The Arts' Influence in Tech

Most people assume that the major moves in the tech industry are all the product of people with highly specific and scientific knowledge, but Scott Hartley's liberal arts talk shows that the Silicon Valley field isn't as technocratic as one might imagine. Though certainly engineers and computer scientists play an essential role in the development of cutting edge technology, many of the high level innovations get hatched by people with liberal arts backgrounds who are able to think about the tech in a new and exciting way.

Hartley breaks the industry down into two types of people: techies and fuzzies. The techies are those with tech expertise — people who can code faster than they can write and who write up algorithms in their spare time. On the other end of the spectrum, the fuzzies studied things like experimental cinema and pop culture 101 in university, and they have little to no technical ability as far as programming is concerned. Hartley argues that despite common sense, it's actually those fuzzies who are irreplaceable in the tech industry.