Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark says you shouldn’t write off liberal arts majors.
After all, Clark, a former journalist who studied literature at the University of East Anglia, is one of them.
“What turned out to be useful is that I got to learn a lot about history and a lot about the kind of stories that we tell ourselves about the future,” Clark said on Monday during Semafor’s World Economy Summit. “That’s turned out to be like, extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted.”
Clark said that the best areas of study are those that have a lot of overlap.
“I think that majors which are going to become more important are ones which involve like synthesis across a whole variety of subjects and analytical thinking about that,” he said.
The best skill, Clark said, is learning how to ask the right question.
“The really important thing is knowing the right questions to ask and having intuitions about what would be interesting, colliders, different insights from many different disciplines,” he said.
After repeated pressing, Clark said that “rote programming” is something he would avoid. That’s on brand with his Anthropic colleagues, including Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, who has said the title of software engineer will start to be phased out this year.
“Some people need to know those fundamentals, but we do see that technology move up the stack,” Clark said.
Overall, though, Clark said that majors that may seem mismatched to the age of AI will actually be fairly worthwhile. He pointed out that Anthropic employs philosophers.
“When was the last time you heard that a philosophy degree was like a great job prospect?” he said.