The Fuzzy And The Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World – Humanities and Soft Skills for AI-Driven Business

“Scott Hartley artfully explains why it is time for us to get over the false division between the human and the technical.” —Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and author of Change by Design

Scott Hartley first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in computer or hard sciences, you were a techie.

While Silicon Valley is generally considered a techie stronghold, the founders of companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, LinkedIn, PayPal, Stitch Fix, Reddit, and others are all fuzzies—in other words, people with backgrounds in the liberal arts.

 In this brilliantly counterintuitive book, Hartley shatters assumptions about business and education today: learning to code is not enough. The soft skills—curiosity, communication, and collaboration, along with an understanding of psychology and society’s gravest problems—are central to why technology has value. Fuzzies are the instrumental stewards of robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. They offer a human touch that is of equal—if not greater—importance in our technology-led world than what most techies can provide.

 For anyone doubting whether a well-rounded liberal arts education is practical in today’s world, Hartley’s work will come as an inspiring revelation.
 
Finalist for the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize
A Financial Times Business Book of the Month

• Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (The MIT Press)
• Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm
• In Defense of a Liberal Education
• You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a "Useless" Liberal Arts Education
• Cyberethics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace
• You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a "Useless" Liberal Arts Education
• Poetry in Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness and Healing
• Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• Artificial Intelligence: 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future
• The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux