{"id":10697,"date":"2026-04-17T16:06:35","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T15:06:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelschindhelm.com\/?p=10697"},"modified":"2026-04-17T16:06:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T15:06:35","slug":"conversation-with-giga-design-milano-about-the-co-evolution-of-artificial-and-human-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelschindhelm.com\/en\/conversation-with-giga-design-milano-about-the-co-evolution-of-artificial-and-human-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversation with GIGA DESIGN Milano about the Co-Evolution of Artificial and Human Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

GIGA DESIGN<\/strong><\/a>
\nis a partner in many recent projects like Bids for Survival<\/strong><\/a>
\nand invited to a discussion about human resilience and collective intelligence.<\/p>\n

Welcome to our second episode of Discourse\u2122. On March 6th we had the pleasure to sit with our second guest:\u00a0Michael Schindhelm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Michael is German-born Swiss author, filmmaker, curator, and cultural advisor. He studied quantum chemistry in the USSR. Over the course of his career, he has served as Artistic Director of\u00a0Basel Theatre<\/a>\u00a0and the founding Director General of the Opera Foundation Berlin. He received several awards for his documentary films. He has been the professor during the founding year of the\u00a0Strelka Institute<\/a>, an experimental graduate school in Moscow. His work spans theatre, literature, visual art, and consultancy across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He has been the founding Director of the\u00a0Dubai Culture and Arts Authority<\/a>\u00a0and participated in the masterplanning of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong.
\nHis forthcoming lecture at Hong Kong University,\u00a0The Ghost in the Machine: Reimagining the University in the Age of AI<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0is the subject of this conversation.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

Your essay is titled\u00a0The Ghost in the Machine: Reimagining the University in the Age of AI<\/em>. It\u2019s a complex piece \u2014 drawing on terminology from neurobiology, social and computer science. I\u2019d like to start by asking how your interest in education developed.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Since I was a theatre director, thirty years ago, I was regularly invited to schools to speak at graduation ceremonies. It\u2019s a familiar tradition \u2014 you\u2019re expected to send young people into the future armed with some smart ideas. What I often had to confess at the outset was that since the age of twenty-eight, I had worked in approximately fifteen different professions without any formal training in any of them. The only thing I studied from scratch, as a proper university student, was quantum chemistry \u2014 something I abandoned nearly forty years ago.<\/p>\n

I have a rather complicated relationship with education, because for most of my life I\u2019ve done what AI developers today call reinforcement learning: you learn on the job.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how I\u2019ve learned most things, both personally and professionally. I often jumped into the deep end \u2014 not by accident, but deliberately \u2014 without knowing what would come next, and tried to learn along the way.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve noticed, over time, is that something recurrent happens in that process. Even as I\u2019ve moved from theatre to film, from literature to the visual arts, from consultancy to different parts of the world \u2014 the Middle East, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada \u2014 the landscape changes every time, but something permanent endures. You learn to grasp that permanence, to build a kind of skeleton around it, a scaffolding that allows you to move through unfamiliar fields with at least some competence, even without the grace of a true specialist.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why my more recent interest is perhaps not quite \u201ceducation\u201d in the conventional sense. I would rather call it knowledge creation, dissemination, production, and archiving. That is not the same thing.<\/p>\n

If AI had not emerged as such a massive accelerator of change in our lives, I\u2019m not sure I would have arrived at this question myself. I\u2019m primarily a practitioner. But I have also taught, and fifteen years ago I co-founded a one-year school called Strelka in Moscow, on behalf of Russian investors, alongside Rem Koolhaas and Stefano Boeri. The idea was to develop a think tank for the modernisation of the country. It became quite significant, until it was shut down in 2022 at the onset of the war in Ukraine. Some of my former students have since become serious researchers in architecture, design, and media.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve come to believe is that universities have the most important role to play in this moment. And that\u2019s perhaps the first time in my life I\u2019ve thought that. For the past twelve months or so, I\u2019ve been in intensive conversation with professors, researchers, and policymakers on higher education and research across several countries.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

