In the 2022 Times Higher Education World University Ranking, the leading universities for Arts and Humanities are both based in the United States. Both institutions hold a position as the world's best institutes for a group of subjects in the arts and humanities, including history, philosophy, fine arts, language, literature, theology and architecture.

Stanford University, which is seen as the center of America's Silicon Valley and whose students have given birth to Google, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo and Netflix, managed to take the first position in the list. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was close behind and placed second in the ranking.

Other world-renowned top tech schools have also improved their Arts and Humanities rankings. Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands rose to 42nd place from 65th last year; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) (known as Zurich) rose from 53 to 49th place; and Georgia Tech (the Georgia Institute of Technology) moved from 175 to 151 places into the world's top 150.

Mutual Insight and Research

In an article written for Times Higher Education, two of MIT's arts school deans, Augustin Reeve (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) and Hashem Sarkis (Architecture and Planning), were clear on one thing: the Arts and Humanities departments—as powerful sources of knowledge and understanding of the human condition—are at the core of MIT's teaching, research and innovation.

"The world's biggest challenges can only be overcome through advancements in science and engineering. But science and engineering operate within human societies and the cultural, political, spatial, and economic complexities of human existence and the earth." The world is best served by being aware of ways to live. Science and technology, the arts, design, and humanistic disciplines are also mutually informing sources of human knowledge, and many of today's most pressing issues can only be addressed through mutual insight and inquiry."

The Challenge of the Metaverse

As we move rapidly into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a new era of intelligent technologies will not only transform economies and societies more profoundly than our past industrial revolutions—steam, steel, electricity, and petrochemicals—but these societies will change the concept of how we previously dealt with things.

It's worth noting that when Facebook, now called Meta, announced its next step in developing the "Metaverse"—an "augmented reality" that includes virtual and augmented reality—it called it a "responsibility." "It took a lot of effort to explain the need to do this. We must involve human rights and civil rights groups early on to guarantee these technologies benefit everyone and promote equality." said Meta's vice president of global affairs. Nick Clegg is the first academic research partnership with universities to be confirmed by Meta on projects related to ethics, privacy, law, diversity and inclusion.

In this age of fake news and conspiracy theories, most alarmingly around climate change, we need a new generation of critical thinkers and communicators. With deep social divisions exacerbated by the pandemic, the rise of nationalism and protectionism, and the existential threat of rising global temperatures, we need to be reminded of our shared lives and learn from our past. There is a need, and we need a new generation that has the courage to speak truth.

Identified by the World Economic Forum last year, tomorrow's top-10 skills were dominated by the best skills in the Arts and Humanities fields are critical thinking and analysis; creativity, innovation and initiative; leadership and social influence; reasoning and problem solving.

The challenge of Artificial Intelligence Technology

New technologies, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence, are raising fundamental questions about what it is to be human. John Tseulis, professor of ethics and legal philosophy at Oxford University and director of the Institute for Ethics in AI, says that perhaps the most fundamental service of the Arts and Humanities to the world is to "clarify the fact that AI development is not a matter of fate; it is our choice, which will have impactful results in many successive waves".

The late physicist Stephen Hawking famously said that AI "has the potential to be either the best or the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity, with the threat of humans being rapidly replaced by intelligent machines." It can be disabled or even subjugated. It is therefore imperative for our institutions of higher learning to allow the Arts and Humanities disciplines to flourish, so that humanity will surely benefit the most from this profoundly transformative revolution.