The Renaissance of STEM

This image was first published on Flickr.Original image by Sp!ros. Uploaded by Mark Cartwright, published on 23 September 2020.

The Renaissance was a pivotal period in European history that led to the resurgence of art and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Specifically, the period encouraged an unearthing of classical literature, art, philosophy, and history. The Renaissance began in Italy, where an excess of money obtained through trade with the Ottoman Empire went to supporting artists and other creative pursuits. Credit for the era can also be attributed to new innovations such as the printing press, which aided in the distribution of writings.

One of the most important aspects of the Renaissance, spurred by sudden interest in Classical scholarship, was the idea of humanism. According to the World History Encyclopedia, humanism was “an intellectual movement typified by a revived interest in the classical world and studies which focused not on religion but on what it is to be human.” Humanism was meant to help people escape from religious orthodoxy and allow for creative thinking, controversy, and confidence in the future of what humans could create. That being said, many art pieces from the Renaissance contain a religious focus. One of the major points is that the creatives felt stifled, and the Renaissance allowed them a chance to express themselves.

A similar suffocation of the arts is creeping back in as the study of the humanities, which was so prized during the Renaissance, has been placed on the back burner in order to make room for STEM interests. STEM refers to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. According to Forbes Magazine, which cites New York Times articles that include data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, people who worked full time with computer science and engineering bachelor’s degrees between 23 and 25 years old earned a salary that was 37% higher than the average starting salary people received who majored in the social sciences or history. Many students choose to pursue studies in those STEM focused fields even if they would rather study an area of the humanities because it ensures a higher chance of financial success.

AI and technological advancements also pose a danger to the humanities. Esteemed journalist Graham Burnett said, “I’m a book-reading, book-writing human- trained in a near-monastic devotion to canonical scholarship across the disciplines of history, philosophy, art, and literature…already the thousands of academic books lining my offices are beginning to feel like archeological artifacts. Why turn to them to answer a question? They are so oddly inefficient.” If you plug a research question into ChatGPT, it can take less than a second to generate information that could have taken hours to find in dusty old books. But what happened to the people who write those books, and the work they put into them? What happened to their personal opinions and writing styles that are so expertly woven into the materials they create? AI is a threat to more than just literary disciplines; it is a menace to art forms like music and visual art. AI can conjure up a pop song in about five minutes, and what’s even scarier is that it already has the exact information to know what makes a song catchy or what the audience wants to hear, yet because of that it lacks emotions and uniqueness. AI can also generate images and elaborate paintings all based on a prompt of a couple sentences, endangering artists who spend hours on their intricate works . AI is taking over the world and it is becoming impossible to stop it.

According to The Heights Forum, “For decades now, the percentage of students enrolling in humanities classes has steadily decreased while the STEM fields have swelled to ever greater numbers.” So, humanities’ downfall isn’t just based on opinion, it is an unfortunate reality. The question is, what happens next? We could be on cusp of another unseen Renaissance where the arts will suddenly come back with a fervent passion like they did in Italy so many years ago, or maybe the present day Renaissance is not a revolution of humanity but a revolution of technology.

While STEM has led to unprecedented leaps in human understanding of the world around us, life-saving medical advancements, and incredible developments of technology, it will never be able to replace what the Renaissance brought into focus: the art of being a human. AI will never be able to replicate the passionate emotion expressed through art or the subtle imperfections of a true human creation. We need the humanities because while STEM can elucidate quite a lot about the world, there is so much that is unexplainable. Love, anger, death, despair, and countless other aspects of the human experience are so often captured in the works of the humanities, and we need to protect that. Yes, we need lawyers and doctors to take care of our financial burdens and physical well being. However, we need the humanities to take care of our spirit.