I want to pause there, because you\u2019ve already described something important: knowledge not as something transmitted in a single direction, but as a cycle \u2014 acquired, re-elaborated, shared, archived, and transformed. And you\u2019re suggesting the institution is the entity that manages and shapes that cycle. There seems to be a sense right now \u2014 a demand, even \u2014 for a return of institutions. We\u2019ve spent a long time in what might be called the age of platforms, where the modalities of sharing knowledge were privatised, and knowledge itself became something of a product. Do you think that\u2019s part of what\u2019s driving the renewed importance of institutions?<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

We are experiencing, at multiple levels, a transformation of the order we grew up in \u2014 or at least, many of you did. For me it\u2019s slightly different, having spent nearly half my life under communist rule behind the Iron Curtain.<\/p>\n

That context matters when you speak about institutions. For us in East Germany, every institution was the enemy. You had to go underground if you wanted to do anything that wasn\u2019t state-sanctioned. I grew up with a very strong instinct for individual approaches to knowledge and experience. I didn\u2019t trust institutions at all.<\/p>\n

That changed dramatically after the fall of the Wall. Almost by accident, I was placed in the position of theatre director at twenty-eight, responsible for three hundred and sixty people \u2014 an orchestra, dancers, actors, designers \u2014 with very little idea of how to run any of it. I had to learn as I went, and in doing so, I found myself building institutions. The theatres I managed were construction sites at the same time \u2014 being physically rebuilt after decades of neglect, while being reimagined artistically.<\/p>\n

That was the spirit of the 1990s more broadly. After the collapse of communism and the beginning of globalisation, there was a mood of openness \u2014 of genuine possibility. I think of Thomas Friedman\u2019s famous phrase:\u00a0the world is flat<\/a>. It genuinely felt, for a moment, as though you could go anywhere, understand your environment, connect with anyone. Institutions seemed like vehicles for moving forward.<\/p>\n

In the years that followed, this changed dramatically. The dream of a flat world turned out to be exactly that. After 9\/11, it was clear that new borders, new conflicts, and new insecurities had emerged. Those of us who had believed in democracy and the rule of law as the better way began to see cracks we hadn\u2019t anticipated.<\/p>\n

Social media and digitalisation accelerated this. Institutions came under increasing pressure and struggled to absorb the pace of transformation. At some point, a kind of collective exhaustion set in \u2014 a sense of let it go. Students would choose whatever they liked because they weren\u2019t listening anyway. This defensiveness and passivity is still widespread, particularly in European academic environments.<\/p>\n

But I think this is now beginning to shift \u2014 partly as a reaction to what\u2019s happening in the United States, where we\u2019re witnessing an extraordinary rollback of much of what we understood as progress: an anti-globalist, increasingly fundamentalist worldview that is also conducting a cultural war against universities, against scientific research, on climate change, on diversity, on any number of fronts.<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, I think this will force a reinterpretation of the importance of institutions. We can already see it: suddenly, these places matter again as spaces for imagining alternatives.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

Going back to your experience as a director: you write about a new kind of figure, someone who must navigate and orchestrate both human and machine intelligence. What does that experience tell you about what this figure might look like?<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether I\u2019m speaking as an institutional director \u2014 sometimes responsible for thousands of people \u2014 or as an artistic director working on a collective project, two things have consistently driven my work.<\/p>\n

The first is transdisciplinarity. I\u2019ve always been drawn to imagining different disciplines working together on complex problems \u2014 whether in art, in collaboration with scientific institutions, or with communities around subjects where joining forces produces something no single discipline could achieve alone. That has run as a constant thread through forty years of work, and I suppose I embody it, having moved through so many different fields.<\/p>\n

The second is collective, or swarm, intelligence. Working alone is something I know intimately from the communist years \u2014 when I was writing in the Soviet Union, I had to hide it. You couldn\u2019t publish; you often couldn\u2019t even share. You had to be resilient, stubborn, to trust only your own voice. That kind of solitude characterises many creative processes \u2014 the painter alone with a canvas, the writer alone with a manuscript. It can be necessary, but it is also genuinely dangerous. There\u2019s a reason so many artists are described as tortured. The absence of feedback, of friction, of other minds \u2014 it weighs on you.<\/p>\n

