AI in Liberal Arts Education

AI and the Liberal Arts: Learning on the Edge of Our Future examines how liberal arts education prepares humans to exercise judgment, responsibility, creativity, and ethical reasoning in partnership with generative artificial intelligence. As AI becomes embedded in teaching, research, and professional life, higher education faces not merely a technological challenge but a human one: how to cultivate the intellectual and moral capacities needed to engage AI wisely. Distinct from tool-driven or policy-oriented accounts of AI in education, this book centers liberal arts ways of knowing—interpretation, ethical reasoning, historical and contextual understanding, communication, creativity, and interdisciplinary thinking—as essential infrastructure for an AI-rich future. Organized into five chapters, the book moves from the inevitability of AI’s presence, to the role of humans as moral agents “behind the wheel,” to the specific skills fostered by liberal arts education, and finally to AI as a complex, interdisciplinary “wicked problem.”