[originaltext] Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I would like to talk about w

Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I would like to talk about why tech needs humanities. The push for STEM-based education in this country—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—is fierce. It’s in all of our faces. And this is a huge mistake. Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States have increased by 43 percent, while the humanities have stayed flat. Our past president dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education at the expense of other subjects, and our current president recently redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding into computer science. And CEOs are continually complaining about an engineering-starved workforce. These campaigns, coupled with the undeniable success of the tech economy—I mean, let’s face it, seven out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market cap are technology firms—these things create an assumption that the path of our future workforce will be dominated by STEM.
    But it’s totally overblown. It’s like, the entire soccer team chases the ball into the corner, because that’s where the ball is. We shouldn’t overvalue STEM. We shouldn’t value the sciences any more than we value the humanities. And there are a couple of reasons.
    Number one, today’s technologies are incredibly intuitive. The reason we’ve been able to recruit from all disciplines and convert into specialized skills is because modern systems can be manipulated without writing code. They’re like Lego: easy to put together, easy to learn, even easy to program, given the vast amounts of information that are available for learning. Yes, our workforce needs specialized skill, but that skill requires a far less rigorous and formalized education than it did in the past.
    Number two, the skills that are imperative and differentiated in a world with intuitive technology are the skills that help us to work together as humans, where the hard work is envisioning the end product and its usefulness, which requires real-world experience and judgment and historical context. What Jeff’s story taught us is that the customer was focused on the wrong thing. It’s the classic case: the technologist struggling to communicate with the business and the end user, and the business failing to articulate their needs. I see it every day. We are scratching the surface in our ability as humans to communicate and invent together, and while the sciences teach us how to build things, it’s the humanities that teach us what to build and why to build them. And they’re equally as important, and they’re just as hard.
    Question 16. What is the speaker mainly talking about?
    Question 17. Why shouldn’t we value the sciences any more than we value the humanities?
    Question 18. What does the speaker say Jeff’s story taught us?