Theatre is a completely different model. You begin alone \u2014 the conductor learns the score, the singer learns the part, the director develops the concept. But you know from the outset that you\u2019ll eventually bring all of that into a room with fifty other people who have their own vision, their own craft. You have to defend your work while genuinely engaging with theirs. You have to align, and sometimes deliberately misalign \u2014 push against, in order to reach something extraordinary.<\/p>\n

This is how creativity and innovation really happen. Not in an ivory tower. They happen when you enter a diverse environment, voice opinions that collide with other opinions, and are forced to rethink. The collision produces something new.<\/strong><\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

That model of confrontation between different creative minds is one of the protocols you propose in the Friction Campus.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Let me give some context first, because it will help frame the Friction Campus more clearly.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been speaking about how the Western world came under increasing pressure \u2014 its inability to keep pace with transformation, the role of social media and digitalisation in fragmenting both institutions and individuals. I remember being in Manhattan in the summer of 2008 and noticing people doing strange things in the streets. It was the first summer of the smartphone. People were walking around, disconnected, absorbed in these devices \u2014 in restaurants, in parks. I found it strange. Ten years later, we were all doing it ourselves.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s just one example among many of how social behaviour, self-understanding, and public communication have been fundamentally transformed by technology. And while younger generations have begun developing strategies to protect themselves from the constant pull of screens and connectivity, AI represents a different order of challenge entirely.<\/p>\n

This is why I\u2019ve been thinking seriously about cognitive forcing protocols. These aren\u2019t new. They\u2019ve existed in various forms since the beginning of industrial automation, and they always address the same essential question: how do we keep control over the machine? How do we ensure that human beings remain the decision-makers?<\/p>\n

We are already losing that in the era of smartphones. People increasingly sense that they are not using the machine \u2014 the machine is using them. And there are now emerging responses: design tools that deliberately make access to your screen more difficult, interfaces built to interrupt constant connectivity. These are forms of cognitive forcing design \u2014 counterintuitive by intention.<\/p>\n

The idea goes back at least fifty years, to other automated contexts where it was essential that the final decision remained with a human being. In aviation, for example: the autopilot exists, but there is still a pilot, and he has a kill switch. In surgery and clinical medicine, interactive interfaces are often designed so that a human certifies the logic of the algorithm.<\/p>\n

With AI, the stakes are considerably higher. It\u2019s important to recognise that AI isn\u2019t a phenomenon that appeared in 2022 when ChatGPT was released. It has existed for decades, embedded in our phones, shaping our commercial choices, harvesting our personal data. There was already significant manipulation taking place long before what we now call \u201cthe AI era.\u201d<\/p>\n

Handling this \u2014 defending your integrity, not simply accepting what the product offers you \u2014 requires serious attention. And it requires stronger rules on different levels.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve probably followed the debate around\u00a0Anthropic\u2019s dispute with the Pentagon<\/a>. It\u2019s worth noting that many of the most urgent warnings are coming from AI developers themselves \u2014 not just celebrating their achievements, but sounding the alarm about misuse. People like Dario Amodei are arguing for state-level regulatory authorities \u2014 not governments in the party-political sense, but independent bodies \u2014 to set the rules for how AI is developed and used. It cannot be left entirely in the hands of private companies driven by profit. Democratic societies need to take collective ownership of this.<\/p>\n

The second level is what each of us can do individually to preserve our integrity and retain control. And here again, education is essential. We need to learn how to use AI \u2014 and, more importantly, when not to use it.<\/p>\n

The protocols I mentioned are all designed around one idea: keeping control over the AI, ensuring that you understand what it\u2019s doing well enough to direct it, and that the human intention remains audited throughout.<\/p>\n

Because what we\u2019re already experiencing, and what will accelerate through 2026 and 2027, is AI taking over more and more of our cognitive and professional work. It will be faster, cheaper, and in many respects more capable than we are at producing content and processing facts. But we must ensure that the outcome of what the machine produces is something we genuinely need, something we can work with, something we have intended.<\/p>\n

For now \u2014 and I emphasise for now \u2014 the machine remains a machine. It predicts the next token. It works with syntax. Meaning is what the human provides.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I believe we are entering what I call the economy of meaning \u2014 not the attention economy, but its successor. We are being flooded with information, data, services, content. And we need to give that tsunami a meaning. That is our role. We cannot outsource it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

