Joseph Aoun Quotes

Instead of educating college students for jobs that are about to disappear under the rising tide of technology, twenty-first-century universities should liberate them from outdated career models and give them ownership of their own futures. They should equip them with the literacies and skills they need to thrive in this new economy defined by technology, as well as continue providing them with access to the learning they need to face the challenges of life in a diverse, global environment. Higher education needs a new model and a new orientation away from its dual focus on undergraduate and graduate students. Universities must broaden their reach to become engines for lifelong learning.

Software is eating the world, so we need software developers. But it is less clear what we will need when software finishes its meal and settles down to digest. What happens when robots learn to program themselves?

The teenager earning $11 per hour as a cashier at Target tucks his phone assembled in Shenzhen, China, by labourers earning about $17 per day into pants made by Bangladeshi stitchers whose minimum wage is as little as $68 per month.

computers will continue to grow more sophisticated cognitive capacities such as critical thinking, systems thinking, and even cultural agility. But they will lack the very human lens from which we view life, learning to interpret contexts to assess, act, and make sound decisions. Human beings possess this lens because we learn from experience.

It gives them the chance to improvise in contexts they never have encountered before, interacting, inventing, and thinking on their feet. When human learners are immersed in the incalculable variety of experience, they escape the strictures of predetermined input—which computers cannot do. They break free of their programming, and they upgrade their minds.

In the future, graduates will need to build on the old literacies by adding three more—data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy.

If you belong to the one-third of Americans who have the good fortune to possess a four-year degree, you will enjoy greater health, higher social esteem, and an average of eight and a half more years of life than your fellow citizens who lack one.20 In this respect—and in the United States particularly, for this gulf in lifespan does not occur in other wealthy countries—increasing college attainment would directly decrease these galling inequalities.

In the pages that follow, I lay out the structure for a new curriculum—humanics—the goal of which is to nurture creativity, flexibility, and agency within the infinite situational contexts of life. Humanics builds on people’s innate strengths and prepares students to flourish in a world in which AI works alongside human professionals. And much as today’s law students learn both a specific body of knowledge and a legal mindset, tomorrow’s humanics students will need to master specific content as well as practice uniquely human cognitive capacities. In the chapters ahead, I describe both the architecture and the inner workings of humanics, but here I begin by explaining its twofold nature. The first side, its content, takes shape in what I call the new literacies. In the past, literacy in reading, writing, and mathematics formed the baseline for participation in society. Even educated professionals did not need any technical proficiencies beyond knowing how to click and drag through a suite of office programs. That is no longer sufficient. In the future, graduates will need to build on the old literacies by adding three more—technological literacy, data literacy, and human literacy. People can no longer thrive in a digitized world using analog tools. Assisted by AI, they will be living and working in a constant stream of information and instant generativity. Technological literacy gives them a grounding in how their machines tick. Data literacy enables them to analyze and judge the merit of these ever-rising tides of information. Human literacy teaches them creativity, culture, empathy, and connection, allowing them to flourish in the social milieu.

It is sometimes overlooked that, despite their usually impressive eloquence, generative AI’s outputs quickly devolve into mediocrity and mendacity without human assistance. The need for “humans in the loop” is the technology’s quiet shame. “There’s a lot of human intervention in the operations of these things continuously, much like there is in the case of Google Search,” says Usama Fayyad, director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. “In the case of ChatGPT, sometime the queries are answered by humans. If the algorithm realizes—and this is admirable—hey, I’m in trouble, I need help, a human will jump in and start answering. It’s a mode of intervention that gets turned into training data, and the machine gets better.”30

The most popular TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk of all time is Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?,” recorded in 2006.20 In it, he famously argues that creativity, which he defines as “the process of having original ideas that have value,” is as important to today’s children as literacy. However, by stigmatizing failure and wrong answers in school, we train children to stifle it. “We don’t grow into creativity,” says Robinson. “We grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

Today, most colleges’ curricula and pedagogy still place inordinate weight on the transfer of information into students’ minds. Development of students’ higher-order mental capacities, such as critical thinking or elegant communication, is certainly one of the objectives of a college education, but all too often it is secondary to the ingestion of content. More often than not, college courses are not designed to nurture metacognitive skills explicitly and systematically.

To achieve this, we need a new model of learning that not only enables learners to understand the highly technological world around them, but simultaneously allows them to transcend it by nurturing the mental and intellectual qualities that are unique to humans—namely, their capacity for collaboration, mental flexibility, and creativity. I call this model humanics.23