We may be on the cusp of a neo-Enlightenment. That was my biggest takeaway from this conversation with Hollis Robbins.
Hollis is one of the world’s most visionary thinkers on how universities should evolve in the AI age. She was previously Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah and is currently a fellow at Harvard.1 She also writes a publication on Substack called Anecdotal Value, which is how we first connected.
The core idea we explored may be one of the most underappreciated opportunities of the AI era. What if we took the knowledge we produce today and accelerated it by 100x or more? That kind of leap is possible if universities reorient themselves around producing new knowledge, not just transferring it.
AI is making it easier to reach the frontiers of knowledge. College freshmen can now engage in forms of scholarship once limited to PhD programs and elite research labs.2 Properly reoriented, universities could make much faster progress on humanity’s hardest problems, from medicine to energy and beyond.
Hollis and I dig into these ideas in this conversation. If a neo-Enlightenment is possible, it will begin with decisions like the ones we discuss here. I hope you’ll watch and listen.3
Stanford student Austin Scholar has written about this.
Thank you to Lauren Balik, Matt Cyr, Nathaniel Walden, Jarlis, Perry, and many others who tuned in live.
