Many think back to humanising learning as a reaction against the usage of automated AI in education, to recall a key touted Renaissance ideal. What many do not realise is that the Renaissance is also about learning to work with magic. These terrifying tools, when confronted and understood, have much to say about our position in the cosmos and working around it. 

We can think of AI as an arcane magic at everyone’s disposal. New forms of tools are made accessible to us, and we have yet to understand them fully even though we are the ones writing out instructions. Each usage has accumulative world-reaching consequences we have still yet to grasp. 

It all depends on the spell and the caster - either it can be used for malice or benevolence. Others use it to manipulate, fool, trick and exploit. Even unintentional harm from good intentions is done should one be ignorant of its works. And there are those who, equipped with an understanding of the risks and rewards, learn to use it sparingly. 

This manifesto can be read as a series of corrective spells to fix our AI confusion. Textual declarations that manifest a cosmology of learning one must discover by engaging with each. They are not so much mere warnings of the limits of AI, but reminders of our own humanistic potential not reliant on the order of institutions. When authoritative institutions, particularly the university, crumble by AI’s near-instantaneous access and utility, we must rediscover the learning we always took for granted so we may renew them for ourselves with a greater awareness of the world and our place in it. 

Here I recall a key indigenous Iban term from Sarawak: ‘berjalai’. meaning travelling the broader world to find your own place.  What ‘berjalai’ means to most, are embodied encounters with new fields of inquiry. Gradually learning to know the worlds and its inhabitants that you encounter, so working relationships with life and land can be shaped. 

The directions taken are based on your very own felt instinct, desire and sense. And yet the ultimate goal of ‘berjalai’ is never just self-achievement, but to renew and expand ecosystems of flourishing, reciprocal care passed down to the next generation so they may be sufficient. Our learning is also an act of ‘berjalai’. We must start berjalai-ing, and aim to meet others halfway in their journey so more paths can be opened for the benefit of all.