Higher Education For The Age Of AI And Climate Change

In AI, climate, and many domains impacting our futures, the pace of change is speeding up fast — requiring new skills, mindsets, and modes of learning. How is higher education evolving to keep pace? For perspective, we spoke with two social entrepreneurs connected to the Learning Planet Institute (LPI): François Taddei, a researcher in evolutionary systems biology now building up a new kind of university as LPI founder; and Stephen Friend, a cancer researcher, co-founder of Sage Bionetworks and 4YouandMe, and LPI collaborator. (Bios below.)

Ashoka: Francois and Stephen, both of you are scientists by background. When did you start to see beyond research as the end goal?

François Taddei: In my case, I studied the evolution of cooperation – what happens when individuals over-exploit the common resource so much so that at some point there is no more resource and a whole population collapses. I studied this phenomenon with bacteria. Fast forward some years, and I was in New York when September 11th happened. I saw the towers go down – and realized in the weeks that followed that I needed to start thinking not only of science for the sake of science and technology for the sake of technology, but what humans do with it. You can use a plane to fly or to destroy a tower.

Stephen Friend: And for me, I trained as a pediatrician and later cancer researcher. Along the way, I began to see that as key as scientific questions are, they are often adjacent to very important questions that are non-scientific, non-technical. Questions having to do with how we work with each other, how we tackle shared problems, how we build solutions. If we want to heal each other and the planet, these questions become central. And they align with the powerful effort that François is leading – the Learning Planet Institute.

Ashoka: How are these skills of cooperation being enabled by the learning environment you are building? Tell us more about your approach.

Taddei: What we’ve been building is co-designed by students, for students. This is the most important innovation, especially in the French setting. We’ve doubled in size every 18 months for nearly 20 years, and now we are going beyond the walls of the institute we’ve built — that has 7,000 square meters in Paris — and we’re collaborating with UNESCO, UN University and about 600 organizations. Tens of thousands of people around the planet are joining forces so that everyone can learn to care for self, others, and the planet.

Ashoka: Why is this important now?

Taddei: Because humanity is at a turning point. For a long time, we solved problems faster than we created them. But at the moment the reverse is true. Something has gone wrong because there are unintended consequences we have not been able to anticipate — climate change is one example.

Ashoka: AI is another one — we are seeing rapid advances in AI and, as you say, a plane can be a tool to fly or a tool to destroy. How is higher education responding to all this?

Friend: The main education framework has universities largely ensuring that people know facts. Now think of a ladder between facts, relationships, and consequences — and imagine a powerful AI assistant facilitating learning of facts, whether it’s in chemistry or climate science or medicine. This opens a way of getting to the things you really want people to have their own input on — nurturing relationships and positive consequences. If universities are to stay relevant, they must design for this change. This is what the Learning Planet Institute is doing.

Taddei: Adding to this point, in the age of AI, we have to think not only of the coevolution of human and artificial intelligence, which is already a very complex challenge. But also of the ethics of those who code the machine — and more broadly, the ethics of our species. We humans are the product of evolution, but we are a conscious product — and we know we may make ourselves extinct. So this is a special moment in the history of life. It was not like this a few centuries ago. Hopefully we’ll find a solution, enjoy a surprising future, and avoid the worst scenario. But we have to take a step back and think about these issues differently.

Ashoka: How might students learn from and engage with urgent questions of climate, AI, and human agency?

Friend: Most education is completely built to give you a way of using the past to move into the future — as if the past were the cornerstone for what will come. Add to this the reality that universities are still largely cloistered from the real world. But it doesn’t have to be this way. What if all students had access not just to knowledge, but also to skills and ethics — plus the ability to work within a community on projects they are passionate about.

Taddei: Historically, ethics have been confined to the people you interact with, typically your tribe or family, then progressively extended to others, to the city walls, where we defined citizenship, and then progressively to the national scale. But think of women, children, migrants across history — the notion of citizen has not been very inclusive. Also, city walls separated humans from nature. Now we need to calibrate ethics to the planetary scale and think in terms of planet citizenship and the long-term consequences of our actions. We have to go from students competing on yesterday’s knowledge to learners cooperating on challenges so they can build the future. This suggests a different paradigm for universities, right? And we know from evolution that if you evolve slower than your environment, you might become obsolete before you know it. This might be true of your profession, the way you learn, the way you teach. We are in a fast-changing environment, and we have to learn differently.

Ashoka: A good segue to what’s ahead for the world’s learners. 20 years out, how will people of all ages learn?

Friend: Most importantly they will be embedded within a community alongside those considered teachers and other learners. Their ability to work together and collaborate in real time with others will feel quite different than today. Notions of success will look different — it won’t be about getting the number one position in the class.

Taddei: Agree! Learners will be solving real-world problems – from elementary through university and beyond. Empowered by collective intelligence, they will contribute their solution to the common pool of solutions. Learning will be more fluid, not confined to a specific setting like a classroom, but out in the real world where they are facing personal challenges, community challenges, and planetary challenges. And last, learning will be guided by such questions as: How can I serve the interests of everyone on the planet, including other species? How can I be a good ancestor?

François Taddei and Stephen Friend are Ashoka Fellows. You can learn more about François here and Stephen here.

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