Sharifah Munirah Alatas says it would be a grave injustice to the nation and nation-building if subjects like history and anthropology are not taught.
“It is, in fact, indispensable to be grounded in the social sciences and humanities, whether literature, music, history, philosophy, sociology, or anthropology. This is education for life, not education for livelihood,” she told FMT.
Munirah said it would be a grave injustice to the nation and nation-building if subjects like history and anthropology were not taught.
She claimed that the country has already witnessed how neglecting, marginalising, and manipulating history has led to various problems.
“A major reason for these problems is ignorance,” she said, adding that subjects like history and anthropology are especially important in a multicultural and multireligious society.
On Sunday, Khairudin Aljunied of the National University of Singapore said students should develop indispensable skills such as artificial intelligence, noting that most university degrees would be obsolete by the time students graduate.
He said degrees that could become obsolete include engineering, humanities and social sciences, as well as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
Khairudin said the situation would be “worse” for those pursuing degrees in the humanities and social sciences.
Munirah went on to say it was a grave mistake to “worship” AI, which she said has led undergraduates to take “shortcuts” in writing essays or producing their theses.
“Without policies to check this, we will simply continue fulfilling KPIs and SOPs while producing graduates who are increasingly unemployable.”
She also said it was a mistake to put AI on a pedestal and be dismissive of human civilisation and history.
“Why must it be either-or? This kind of binary thinking is blindly agreeing with the Global North,” she said, referring to more economically developed, industrialised, and wealthier nations.
“We in the Global Majority (the countries outside the Western world) should not be so naive. And there’s more to AI than we think. Malaysians must be more discerning. There are hidden costs, mainly social and environmental exploitation.”
Digital colonialism, Munirah said, is real and Malaysians should guard against it.
She said mainstream conversations about AI have been dominated by agendas set not by the country, but by tech conglomerates like Amazon and Microsoft, which require semiconductors, batteries and other physical infrastructure which rely on rare earth elements.
Munirah also said the country is being intellectually duped into thinking AI is the future and that the social and human sciences are obsolete.
“Extolling the wonders of AI while subordinating traditional fields of study is grossly ignorant and regressive. It demonstrates how easily it is to be seduced by digital colonialism, without even realising it,” she added. - FMT
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