The leveraging power of the humanities becomes stronger in a technological world
Posted by Riccardo Paterni on 02/07/2017

An article published on latest July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review, titled “Liberal Arts in the Data Age” and authored by JM Olejarz points out how the humanities can have a driving role within the imagination needed to channel the potential of technologies; technologies that by now are growing at a faster and faster pace with increasing market impacts in a wider range of fields. 

The famous quote by Albert Einstein “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand” creates a framework for this fine balance and synergy between imagination and technology. 

Erik Kim recently wrote a blog article entitled “10 lessons Pablo Picasso can teach you” and quite interestingly he lists a series of actual tools that have been utilised by the artists to develop his masterpieces and that nowadays can represent actual ways to drive such technological developments.

In my opinion this represents a fundamental perspective that enlightens the increasing relevance of the human factor within a changing world strongly impacted by change fuelled by Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and other systemic approaches that appear to sideline people. 

This entire topic is up for a necessary debate from many different perspectives.