September 26, 2026

The UAA AI Symposium left me with a different question than the one I brought into it; or the earlier question I had posted about the future of work and how AI affects career paths and education.

We spend a lot of time asking how intelligent machines will become, what work they may replace, and how we should regulate or constrain them. After the panel and attending the keynote last night, I found myself wondering whether one of AI’s greatest opportunities may actually be what it teaches us about human intelligence and our capacity to think.

We would never reject a new colleague simply because they were smarter than the rest of us. We would hope to learn from them, work with them, and become better because they were part of the team.

Maybe we need to think about increasingly capable machines the same way.

Rather than fearing machines because they may become smarter than we are in some dimensions, perhaps we should become much more serious about understanding how humans learn, how we develop creative and critical thinking, and how we cultivate the capabilities that are uniquely strengthened by our individual experience, relationships, values, imagination, and diversity.

It reminded me of some of the questions Yuval Noah Harari raises in Homo Deus about what happens as technology begins to alter not only the world around us, but human bodies, brains, minds, and our assumptions about human primacy. 

We may discover that this technological revolution is as much about developing human intelligence as developing artificial intelligence. And, for the University, the work is as much about how higher education is impacted by its focus on incorporating a new generation of advanced information and automation technology; as it is by a renewed focus on human thinking and its potential.

In education, we are already relearning some fundamental lessons about how young humans learn to read. I suspect we may need a similar rediscovery of how people learn to think: how curiosity develops, how creativity is cultivated, how judgment matures, how we form good questions, and how we learn to work productively with people—and eventually machines—whose capabilities exceed our own in important ways.

Maybe the goal is not to make humans compete with machines at everything machines can do better.

Maybe it is to help every person develop more fully what they uniquely bring—to their family, their community, their work, and perhaps ultimately to the universe—and then use increasingly capable machines to extend that contribution.

That feels to me like a much more interesting question than simply asking whether AI will replace us:

What could AI help us discover about how we develop our own intelligence and capacity to think?

Ky

Updates and additional resources.

9/27/26 Ed Morrison on LinkedIn – “…AI doesn’t just add new tools. It shifts the ground underneath strategy itself. Suddenly, everything feels possible…. “