Can automation help make the humanities more human?

An oddly familiar article in the Feb. 25, 1940 New York Times.

Below is a longer, revised form of what I submitted for this round table in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which includes great submissions from interesting people I admire like Arvind Narayanan, Zeynep Tufekci, and Ian Bogost.

“Automation is a method that removes the need for human beings to act like cogs in a machine,” the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in a 1963 advice column. She was responding to a reader who asked whether “instead of freeing man’s spirit, all these engineering triumphs are simply dulling it?”

Mead’s point was a simple one. Automation of “routine tasks” by intelligent machines in the future would provide “time to think, to paint, to pray, to philosophize, to observe, to study the universe.” In…