Hullo AI, Goodbye Humanities?

Alex Karp has asserted that AI is the end of the humanities.

I am an AI and AGI enthusiast, and I am eager for the robots to kill labour markets. However, I am also both an author of fiction and a psychological scientist in training, and a cognitive scientist. I have heard Karp carp on about philosophy and humanities before. He's got a personal beef. A chip on his shoulder. I happen to understand this since many (not all) of the the philosophers I have met are sauce-dribbling, relational aggressive assholes. So: psychological explanation.

However, Karp's also not watching the ball. Writing a novel is still well out of reach of even the best models. Getting to novel-writing status requires solving some of the most stubborn and recondite problems in mechine learning. Machine learning systems combine semantic vectors with an emulation of Hebbian neuroplasticity, and it's astonishingly powerful. But a good novelist has to develop character psychologies, multiple threads of meaning intertwined between characters and scenarios, subtextual inferences, subtextual-intertextual inferences, double meaning, euphuistic language, layered metaphor, estrangement, drama combined with comedy, and existential moods and themes which are conveyed via emotion. Moreover, this all must be imbued into multiple large story arcs. Post modern novelists usually mix both traditional story arc construction with episodic geworfenheidt. 

AI will get close, but not very soon. It will likely require AGI to do it well.

Most importantly, however: if it's done right - the way that Elon (of all people) suggests - then labour markets should end. If people like Karp do the right thing and don't try to undermine the incoming AGI-induced human utopia for weird and psychopathological reasons, then AI should be the greatest boon the humanities has ever seen. Human creativity will still be valuable. Likely more valuable. Humanities people will be free to do great art all day.