Just So You Know…

Dear students

You are holding the first student-powered manifesto on AI education in Southeast Asia, and possibly even all of Asia. While you will find many similar student-centric critical demands for AI integration, I hope you see how ours stand out for being informed by experience and evidence. This manifesto more than anything is an extension of your elaborate testing. Other documents are born from workshops and surveys. Ours is born from a structured and extended act of using and breaking the machine. This gives it a unique, grounded authority. So when you read the principles, remember the frustrations, confusions and surprises that gave them roots. Your demands were voiced from the grainy mire of AI’s failures.

So unlike other manifestos, you go further than general pleas for more humanity, a conceptually flawed and timid view given that it was humans that made AI in the first place. You rather take your reader to vulnerability and flawed perception. The machine may be able to do a lot but it is ultimately an indecent little thing, one that we must now learn to live with one way or another. This moves into a more radical and poetic defense of a distinctly embodied experience with AI despite the endless enigmas that would follow.

I can go on and on about how much I've learned from your assignment but I think what's more important is to thank you for believing in the idea to begin with.The whole thing was, in hindsight, rather ridiculous despite its boldness. But it was necessary, given the equally ridiculous time we live in.

Consider it a rehearsal for going through the looking glass.

Faithfully,

Dr. Fuad