This brings me to something I keep returning to \u2014 orality. There seems to be an urgent need for people to come together, to speak with one another in real space. It\u2019s one of the oldest technologies we have, and yet it feels newly necessary.<\/p>\n

And connected to what you\u2019re describing about authority \u2014 not authoritarianism, but a kind of structure. In my own experience of teaching and leading teams, I\u2019ve noticed that offering complete freedom doesn\u2019t always produce connection. Sometimes it produces disconnection. I\u2019ve been thinking about protocols as a form of gentle authority \u2014 something that holds a group together.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Let me start with the educational context, because I think that\u2019s where these protocols need to be learned before they can be carried into professional life.<\/p>\n

Orality is just one element \u2014 though an increasingly important one. More and more schools are introducing it, partly in response to a very practical problem: students are using AI to write their essays and assignments without doing any cognitive work themselves. They\u2019re offloading thinking to the machine and submitting the result. Some of them don\u2019t even understand why this is a problem. They say, \u201cBut it\u2019s the right answer \u2014 what does it matter?\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a German proverb that captures a certain logic: you don\u2019t need to know everything, you only need to know where to find it. The equivalent of knowing which shelf the book is on. I think that proverb no longer holds in the age of AI. It cannot be the solution.<\/p>\n

A recent study from MIT examined this directly.<\/a>\u00a0Fifty-four students were divided into three groups and asked to write an essay. The first group used only their own minds. The second could use search engines. The third used AI. The neural activity in the brains of the third group was 55% lower than in the first. The brain is a muscle: if you don\u2019t use it, it atrophies \u2014 literally. And 90% of the students in the AI group were unable to cite a single sentence from the essays they had just submitted. They didn\u2019t know what they\u2019d written because they hadn\u2019t written it.<\/p>\n

If this continues, people will quite simply forget how to think, because thinking will no longer be required of them.<\/p>\n

This is what I mean by friction. Those in the first group were lifting the heavy weights themselves. The third group brought in a forklift \u2014 and then wondered why they weren\u2019t getting stronger.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t go to the gym so that a machine can lift for you. You go because the resistance is the point.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We already live in a world engineered toward frictionlessness. Every new technology is sold with the promise of making things easier. And yet human nature, paradoxically, doesn\u2019t seem to want a frictionless life. Research on the introduction of washing machines a century ago showed that housewives and domestic workers actually spent more time on laundry afterward \u2014 because the standards of hygiene rose with the technology. A solution is almost always the next problem in disguise.<\/p>\n

Friction is essential to human nature. It is how we generate meaning, how we grow. And that\u2019s why, in universities and research institutions, I believe we need stronger frameworks again \u2014 protocols that interrupt the desire for seamless, push-button results.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

This is the definition of your Friction Campus idea.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Yes \u2014 but let me add one thing first, because orality deserves a bit more attention.<\/p>\n

Orality is one of many ways of forcing yourself to articulate your own understanding \u2014 to demonstrate that you have genuinely processed what you\u2019ve learned. When you speak in a room, you can\u2019t hide behind a machine-generated text. You have to justify your thinking in real time.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a deeper philosophical dimension here too, which is perhaps the second reason I\u2019ve become invested in this question. For thousands of years, humanity imagined itself as the only kind of mind on Earth. There were gods \u2014 a supernatural intelligence above us \u2014 but only one type of intelligence in the world, and it was ours. We lived within a kind of dualism: us, and something infinitely higher. We accepted it. We even worshipped it.<\/p>\n

Now, for the first time, we face a different kind of dualism: something we have created that is beginning to exceed us in certain dimensions. And what makes this particularly strange is that it\u2019s happening in a society that is largely post-religious, at least in the West.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The creators of AI are often agnostics \u2014 people without religious faith in any traditional sense. And yet we find ourselves projecting onto AI a kind of supernatural status: the other intelligence, possibly approaching godlike capacity.<\/p>\n

