Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings said STEM is “overdone,” and people need to look at the humanities instead.
In an interview on the “Possible” podcast, released on Wednesday, Hastings said that in the age of AI, emotional things such as entertainment, art, or sports will not be “the big thrust of the AI world.”
“You’re not going to watch a basketball game of robots,” he said.
Meanwhile, he said AI is very good at thinking and logic-driven pursuits, and will progress rapidly in fields such as software engineering and medicine.
“And now maybe what we’ll see is a rotation back to the humanities, into understanding the combination of history and literature, but also kind of the physiology of the brain and how we interact with each other,” Hastings said. “If I had a three-year-old today, I would be like doubling down on the emotional skills.”
He added that over the last 20 years, society has emphasized the importance of STEM and learning to code. But he said that now, “as everyone sees that coding is overdone, my guess is we’ll see that STEM is overdone.”
Hastings, who currently serves as Netflix’s chairman, will step down from the board in June.
He is not alone in predicting a resurgence of the humanities. Ex-Microsoft executive Craig Mundie told Business Insider in June that the current education system is divided into humanities and STEM, and that the gap between the two needs to be bridged.
“If I could create a new curriculum in college, it would be a liberal education in technology,” Mundie said.
Google NotebookLM’s editorial director, Steven Johnson, told Business Insider last March said that in the age of AI, there will be a “revenge of the humanities.”
Johnson said people with language and humanities degrees would be sought after to fine-tune the tone and conversational capabilities of large language models.
But the debate is live, with numerous other executives stressing the importance of learning how to code.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told Business Insider in April 2025 that there will be more engineers in the future, not less, and the idea that AI will kill software jobs is “laughable.”
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