The Future of Education

The integration of AI into higher education presents both opportunities and profound challenges. While AI tools enhance learning, they also risk eroding intellectual responsibility and deep critical engagement. Students can now readily generate essays, analyse texts, and solve problems with minimal effort; institutions of higher education must in turn reexamine assessment methods and redefine the role of ethics in education to ensure that AI remains a means for intellectual empowerment and not passive dependence. I reflect on my four-year experience as chairperson of my institution’s disciplinary committee and suggest a shift from policing AI use, a futile and ultimately doomed tactic, to an approach that combines ethics and a reconsideration of assessment. The presentation discusses three ethical approaches – Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, Hannah Arendt’s approach to automatic behaviour and thoughtlessness and Bernard Stiegler’s critique of technological externalization – in order to frame Gen AI use as an intellectual responsibility rather than merely as a technological expediency. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach argues that education should cultivate ethical reasoning and intellectual independence, rather than mere skill acquisition. Arendt’s concepts highlight the risk that AI will produce students who uncritically accept machine-generated knowledge rather than engaging in active moral and intellectual thought. Stiegler’s critique of technological externalization warns that AI may reduce cognitive autonomy by shifting even the burden of thought to machines. The return to ethics should not be abstract, but should rather be incorporated into AI literacy education. Combined with new approaches to assessment, the ethical framework may help institutions of higher learning foster critical engagement, intellectual autonomy, and ethical responsibility in an AI-driven world.