Yet another imperative to use AI?

20 Oct, 2026

"The promotion [of AI] is important, otherwise from both a research perspective and a preparing our students for the future [perspective,] we will fall behind."

This assertion, which I will leave anonymous, applies specifically within a university. It is certainly not a moral imperative, but something quite subtle has happened which results in it functioning in a similar way. Specifically it is a hypothetical imperative, but the antecedent of the hypothetical, while stated explicitly, is taken to be an incontrovertible good.

If we don't want to fall behind, then we must promote AI use

What is so bad about falling behind?

On Sunday I was at the Yorkshire Marathon. (For full transparency I ought to say that I was part of a relay team of six people and only ran five miles.) This allowed me to observe lots of people running a marathon. And one thing that's quite noticeable is that a small number are competing against each other, a larger number are competing against themselves, and an even larger number are not competing at all, but merely engaging in the activity and their success criterion was completing the route. The first group cared about falling behind other runners the second group cared about falling behind their own self imposed targets and the third group didn't care at all about falling behind at all.

This should remind us that falling behind is not intrinsically bad. Rather, it is only bad if your success criterion is a competitive one. And even if your criterion is competitive, there will be some things you're not prepared to do in order to succeed. Cheating would be one such thing, but also permanent damage to one's own health or well-being, pretty much any sort of injury to other people's health and well-being, significant damage to the environment, significant social injustice, ... the list goes on. A good person would risk falling behind to avoid those outcomes, and also, hopefully, would a good university.

So if the promotion of AI has negative consequences in terms of academic quality, environmental damage, political power distributions, economic injustice, social injustice and the well-being of students and staff, then it's not so obviously a bad thing to fall behind those who do promote AI.

Follow the money

However, there is a subtext here which places universities in with the first group of marathon runners competing against each other. The subtext is that there is a finite pot of income, from research grants, student fees and business contracts, available to universities. If universities fall behind on the metrics and league tables, which are believed to influence quite strongly the distribution of that income, then they risk reduced income. And universities are particularly vulnerable to negative effects of reduced income because they have to budget their spending on the basis of income predictions, with very few options for reducing net spending should income fall short of prediction.

In a nutshell, no university wants to fall behind other universities on those metrics because their income predictions are based on their relative position in those metrics and their spending is committed against those income predictions.

Falling behind what exactly?

So this is really about money. However, the sentence I quoted does not mention student recruitment. Rather, it talks about falling behind in the activity of "preparing our students for the future". And there is a lot of value-laden magic in that expression.

While resource distribution across universities is a zero-sum game, preparing students for the future most certainly is not. Therefore to fall behind in this activity is not to do less well in some competitive measure, but to do less well against some qualitative standard. What is that?

We can articulate some qualitative standards for education. Typically these will be in terms of improvement of certain intellectual values and competences. Which values and competences is traditionally determined at the level of an academic discipline and we can assume that educational success comes when the students have chosen the discipline which effectively instills or improves those values and competences which they want. Whether this prepares them for their future depends upon whether they have chosen the discipline wisely and upon what choices they make after graduation.

In contrast, the quotation we're considering presupposes that it's the role of the university to prepare students for 'the future' and that the university must make choices in order to 'optimize' that.

The first problem with that presupposition is that it collapses the huge diversity of student futures into one thing: the future. Surely one ought to hope that in the future there will be as much diversity in ways of living, ways of occupying one's time, in values and in cultures as there is at present? Universities need seem like important institutions to encourage and protect such diversity, not crush it by promoting a single vision of the future.

The second problem with the presupposition is that it only makes sense to prepare students for the future if you have a pretty confident grip on what the future will be like. However, the future, and in particular the role of AI in it, is contested.

Governments, corporate lobbyists and people financially exposed to the AI bubble have one view of the future. They are using their immense power to try to create this future. Many academics, civil society organizations and ordinary citizens are inclined to resist that vision of the future and want more choice in determining how AI is governed and deployed.

If a university claims to be preparing students for the future, then it must have taken sides in that debate, often in conflict with some or even many of its academics.

Why not promote the diversity of approaches?

One way of not falling behind in the competitive resource distribution is to have a unique selling point or USP. And that should be obvious by now.

If you are worried about falling behind by not promoting AI, have you considered the option of pulling ahead by promoting a diversity of approaches to AI (including not using it)?

Let students choose how to prepare themselves for their own personal futures by choosing between courses or disciplines which have different approaches to AI. Don't force it on anyone, student or academic; let them choose for themselves.

Promotion and Power

Of course, plenty of people will point out that promoting the use of AI is not forcing it on anyone. But that depends who is doing the promoting and in what context. In particular, what normative context.

Universities are funny places, because both students and academics are continually chasing better grades. Students go to university to get a good degree¹, researchers have a career structure built around their work being given good academic assessments - by funding panels, peer reviewers, promotion panels etc. As Meredith Whittaker so nicely put it, if you are in the business of "getting A grades for a living", it means "you're pleasing those with power over you".

Now if those people awarding the A grades, or employing those who award the A grades, or designing the processes to award the A grades, promote the use of AI, then there will be pressure to use AI, whether you are a student or a researcher.