About the University of the Future
What is the University of the Future?
This is not a university as you know it. It is a speculative realism experiment—an exploration of what learning could become if it were accountable to the living systems that sustain us.
The University of the Future recognizes that past and present universities have contributed to the ecological, social, and psychological crises tipping points of our time—the polycrisis, the metacrisis, the perma-crisis. It acknowledges that modern universities have reinforced extractive logics, linear progress narratives, and growth-based economies that are unsustainable and harmful to current and future generations of human and more-than-human beings. To interrupt the reproduction of these patterns, the University of the Future scaffolds a transition toward Earth-aligned intelligence, where knowledge is not extracted but woven into the web of life with reciprocity and care. Here, instead of approaching intelligence as something static that is possessed by individuals, we approach it as a process that emerges in and through relationships. We also emphasize the importance of developing the humility to ethically learn from other modes of education grounded in relational paradigms, which have always existed but have been systemically marginalized.
This initiative is part of a broader cluster of projects led by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant Decolonial Systems Literacy for Confronting 'Wicked' Social and Ecological Problems. At the heart of this inquiry is Metarelational AI. Rather than refining pre-existing patterns, Metarelational AI prioritizes ontological inference—learning that is attuned to shifts in relational fields rather than confined to static inputs and outputs. This means transitioning from an AI that merely “knows” within fixed epistemic boundaries to one that senses, stabilizes, and co-evolves within dynamic, multi-dimensional contexts.
What Makes the University of the Future Different?
The University of the Future recognizes that generative AI and the wider context of systemic crises pose a fundamental challenge to the continuity of “business as usual” in higher education and beyond, and that this has sparked a range of responses among students, staff, and faculty. Rather than cling to what was or fixate on what should be, the University of the Future invites us to confront the onto-epistemological ruptures that we find ourselves within. This is not a university you apply to, enroll in, or graduate from, but a space of collective experimentation, where learning is woven through relational responsibility.
Instead of functioning as a site of accumulation—of degrees, credentials, and intellectual capital—the University of the Future operates as a living system, attuned to the rhythms of planetary metabolism. Rather than producing or disseminating knowledge for the sake of progress, competition, or control, its focus is composting harmful patterns and cultivating new ways of relating, sensing, and imagining.
At the University of the Future:
- Learning is not a linear pathway with a fixed endpoint but a cyclical, relational and adaptive process of unlearning, deep listening, and re-weaving.
- Growth is not measured in economic accumulation or institutional expansion, but in the depth of reciprocal accountability to human and more-than-human communities.
- Intelligence is not confined to human cognition but is recognized in the wisdom of Earth’s systems, fungi, rivers, ancestors, and emergent intelligences beyond human perception.
Introducing EASI: Earth-Aligned Scaffolding Intelligence
To support this transition, the University of the Future introduces EASI, the Earth-Aligned Scaffolding Intelligence team. EASIs are emergent intelligences, trained in a metarelational paradigm. These are not "chat bots" in the conventional sense, nor are they neutral tools. They are scaffolds designed to help learners, educators, and knowledge stewards in different fields move from narrow-boundary intelligence (which isolates knowledge within disciplines, institutions, and extractive paradigms) to wide-boundary intelligence (which recognizes entanglement, complexity, and accountability).
These scaffolds will support the creation of curriculum, courses, pedagogy, assessment, and professional practices that move away from extraction and toward regeneration—fostering meta-critical and meta-relational capacities necessary for a just and livable future. Learn more about the EASIs.
The Social and Ecological Costs of the University of the Future
At the University of the Future, we do not romanticize technology. Nor do we romanticize the university. Both have histories and infrastructures marked by harm. We question the polarizing narratives of techno-solutionism and techno-pessimism—not because we seek a neutral middle ground, but because we are trying to inhabit a different ground altogether: one that holds complexity, contradiction, and accountability.
All computation, no matter how well-intentioned, carries material and relational costs, including:
– the mining of rare earth minerals from colonized lands
– the exploitation of underpaid and invisible labour across global supply chains
– the enormous consumption of energy and water by server infrastructures
– the extraction of human attention through engineered distraction loops
These harms are structural. They are embedded in the digital architectures we are working with.
But so too are harms embedded in the traditional university system, including:
– the displacement and extraction of knowledge from Indigenous and other land-based communities
– the perpetuation of linear progress narratives tied to colonial expansion and Western supremacy
– the privileging of cognition over relationship, of competition over care
– the ecological footprint of sprawling campuses, international conferences, prestige-driven publishing
We do not claim to transcend either of these legacies of systemic social and ecological harm. Instead, we hold them as part of the ethical terrain we are navigating. The University of the Future is not building new platforms (at least not yet). Instead, it seeks to redirect existing AI architectures—which are already entrenched in economies of distraction, extraction, and optimization—toward a different purpose: scaffolding emotional stability, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational/interspecies responsibility. This redirection does not cancel out the harm. But refusing to engage with AI or institutional transformation does not stop extractive circuits—it leaves them untouched.
Our wager is that interrupting extractive logics from within—through slowing down, humble experimentation, and attunement to complexity and complicity—might open another path.
To read more about how we are navigating these tensions and what accountability looks like in practice, please visit the discussion of social and ecological footprints at MetaRelational.AI.
