Ken Burns on da Vinci, AI, and the value of humanities

Executive overview

Siloing knowledge into disciplines is a modern failure Leonardo da Vinci never made. He moved fluidly across science, art, anatomy, and engineering — and that integration was the source of his power. Today's technologists lack grounding in the humanities; today's artists often ignore science.

The antidote is not nostalgia for the Renaissance but a deliberate refusal to let convenience dictate how we think. Story — not argument — is what changes minds.

The shortcut is always the wrong road: in filmmaking, in AI, in building a life.

What da Vinci teaches leaders

• He never separated disciplines — scientist, artist, anatomist, inventor were the same role
• His trust in nature anchored everything: the atom and the solar system share the same architecture
• He operated under real competitive pressure — commissions, rivals, public failure — the same dynamics as today
• His work on heart valves and human flight only made sense centuries later, when technology caught up
• The Renaissance emerged from pandemic and dogma, just as secular humanism broke open new thinking — the parallel to now is explicit

On AI and the craft of filmmaking

• Burns shoots on film until 2010, switched to digital editing a decade after peers — deliberate lag, not ignorance
• AI could generate a plausible "Ken Burns script" from his archive — he sees no value in that
• The editing process involves millions of decisions; who makes them defines the film
• The shortcut (interstate) gets you there; the high road is where the meaning is
• PBS's church-and-state firewall — no subject has editorial input — is the discipline that makes the work trustworthy

Why humanities are the missing variable

• An AT&T executive told Burns: MBAs can't write a letter, don't know ethics, don't know history
• STEM without arts produces automatons — Burns's word: add the A, make it STEAM
• One plus one equals two is engineering; one plus one equaling three is what story, love, and art do
• The humanities teach tolerance for complexity and contradiction — things binary thinking cannot hold

On optimism, fragility, and what stays constant

• Human nature doesn't change — same greed, generosity, virtue, and venality in every era
• The Civil War killed 750,000 Americans, yet free elections and judicial independence were not in question — now they are
• The Holocaust film was the one exception where Burns changed an ending mid-production — the rhyming with the present was too loud to ignore
• Enthusiasm — from the Greek, "God in us" — is the animating force; being genuinely alive to your work
• The ultimate human act: none of us gets out alive, yet we raise children, write symphonies, tend gardens