The tech industry needs more philosophy majors.
Instead of techies, Silicon Valley is in dire need of Fuzzy thinkers. While a “Techie” would be someone focused on computer science and engineering, a “Fuzzy” is a person immersed in the arts, humanities or social sciences.
The term has been floating around the Stanford campus, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, since the late sixties.Fuzzies Should Apply
There is a major misconception about Silicon Valley: it is populated entirely by a bunch of techies and that you must be a techie if you want to be involved in the tech industry. While that train of thought seems logical, it fails to take into account both the opportunities in technology for people without a STEM background and the need for techies to have a greater appreciation for fuzzy disciplines.
Coding is a great skill to have–but if one focuses entirely on coding, they may have major blind spots related to the more human side of implementing a technology. As we see every time there is a controversy (see Uber, Ethics), the most vexing issues are not technical in nature. We may get wrapped up in the newness of advancing AI, robotics, and self-driving cars, but the struggles with how these technologies integrate into society touch upon philosophical and ethical issues that are hundreds of years old.
In order to adequately grapple with world-changing ideas, we need more well-rounded thinkers.
“If we are talking about self-driving cars, how would we think it through?
,” asks Scott Hartley, author of The Fuzzy and The Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World.“What would John Stuart Mills argue in this situation? What would Immanuel Kant argue in this situation? How should we be thinking about this? Who should be in the room as we’re codifying some of the principles in the code? Just because we’re putting them into ones and zeros, and we’re calling them algorithms, we’re calling it machine learning, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s objective. Even machine learning has probabilities, sensitivities that engineers make those delineations and make those decisions.” -Scott Hartley
Hartley is not arguing that we should be a Fuzzy instead of a Techie, but that the two should be intertwined. People who identify as…
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