Emi Blakely

Back in March 2026, Anthropic released a report on the possible labor market impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and found that the occupations at the highest risk of automation by AI are financial and investment analysts, business and management jobs and computer programming jobs. The report found that actual implementation of AI in these occupations is far from reaching its theoretical capabilities and at most automates only 33 percent of tasks in these fields currently. Evidently, there is a lot more room for automation to occur within these sectors, of which entry-level jobs are obviously the most at risk. With the emergence of AI recursive self-improvement, the expansion of automation may happen far quicker than we anticipate.

Yet these are the very occupations that Bowdoin graduates are filing into, with around 45 percent of graduates going into finance and banking, business and consulting or technology. The continued growth of AI capabilities and its usage to automate work in the aforementioned fields indicate that there is an emerging and possibly grave risk to the professional pursuits and aspirations of Bowdoin graduates.

This calls for Bowdoin to develop a comprehensive plan to tackle these shortcomings. The Hastings Initiative is certainly a great first step in this direction, but given the severity of the number of Bowdoin graduates going into fields at grave exposure to AI automation, a more comprehensive and institution-wide approach is needed. The ambitious and broad goals of the Hastings Initiative are “to critically examine, thoughtfully utilize and ethically shape AI’s trajectory.” However, what will that mean concretely for the Bowdoin curriculum and its graduates? Perhaps this moment calls for a reevaluation of the Bowdoin degree, possibly deemphasizing the highly vulnerable disciplines of finance, business administration and programming, and restoring the prominence of the humanities. AI can augment but not automate tasks which require subjective human interpretation, such as journalism, education or government.

The labor force dislocations that are ahead may force difficult choices upon the school. How will Bowdoin navigate the institutional alignments necessary for a dramatic change of course to improve graduates’ outcomes? Not only is it a matter of the College’s long-term self-interest to engage with this topic more thoroughly, it is vital to maintain the development of the human cognitive capacity for rational, deliberative and independent thought that ought to occur in a liberal arts education.

AI poses a threat to the quality of the higher educational experience, as AI research assistants simplify, accelerate and even automate the learning process. In his book “On Liberty,” political philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used” (59). Judgment and rational thought are the distinctive traits of human beings, those which separate man from animal. For Mill, this requires freedom of thought and expression, to question assumptions and argue in a free society. “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties” (59). The ape-like capacity of imitation is exactly what AI offers students. AI automates learning by providing students with ready-made solutions to complex tasks or problems that do not require the mental struggle of overcoming them, which would otherwise exercise the mental muscles. This degradation of the learning process can stunt intellectual growth.

Plato believed that the rational rule of the soul over its appetitive and honor-loving components made an individual just. He also believed that, sometimes, the rational part of the soul has to enlist the courageous part to beat down the appetitive part, and this courage is required now so that we don’t allow ourselves to fall to the mercy of AI because of our appetites for quick solutions and leisure.

Human judgment will be the difference maker with the growth of AI capabilities and usage across the country. Will AI become a tool that we wield for the common good, or will AI enfeeble our minds and ambitions? Our capacity for rational thought ought to be nurtured now more than ever in the face of the attention economy and the threat of AI to humans’ capacity for independent judgment. How Bowdoin responds to this moment will be interesting to see, and I hope that we lead the way.

In my year abroad at Oxford, I made a friend named Paul Kurgan, with whom I took away an inspired understanding of what a transformative education could be. Writing in the Cornell Daily Sun, he argued that Cornell needs a refounding effort to reassess the purpose of higher education and to reorient the university toward learning, in order “to transform our character, to inspire our spirit and to strengthen our will.” I believe this is a call Bowdoin ought to heed as well, especially as our education becomes in danger of not only becoming a participation trophy for professional success, but one for professional success in fields that are highly exposed to AI automation. Further, this is fundamentally an issue of developing students as critical thinkers with a strong capacity for independent judgment.

Jack Higgins is a member of the Class of 2027.