What We Lose When We Forget the Humanities
Written by Mia Fulford
Over the past few months, while developing the Dialogues for Post-Conflict Futures series, it has become increasingly clear to me that conversations about innovation in complex and often deeply contested contexts cannot be reduced to technical expertise alone. Questions of rebuilding, reconciliation, governance, and the futures we want to create inevitably involve competing histories, values, and understandings of what it means to live together.
Yet at the same time, public conversations about innovation and technological progress often continue to sideline the very disciplines that have traditionally helped us grapple with these questions.
You do not have to look too far to see that the Arts and Humanities are having a difficult time. Universities are closing language and music departments, funding continues to shrink, and politicians increasingly talk about arts degrees as though they are indulgences rather than serious forms of study. Proposed governance plans under Reform, for example, have suggested scrapping degrees deemed to have little economic value. At the same time, AI has flooded the internet with images and writing that draw on the work of artists, writers, and creators, often without acknowledgement of the years of labour and practice that made those styles possible in the first place.
And so, a question that should be at the forefront of our thinking today: how far we are willing to advance technology without accounting for the intellectual and ethical traditions that have taught us how to think critically about what it means to be human?
There is a persistent tendency to treat science and technology on one side, and the arts and humanities on the other, as if they belong to entirely separate domains: necessity and rationale on one side, and ornament and emotion on the other. This division, as thinkers from Spinoza to Bruno Latour and beyond have sought to illustrate, collapses under closer inspection. Take AI, for instance. Much of the conversation around it is driven by efficiency: How can we produce things faster? How can we automate more tasks? How can we remove friction from processes that take time? There is nothing inherently wrong with those questions, but they often come with an assumption that some of the messier aspects of being human are problems to be solved and things like ambiguity, emotion, uncertainty, contradiction, or the slow, generative process of working through an idea start to look like simple inefficiencies to be optimised away.
The humanities, however, suggest different. They remind us that these qualities are not failures of thinking but part of what thinking actually is. More than that, they invite us to question the assumptions we make about ourselves. We are often taught to think of humans as separate from the world around us: the people designing machines, the architects managing the environment - those with a totalising power to fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide or choke the seas with plastic - or those directing history from above. But that picture is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Climate change, AI, and technological infrastructures all point to the same reality: we are deeply entangled with the systems we create. Data centres powering AI consume vast amounts of energy and water, tying digital activity directly to environmental strain. Technologies that appear weightless and immaterial rely on physical infrastructures and global supply chains; extractive industries of mining that strip away natural resources and force children into labour. These systems are not peripheral but foundational to what we call the “digital world.” It is the marriage of the humanities with the sciences that offers us the vocabulary to think through these connections, and to understand their ethical and political stakes.
Surveillance, and the emergence of surveillance capitalism (in which seemingly mundane personal data from everyday digital activity becomes collected and analysed for profit) offers another example the necessary partnership of the humanities and science. These technologies often appear benign and routine, woven into the fabric of daily life: a recommended video, a targeted advert, a fun online trend. Yet beneath this familiarity lies a systematic pooling and processing of information that is far from neutral. It helps determine who is seen and recognised, who is pulled up, identified, and treated as a suspect, and who is instead left outside the frame of attention altogether. In this sense, even being “unseen” is not simply absence, but a produced condition within the system itself. In other words, these surveillant systems shape visibility itself.
Crucially, that visibility is not evenly distributed. Racialised communities, migrants, women, and other marginalised people are often rendered hyper-visible to systems of policing, border control, and data collection, while also being caught in a double bind of overexposure on one hand and an algorithmic illegibility that flattens complex lives into simplified risk categories on the other. The result is that surveillance produces forms of harm that are anything but neutral, embedding historical and social inequalities within systems that present themselves as objective and technical. In the UK, for example, people from ethnic minority backgrounds have been disproportionately included in predictive policing databases. In tandem with this, black people are around nine times more likely to be stopped and searched and 54% more likely to receive fines compared to white people.[1] These disparities are not incidental but reflect how seemingly neutral data systems can inherit and reinforce existing patterns of unequal treatment, turning social bias into institutionalised, data-driven outcomes that are harder to contest precisely because they appear to be evidence-based.
What interests me here is that we cannot understand these technologies simply by understanding how they work. We also need to ask who they affect and what assumptions they make about the people they encounter. These are not simply technical questions, but ones grounded in the kind of self-reflexive thinking the humanities encourage: the habit of looking critically at the systems we build and the stories we tell about ourselves. Technologies such as CCTV cameras, algorithmic systems in AI or social media, and body-worn cameras are never the neutral or merely technical instruments of progress we often assume them to be. Rather, they are always bound up with questions of people and power, necessary for us to unravel if we want to understand what that progress might resemble.
Science helps us understand how systems work and what their effects are. But it cannot, on its own, determine how we should weigh those effects, whose harms matter most, or what counts as an acceptable trade-off. That is where humanities-based thinking becomes essential. While it may seem clear in principle that science explains how things work and ethics guides how we act, the persistence of harm in technological systems suggests this distinction is not consistently carried through in practice, especially where it matters most.
Obvious? Perhaps. Worth repeating? Yes: the humanities matter now more than ever. Do they have unproblematic or untainted histories themselves? No. They are shaped by exclusionary traditions and, like all knowledge systems, require ongoing processes of decolonisation and critique. But at their best, they do not stand in opposition to science and technology; instead, they help us make sense of the increasingly entangled relationships between humans, machines, and environments that define contemporary life.
If we lose the humanities and arts, we lose more than a collection of academic disciplines. We lose one of our most important ways of understanding the world we have built and our place within it, and we risk building technological systems that forget who they are ultimately meant to serve.
For those interested in innovation and entrepreneurship, this means recognising that the question is not simply what we can build, but how and why we build in the first place. The humanities - fundamental to our imagining of a better world and central to responsible and accountable technological progress - can help us answer these questions.
[1] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/issue/discriminatory-policing-in-the-uk-how-coronavirus-made-existing-inequalities-even-worse/
Mia Fulford is a writer and researcher based in Cambridge. She is Coordinator at the King’s E-Lab, where she also convenes the Dialogues for Post-Conflict Futures webinar series. She previously completed her MPhil at King’s College, and will soon be moving to Germany to begin her PhD in Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research explores the gendered and affective dimensions of surveillance structures in contexts of state violence and conflict.