What Does It All Mean
AI and the Future of Post-secondary Education
At the time of writing – April 2025 – there are two competing visions for the future of AI and humanity (nevermind post-secondary education). The first sees the continued acceleration of AI and superintelligence rapidly and entirely disrupting all of society from labour and the economy to geopolitics – you can see this view well represented by the AI Future Project in their manifesto AI 2027. The second sees AI following a familiar path of transformational technologies like the personal computer or the internet, with continued acceleration in development, but with slower and more measured diffusion throughout society in ways that allow for gradual adjustment for individuals, institutions, sectors and nations – you can see this view represented in the counter-manifesto AI as Normal Technology (and credit to the New York Times podcast Hardfork for exploring these two visions in the April 11 2025 and April 18 2025 episodes)
The truth is, we really don’t know with any degree of certainty what will happen, or when, or with what effect.
And so as teaching and learning leaders, we need instead to “think in possibilities not in certainties” as this episode from McMaster’s AI Dialogues podcast recommends. In the episode, host Stephanie Verkoeyen interviews Shane Saunderson about his research in strategic foresight and its application to AI. While the episode offers several examples of strategic foresight exercises you can consider, there are plenty of courses, tools, and strategies you can review – here’s just one example that includes guided prompts.
While we can’t know with any certainty what that future will hold, we can look at where we are now and make some reasonably reliable predictions:
- The nature of intelligence, what it means to be intelligent and what it means to ‘hold knowledge’ will continue to change.
- What, how and why we teach will need new articulation across our sector.
- Traditional processes and practices for research and work will also continue to radically change (and ought not be disentangled from the work of teaching and learning).
- We – as individual leaders and as a community – will need to continue to learn and adapt. (And this is best done in community.)
And, with that final prediction, we close with a call to continue the conversation, and to continue adding to and revising this Playbook.