This raises profound moral questions. If AI is faster, smarter, possibly more creative \u2014 does that mean we should defer to it? Or is it in fact more important, precisely because of that, that we insist on our own sovereignty? That we decide what the machine does, and what we want it to do?<\/p>\n

Most people are genuinely worried about this.<\/a>\u00a0A recent poll in the United States found that only 35% of adults think AI is a positive development. Compare that to China, where 70% of adults view AI favourably. When you\u2019re talking about 70% of the Chinese adult population, you\u2019re talking about more people than the entire adult population of the US and Europe combined. India would likely show similar results. We need to take that asymmetry seriously.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s part of why I go to places like Hong Kong to talk about this. Those environments are further along in integrating AI into daily life \u2014 and the more thoughtful people there are also more alert to the challenges it brings.<\/p>\n

But to come back to the core of it: what all of this drives me toward is the question of sovereignty. How do we ensure that this doesn\u2019t become a new religion, with Silicon Valley as its Vatican? We already have pseudo-religious figures propagating a vision of vertical intelligence \u2014 transcendence through technology, departure from the merely human. We need to be very careful about that.<\/p>\n

I am not a doomer. I genuinely believe AI is a remarkable tool, used wisely and governed well. But I think the most important thing it offers us \u2014 paradoxically \u2014 is an invitation to rediscover our own intelligence. What is it to be human? What is irreplaceable in us, despite everything this technology can do?<\/p>\n

Orality is one answer. Tacit knowledge is another. Tacit knowledge \u2014 knowledge that cannot be easily translated into words and numbers, that cannot be codified \u2014 is central to what we do as creative people. Economists know that the first jobs to disappear will be those based purely on language and quantitative reasoning, because those are easiest to automate. But knowledge embedded in practice \u2014 playing an instrument, developing a design sensibility, swimming, even speaking itself \u2014 is far more resilient. It lives in the body, sometimes faster than conscious thought. That is what makes us human. And it\u2019s what we need to reclaim.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

This connects to something you explore through four different scenarios in your essay \u2014 one of which, the Escape, describes a kind of return to ourselves. And you\u2019re clearly not approaching this from a purely pessimistic position. You also envision something more like a contest \u2014 a genuine confrontation.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

This is, in part, a generational question. I\u2019m fortunate to be in my sixties \u2014 old enough to have lived deeply in an analog world, and engaged enough to have moved through the digital one too. That used to be seen as a handicap \u2014 being a \u201csecond-tier digital person,\u201d someone who never fully internalised the machine the way millennials and Gen Z did.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, I think it\u2019s a privilege. Having experienced a world with massively more friction \u2014 where nothing was made easy by digital tools \u2014 is something worth reintroducing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s part of why I\u2019m optimistic: when AI takes over significant portions of cognitive and professional labour, it also frees us to focus on what we\u2019re genuinely capable of, what we might even be great at. That\u2019s not nothing.<\/p>\n

Starting from the university: one of the real tragedies of recent decades in research and education has been the siloing of disciplines. Even under one university roof, biologists rarely speak to historians, natural scientists rarely engage with humanists. The walls are remarkably impermeable. A great deal of what natural scientists spend their time doing will be automated before long \u2014 and that will free up cognitive capacity. The question is: what do they do with it?<\/p>\n

My answer is the polymath. Not the specialist who knows everything about one thing, but someone with genuine core expertise alongside a much wider horizon \u2014 someone who has developed tacit knowledge across multiple domains, not at the machine\u2019s level of data, but at the level of skill and judgement.<\/p>\n

Because what the future requires is not more facts \u2014 the machine will produce those. What it requires is the skill to assess those facts: to visualise them, to curate them, to troubleshoot, to narrate. And those skills are transferable across disciplines. A biologist and a historian both need them.<\/p>\n

And this is where the Friction Campus finally enters.<\/p>\n

The graduate of the future still has a core field of interest \u2014 but is surrounded by many other tools and capacities, because they\u2019ve developed the skill to move across domains: as a designer, as an artist, as an architect, as a storyteller. That\u2019s genuinely exciting to imagine.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

It really is. How do you envision tacit intelligence actually being cultivated? What kind of institution do we need?<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

