One has to feel rather sorry for liberal arts college students these days. With tremendous societal advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies, many commentators have been quick to speculate about future job supply contraction and its impact on world economies, social inequality, and even the prospects of personal fulfillment in an automated world. Concerned parents and their children ask: how do we “future-proof” our increasingly expensive and time-consuming educations?

One of many emerging technologies we hear discussed is “Artificial General Intelligence,” which is distinguishable from more narrow, and already prevalent, “Artificial Intelligence” (AI). Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, would be an AI capable of achieving a wide range of intelligent capabilities—it would not only be able to beat humans at Chess or Go, but would be “generally intelligent,” capable of adapting its problem-solving skills to achieve other tasks, like achieving resolutions to disputes. Currently, only humans can really achieve this: we think, feel, and act flexibly and responsively. And generally speaking, the better educated we are, the better we are at doing these things. We go to university in order to “upskill” that thinking.