Hedgehog or Fox?
My first degree was in History. Quite some time ago. My eldest daughter has recently chosen to study it at university.
In an age of AI, is she making a wise choice?
According to the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Authority and UCAS, history enrollments fell by 11% between 2019-2023. Another RHS survey of 66 UK universities, found that 39 history departments have reported staff cuts since 2020. Some 36% of departments reported the closure of one or more degree programs since 2020, and 60% had suffered a fall in academic staffing levels over this period. Universities - at least in the UK - seem set on a path to cutting liberal arts programs, eliminating faculty positions, and pushing funding toward more “practical” STEM majors.
Yet this retreat may be precisely the wrong response to an AI-driven future.
Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between Hedgehogs and Foxes offers a useful lens as AI transforms the landscape of human capability. Berlin divided thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who “know one big thing” and relate everything to a single central vision, and foxes, who “know many things” and draw on a wide variety of experiences.
In an age of AI, do we need more hedgehogs or more foxes?
I think we need more foxes.
History develops fox-like capabilities. I learned to evaluate conflicting sources, construct narratives from incomplete evidence, and identify patterns across different contexts. Most importantly, history taught me to ask the right questions—not just ‘what happened?’ but ‘why?’ and ‘what were the alternatives?’ These are uniquely human skills.
Philip Tetlock’s research provides strong empirical support for fox-like thinking. . His 20-year study of expert predictions revealed that specialists routinely performed worse than generalists at forecasting, even in their own domains.
My favourite economist, John Kay, puts it directly: Foxes are better at prediction than hedgehogs because they derive information from many sources, adjust their views in line with events and see a range of perspectives on each situation. Hedgehogs are people who know the answers. Foxes know the limitations of their knowledge.” Kay argues that “the world needs both but today it needs fewer hedgehogs and more foxes” — especially since “people are more likely to listen to the hedgehog while the fox is more likely to be right.”
The future, in my view, belongs to those who can synthesize insights from multiple (AI-generated) analyses, know when to trust AI recommendations and when to override them, orchestrate multiple AI systems rather than operate single tools, and rapidly iterate with AI assistance across domains. These are precisely the thinking and perspective setting skills that History, and more broadly, Liberal Arts cultivates: critical thinking, synthesis, judgment, and the ability to connect insights across time and across seemingly unrelated fields.
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The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
The world needs fewer hedgehogs
