years of college down the drain.” I guess the good news is maybe I only wasted six.

Eventually, I pivoted to writing, with five novels published and another coming next year. And of course, there’s this weekly column. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. According to Microsoft Research, writers and authors rank No. 5 on the list of endangered professions.

I might as well have opened a retail shop selling goose feather pens or eight-track cassette tapes, right? No. No frigging way.

I’ve taught a college course on AI’s effect on society and, with due deference to those eggheads at Microsoft, they are missing the point. A background in history or English is excellent, perhaps unsurpassed, preparation for the Age of AI.

In 2017, Mark Cuban, an early internet billionaire who won fame as a panelist on “Shark Tank,” said, “There’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming.” He was validated less than a decade later when Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said in 2025, “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”

Both software veterans and pioneers in AI can rely on the same secret weapon: a mind trained by the study of history and literature. My old boss Thomas Siebel, who sold his software company to Oracle for $6 billion, was a fellow history major. He says advice to study only STEM in college is “a bunch of bunk.” He still reads history “to expand his understanding of the past as he prepares for the future.” In grappling with AI, shouldn’t we know how society confronted other new technology waves from the railroads to the programmable computer?

Daniela Amodei, the co-founder and president of Anthropic, the AI company whose last round of financing valued it at almost $1 trillion, studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She’s said, “In a world where AI is very smart and capable of doing so many things, the things that make us human will become much more important.”

Amodei hits the nail on the head. AI emulates a human by vacuuming up huge databases of what humans have done before. AI might do calculus better than its discoverers Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz ever could, but it could never have made the leap to discover calculus in the first place. That takes human creativity and inspiration. AI looks backward to predict the next logical step based on a sequence. Humans look backward to understand context but use imagination to leap into something entirely unprecedented and maybe even inexplicable. As the novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert said, ” I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify.” How will AI do that?

The late Susan Wojcicki, longtime CEO of YouTube, said she saw technology as a way to extend the creativity she’d learned pursuing an undergraduate degree in history and literature. On top of that creativity, the study of both history and English teaches critical analysis, looking at problems from different perspectives, asking questions and keeping an open mind.

The brilliant essayist Joan Didion famously explained: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” When I sit down to write this column each week, I am not certain what I think of Trump’s latest gambit, the Supreme Court’s most recent decision or right and wrong in the Middle East. I don’t want AI to tell me either. I want to reason it out myself because I know that understanding what’s happening today requires understanding what happened yesterday — and often centuries before.

An educated voter needs to know how a policy of appeasement fared in the 1930s when discussing diplomacy today. Cries to “make America great again” must be analyzed against an American past featuring slavery based on race, lack of women’s suffrage and broken treaties with Indigenous tribes. And all that must be balanced against an America that aspired to equality, opened its doors to those who wanted to share in the dream, and fought to save the world from the scourge of Nazism.

In 1967, 5.7% of college graduates majored in history. By 2019, the number was down to fewer than 1.2%. In just the past five years, the number of English majors has dropped 25%.

Have creativity and humanity gone right down with them?

If we want to retain our humanity as artificiality spreads, we don’t need fewer students of our past and our literature. We need many, many more.

A renaissance man, Keith Raffel has served as the senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, started a successful internet software company, and had six books published including five novels and a collection of his columns. He currently spends the academic year as a resident scholar at Harvard. You can learn more about him at keithraffel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 KEITH RAFFEL DIST. BY CREATORS