What AI Can’t Teach Us — And Why That’s the Point
By: Roozbeh Aliabadi, Ph.D.
You don’t fully understand what’s happening to the humanities until you’ve watched a 9-year-old from Lagos teach an AI to empathize with a lost dog.
That moment didn’t happen at Harvard or in a policy roundtable at Davos. It happened at WAICY — the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth (www.waicy.org)—a project I helped start with my team at ReadyAI (www.readyai.org). The lesson that little boy taught me is one I now carry everywhere: the future of the humanities may not be written in journals or faculty meetings — it may be written in code, in creativity, and in conversations between kids and machines.
Let me back up.
We’re living through what I’d call a “mirror moment” in human history. The age of AI is not just a technological disruption — it’s a philosophical provocation. It’s asking each of us, often quietly, sometimes painfully: What makes us human? What’s left when machines can write, calculate, compose, illustrate, translate, and teach faster than we can?
At first glance, it’s a terrifying question, especially for those who’ve made their lives around the humanities — literature, history, philosophy, art, and the social sciences. In a world where ChatGPT can write a decent undergraduate paper in under a minute and where generative tools can create entire textbooks tailored to your specific worldview, the old business model of the humanities — read, write, repeat — is falling apart.
But what if that’s not the end? What if it’s the beginning of something we’ve needed for a long time?
At ReadyAI, we’ve spent nearly a decade introducing artificial intelligence to kids worldwide — from Pittsburgh to Phnom Penh, refugee camps in the Middle East, and African rural schools. What I’ve seen should challenge every doomsday headline about “the death of the humanities.”
We don’t just teach kids how to code. We ask them to think with AI, engage in moral dilemmas, build tools that help their communities, and reflect on the social and emotional impacts of machine intelligence. What happens in that process isn’t a collapse of the humanities — it’s a reawakening.
Take a recent WAICY team from Colombia. These were 11 — — and 12-year-olds. Their project? An AI tool designed to help teenagers manage anxiety — specifically around domestic violence and poverty. When asked how they trained it, they said, “We taught it how to listen like our school counselor.”
Think about that. These kids weren’t building a toy. They were building empathy with algorithms.
Or consider a group of middle school girls from rural India who trained a chatbot in Hindi to teach their fathers about the importance of girls’ education. They didn’t just build a tool — they wrote a social argument, in code, for dignity and equality. You tell me: is that engineering? Or is that the humanities at their most alive?
One of my favorite authors, Tom Friedman, once said, “The world is flat.” Globalization was leveling the playing field. I’d say AI is folding the field back inward. It’s bringing kids face-to-face with questions we’ve always called “humanistic”: What is fairness? Who gets to decide? What does it mean to be understood?
But here’s the twist: they’re asking these questions not to a teacher or a parent but to a machine, and they’re learning just how limited those machines are.
A 13-year-old in Setubal, Portugal, told me, after building a chatbot modeled on Anne Frank’s writings, “It sounds like her, but it’s not her. It made me want to reread her diary to remember what it feels like to be human.” That’s a sixth grader encountering the difference between simulation and soul.
And that’s where we’re getting it wrong on college campuses.
Universities are tying themselves in knots, trying to detect whether students are using AI to write their essays. But what if that’s the wrong fight? What if we asked students to dialogue with the machine instead of banning it? To confront the very limits of what AI can and can’t do? To come face-to-face with the difference between intelligence and understanding?
Let me tell you one more story. In a refugee camp in Jordan, we worked with a young boy named Yusuf. He had no formal schooling for years, but he took to AI like a fish to water. When asked what he wanted to build, he said, “A bot that teaches my little sister how to hope.”
He ended up creating an AI tutor that used stories and songs from his village to encourage his sister to keep learning — even when their electricity was out. I didn’t see a piece of technology when I saw the final prototype. I saw a humanist. I saw a boy asking: How do I preserve my culture? How do I care for the people I love? and using AI as his brush.
So no, the humanities aren’t dead. But the delivery mechanism has changed. Permanently.
The old model dissolves: the professor is the gatekeeper, and the student is a passive receiver. The new model looks more like ReadyAI: a 10-year-old girl in Nairobi arguing with her AI assistant about whether robots can fall in love, a group of teens in Houston creating digital plays about machine loneliness, kids learning with AI but also learning where AI stops and humanity begins.
This is not the automation of the liberal arts. This is their reanimation.
Because here’s the truth: knowledge is no longer scarce. It’s ubiquitous, instant, infinite. What’s scarce now is wisdom. Discernment. Empathy. The ability to sift, synthesize, and stand for something a search engine can’t index. And that is the work of the humanities.
The machines can now give us answers in milliseconds, but they still can’t tell us what matters — or why. They can simulate meaning, but they can’t live it. They don’t have childhood memories, heartbreak, awe, or the quiet experience of wonder on a walk at dusk.
Only we do.
So, if you’re a teacher, don’t fear AI. Use it to show your students what only they can do. Don’t ban AI at the dinner table if you’re a parent. Ask your kids what they can’t understand. (You’ll be amazed by what they say.) And if you’re a student, especially one feeling overwhelmed, remember: the AI knows the facts. But you know what it feels like to be confused, curious, alive.
Let the machines be brilliant at knowledge. But let us be masters of being.
And that’s what gives me hope. I’ve seen the future of the humanities — it’s 10 years old, has messy handwriting, and just asked its AI assistant why the stars make us feel small and infinite simultaneously.
That question alone is more human than any machine will ever be.
This article was written by Rooz Aliabadi, Ph.D. (rooz@readyai.org). Rooz is the CEO (Chief Troublemaker) at ReadyAI.org. He is also the Director of Compassion in AI at Stanford University (CCARE).
To learn more about ReadyAI, visit www.readyai.org or email us at info@readyai.org.
