You enter into the chamber. It is well furnished. Wood panels line the walls, thick red carpet underneath your feet. Bookshelves stretch around the room, filled with all manner of texts on the subject you will study.
You sit down at the special computer set aside for you. It connects to every data repository you will ever need. With a few clicks (or voice commands if you feel so inclined) you have set up a file into which you will pour your research.
Hours of study ensue. Charts of data have been created. Reams of text have been written. By the end of the research session, you will slump exhaustedly in your chair, and reach for your access card. Slouching out the room, you head to your common room, absentmindedly picking up your phone and personal laptop from the locker outside.
Somewhere deep inside a secure vault, an automatic system logs your transition between rooms. This your life for the next three years. Tracked from place to place, your every move scrutinized by cameras, microphones, and website cookies.
Welcome to university. You are one of only a few hundred on-campus students. You have signed a contract to study at set points in a day, accessing terminals that permit research whilst ensuing that you cannot access AI. Any work outside these terminals will be automatically rejected. While AI does have uses in teaching and research, any attempt to utilise it for the composition of essays and papers will result in your expulsion.
You are in a minority. The days when hordes of young adults flocked to the great academies for beer and a 2.2 are over. Grade inflation/devaluation, artificial intelligence, and the disillusionment of generations of young people have led to the decline of mass-tertiary education. Most people flock to on-the-job tuition. Apprenticeships, delivered both by employers and sanctioned Ais, are the foundation of pre-work qualifications.
A small minority undertake online-learning, but this is prone to excessive AI utilisation (i.e.: “cheating”), and is discredited.
You have sometimes asked yourself why you would want to submit to the discipline and rigour of the modern university. Why have your every move tracked? Why memorise theorems and equations by rote? What is the point of all this? The answer is the future you have chosen- there are some career paths that quite simply require the old ways. History, scientific discovery, even the much mocked “literature studies”- all require the work of an academic. As transformative as robotics and AI have been, there will always be a role for scholars. There will always be a need for the old ways.
Fittingly, these ways came to the rescue of scholarship as the great intelligences inserted themselves into our lives. As disaffected youth began to turn away from the abstract online lifestyle, and towards religion, reading, and board games, so too did institutions begin grasping for ancient realities. The earliest hubs of learning in the post-Roman world were the monasteries, and thus did they return when transformation loomed. Now we find ourselves surrounded by the chaos of faux-intelligences that can make anything we desire, so do we isolate ourselves from the chaos, into an ordered life of contemplation and study. The university-monastery is secure from the ravages of unrestrained technology- a haven for those that wish to develop their skills free from the temptations of the “do it all for you” robotic genies in the outside world.
Those students that emerge from this haven will have the discipline to use the powerful systems at humanity’s disposal without succumbing to them. Draughtsmen can input arcane terms into search engines, combining hand-drawn plans with image generators to produce entire cities. Working with our new djinns, scientists can start from basic principles to draw out theorems undreamed of. In fusing the old and the new, we will have a world of intellectuals free of early 21st century snobbery and childish technophilia, yet eager to exploit the power of new technology.
This is why you entered the cloisters of thought. Like your dark age forbears, you are here to seize the world.