According to The Wall Street Journal, anthropology is one of the few disciplines that might help students survive the AI apocalypse. They pull this idea from Alec Litowitz, founder of Qstar Capital, who argues in his forthcoming book that AI has already commoditized most knowledge people will acquire in college. Litowitz, who graduated with a BA in math and anthropology from MIT, goes on to recommend that students study topics that can help them think critically, understand people, and adapt to change. 

For Litowitz, the critical approaches he gained in anthropology enabled him to navigate and evaluate investment opportunities  — specifically his bets on merger arbitrages, the process of purchasing shares prior to a merger and then selling the shares at a profit. 

It is his training in anthropology, he insists, that has given him a distinct advantage over his competitors to predict corporate change with a precision that has returned many, many, many billions of dollars. 

Anthropology Can Help Students Succeed in a Changing World

Litowitz suggests that anthropology can help students become more marketable and make more money, and, thus, can help them to “succeed in an AI world.” 

If this is true, then the concepts, approaches, and critical methodologies of anthropology might still have a future inside the universities that manage to survive the coming decades. 

Faculty might have a different flock of students to teach and mentor. Graduates might become more equipped to write large checks back to universities. Deans and provosts might be willing to expand rather than shrink budgets (or, at least, restore monthly faculty lunches). 

All in all, anthropology might accidentally find a future as it teaches students to engage more critically with the present and past.

The fields of anthropology share one primary commitment and that is to time and space — to being(s) in the world. 

But I would like to offer one more critical concept, or approach, that anthropology necessarily teaches all its students: slow time. 

AI makes processing information faster than nabbing a Milky Way from a vending machine. Need a syllabus on Ethnography & Imagination? Seven seconds. How about a detailed summary of that book you just spent ten years writing? Five seconds. 

AI has done to information processing what the telephone did to long-distance communications. Punch a few buttons and the other side answers before that Milky Way has even been unwrapped. AI, like the telephone before it, has eliminated the obstacles of time and space. Anthropology, on the other hand, lives in time and space.

There are no shortcuts to ethnographic research. To archaeological digs and material reassembling. To observing language use in practice. The fields of anthropology share one primary commitment and that is to time and space — to being(s) in the world. 

Anthropology Can Take Us Into the World

Anthropology builds knowledge and makes sense of change from within the slow time of sitting and observing and listening and questioning and sharing and receiving and remembering and digging and giving and brushing and seeing, all in specific times and spaces. 

“I believe in the world and want to be in it,” states Fred Moten, MacArthur-winning poet and professor of Performance Studies, in an interview from 2013. “I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.” 

Anthropology can help slow us down. It can take us, can take our students, into the upheaval of that path, where beauty and brokenness and everything in between get all mixed up.

In almost every anthropology course I have taught since 2019, no matter the topic, I have assigned this interview during the first weeks of class. 

What does it mean to believe in the world? To want to be in it all the way to the end? As I say to my students: Moten does not say that he is waiting for a better world. Nor does he say he is looking to build a better one. He says he wants to be in the world. Until it gives way to another. And so on. 

Moten does not believe in being in the world because it gives him a strategic advantage in the marketplace, but because the world is where it feels good to be: in pain and in sorrow, in joy and in celebration, in possibility and in foreclosure, embraced by others, embracing others, in the fading daylight where horizon swallows sun, giving way to night, smells of soil, earth, friction, critters skittering, laughing with others. Walking oh so slowly so as not to trip in the inky blackness now blanketing the path before us, no screens to light our way, only the crease of a thumbnail moon.

Anthropology Can Slow Down Time That’s Speeding Up

I was asked to write about how anthropology might save us and our students in the era of AI, as Alec Litowitz suggests. And here I am talking about carousing in the night. 

Karl Marx argued that new technologies always change what it means to work, what it means to live in society, and, of course, radically alter the multitude of social relations that make up both. But within each new epoch, people make their own change, their own history in the world.

We cannot possibly know how AI will change what it means to live on this planet. Which means we cannot know how or what we will need to adapt. But anthropology insists that we lead our students into a changing world and invite them to slow down and take a look around.

With the lessons of anthropology at our backs, we might even be able to learn from the people before us who were forced to navigate world-shattering processes of change.  

As the billionaires and trillionaires trip over each other trying to launch out of it and into that Milky Way, we can invite students to sit and listen, to talk with others, to get their knees and palms dirty, to imagine, and to think, also with others, about what they saw, heard, smelled, sensed, felt. 

AI will continue rapidly remaking everything and everyone in its path — an avalanche with no end. 

Anthropology can help slow us down. It can take us, can take our students, into the upheaval of that path, where beauty and brokenness and everything in between get all mixed up. And with the lessons of anthropology at our backs, we might even be able to learn from the people before us who were forced to navigate world-shattering processes of change.  

How we adapt those lessons in this moment, and how our students do, remains open.