In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2022, both the universities ranked as the top in terms of arts and humanities are from the US. Both universities hold a position as the world’s best institutes for a group of subjects in the arts and humanities, including history, philosophy, fine arts, language, literature, theology and architecture.
Stanford University, which is seen as the center of America’s Silicon Valley and whose students have given birth to Google, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo and Netflix, managed to take the first position in the list. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was close behind and placed second in the ranking.
Other world-renowned top tech schools have also improved their arts and humanities rankings: Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands rose to 42nd from 65th last year, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH (known as Zurich) rose from 53 to 49th place, while Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology) moved from 151-175 places into the world’s top 150.
Mutual insight and research
In an article written for Times Higher Education, two of MIT’s arts school deans, Augustin Reeve (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) and Hashem Sarkis (Architecture and Planning), were clear on one thing: The arts and humanities departments— As powerful sources of knowledge and understanding of the human condition – MIT’s teaching, research and innovation are at the core.
“The insights of science and engineering are, of course, critical to solving many of the world’s most pressing problems. But science and engineering operate within human societies and the cultural, political, spatial, and economic complexities of human existence and the earth.” The world is best served by being aware of ways to live. Science/technology, the arts, design, and humanistic disciplines are also mutually informing sources of human knowledge, and many of today’s most pressing issues can only be addressed through mutual insight and research”.
The Challenge of the Metaverse
As we move rapidly into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era of intelligent technologies will not only transform economies and societies more profoundly than our past industrial revolutions—steam, steel, electricity, petrochemicals—but these societies will change the concept of
It’s worth noting that when Facebook, now called Meta, announced its next step in developing the “Metaverse” — an “augmented reality” that includes virtual and augmented reality — it called it a “responsibility.” With” it took a lot of effort to explain the need to do this. “We need to engage the human rights and civil rights communities from the beginning to ensure that these technologies are built in a way that is inclusive and empowering,” said Meta’s vice president of global affairs. Nick Clegg’s first academic research partnership with universities, confirmed by META, is on projects related to ethics, privacy, law, diversity and inclusion.
In this age of fake news and conspiracy theories, most alarmingly around covid-19 vaccinations and climate change, we need a new generation of critical thinkers and communicators. With deepening social divisions exacerbated by the pandemic, the rise of nationalism and protectionism, and the existential threat of rising global temperatures, we need to be reminded of our shared lives, to learn from our past. There is a need, and we need a new generation, that has the courage to speak truth to the mighty.
Identified by the World Economic Forum last year, tomorrow’s top-10 skills were dominated by the best skills in the arts and humanities fields: critical thinking and analysis; creativity, innovation and initiative; leadership and social influence; Reasoning and problem solving.
The challenge of artificial intelligence technology
New technologies, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence, are raising fundamental questions about what it is to be human. John Tseulis, professor of ethics and legal philosophy at Oxford University and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI, says that perhaps the most fundamental service of the arts and humanities to the world is to “clarify the fact that AI The development of is not a matter of fate, but it is our choice, which will have impactful results in many successive waves.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking famously said that AI “has the potential to be either the best or the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity”, with the threat of humans being rapidly replaced by intelligent machines. It can be disabled and even subjugated. It is therefore imperative for our institutions of higher learning to allow the arts and humanities disciplines to flourish, so that humanity will surely benefit the most from this profoundly transformative revolution.