It starts at school. I read recently about high schools in the United States \u2014 not colleges, but secondary schools \u2014 where teachers are introducing something they call\u00a0AI literacy<\/a>, with what resembles a driver\u2019s licence: an exam certifying that you know how to use AI responsibly. I like the idea. It points in the right direction.<\/p>\n

But a university has to go further. A driver\u2019s licence is still generic \u2014 everyone passes the same test. In higher education, the approach needs to be more individual, more tailored. That said, the metaphor of the car is useful. I prefer, in my own work, the metaphor of an instrument.<\/p>\n

I think of AI as an instrument. And I think of the student, the researcher, the practitioner, as a potential virtuoso. A virtuoso doesn\u2019t just operate the instrument \u2014 they master it. And mastery is always individual. Every pianist brings their own interpretation to a Beethoven sonata. Every musician, after thousands of hours of practice, has developed a tacit relationship with their instrument \u2014 the knowledge is in the fingers, not in the mind consulting the score.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I think we should be aiming for with AI. Not generic proficiency, but highly individualised mastery. Developing your own AI system, shaped to your own goals and intentions, processed deeply enough that you genuinely understand its logic, so that you can harness it, and ultimately give it your own imprint.<\/p>\n

This takes time. It is, at the beginning, a frictious process \u2014 intensive, demanding, sometimes uncomfortable. But at the end of it, the screen almost disappears. You\u2019re speaking directly to the instrument. The interface becomes transparent.<\/p>\n

And crucially, in the final stage of that process, you bring your own interpretation. Just as a musician doesn\u2019t simply execute the composer\u2019s notation but inhabits and transforms it \u2014 you bring your own goals, your own meaning, to what the AI produces. That is what it means to remain the author.<\/p>\n

GG<\/p>\n

This connects to something you said earlier about AI and sycophancy \u2014 the way AI currently tells everyone they\u2019re brilliant, that they\u2019ve just invented the fourth dimension. Without the friction of other minds, we might all drift into a kind of collective delusion.<\/p>\n

MS<\/p>\n

Precisely. And there is already empirical evidence for this.\u00a0Microsoft\u2019s 2025 report<\/a>\u00a0noted that within their own organisation, following the widespread adoption of AI tools, individual output and productivity increased \u2014 people became more efficient. But at the same time, collective and cognitive intelligence stagnated. Because working with AI absorbed so much attention that the informal dialogue between colleagues \u2014 the conversations, the challenges, the back-and-forth \u2014 diminished. People became siloed.<\/p>\n

Microsoft flagged this as alarming, because it understood that collective process is where innovation actually happens. Innovation is not frictionless. It requires detours, reversals, uncomfortable confrontations with ideas that don\u2019t fit your current model. And those usually come from other people.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also something more fundamental here.<\/p>\n

AI is a statistical system. Its goal is always the most probable outcome \u2014 which means, by definition, the average outcome. The middle of the bell curve. Innovation, by contrast, lives at the fringes. It is the improbable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So how do we reintroduce the improbable in the age of AI? Through the collective. Other people take you out of your routines, interrupt your seamless, frictionless thinking, and force you to rethink what feels comfortable but is, in fact, just average.<\/p>\n

If you look at the major discoveries in the history of science and art, many of them began as mistakes. Penicillin, for instance \u2014 one of the most important compounds in medicine \u2014 was the product of an error. A researcher left his lab for a week\u2019s holiday without properly cleaning his dishes. He came back to find that something extraordinary had grown in his absence. A humongous thing that saved the life of millions of people. That is perhaps a useful image to sit with, as we think about the future.<\/p>\n

We are already swimming in a sea of frictionless information. Everything is available. But the question increasingly is: what does it mean? Why does it matter to me? And how do I navigate a sea where, within a year or two, most of the content may not even be true?<\/p>\n

One of the most striking things I encountered in my own predictive research on European cities was this: the AI system I was working with kept insisting that the primary purpose of institutions in the future would be certifying truth. Not producing content \u2014 the machine does that, in abundance \u2014 but authenticating it. Putting a stamp on what is real, what is meaningful.<\/p>\n

The media, the university, the student \u2014 all of us \u2014 our role in the future may be less about creation and more about judgement. And that judgement cannot be outsourced.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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