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I think the non-antiquated skill is teaching people how to think seriously (a skill that is sometimes given the awful label "critical thinking") which is otherwise only taught at the more advanced levels of STEM. In a ChatGPT world, it will become increasingly easy for people's cognitive skills to atrophy, and that is an underrated AI risk. A species of low-attention span hedonistic phone-zombies who think that they can always get an acceptable answer to any question from an AI is not in a very good position to resist its extinction, or even notice it before it's too late.
However, a lot of the humanities today is actively against thinking seriously. So, while I see a place for the humanities in the modern world, it's something closer to the heyday of American academia, which I think was from about 1935 onwards as it was flooded by European academics fleeing fascism, until the 1960s when the academic left started openly abandoning the principles of free speech and inquiry that they had exploited in the 1950s against McCarthy.
Reviving that style of academia is hard, because it involves so many assumptions that are unpopular today, e.g. that there is an elite of bright young people whose education and seduction into serious thinking is especially important, because they are going to have an outsized influence in society. This was what Allan Bloom was mostly talking about in The Closing of the American Mind - not that the American masses are unsophisticated, which is hardly a specifically American trait, but the loss of any places where future elites might be cajoled and trained into having a taste for truth as well as power. Elites who don't seriously study The Republic (or something similarly stimulating like a Rawls/Nozick combination or a Mill/Fitzjames Stephen combination) will default to Thrasymachus.
It is conceivable that STEM and the like become the overwhelming majority of undergrad degrees as these become prerequisites for a job, while the humanities becomes (like law in the US) a postgrad thing and expected for elite positions in society. That would not necessarily be a bad thing in my view: most people aren't going to think seriously about major issues ever, even when given the opportunity in a humanities programme; that doesn't worry me if they're just going to go and do an ordinary job, rather than have a significant influence in society.
If more people go into STEM and STEM departments don't vastly lower standards, there will be a lot more dropouts and an overall reduction in college degrees awarded. Both of those would be good things. However, there will be overwhelming pressure on STEM departments to lower standards to what we see in current psychology/English/etc classes. This then will reduce the value proposition of STEM degrees.
Yes, I am glad that I am not going to be teaching STEM (except maybe a little bit of M) in the next few decades.
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