CONFERENCE 'Untutored AI will be disaster,' KCL president says
King’s College London Vice-Chancellor and President Shitij Kapur delivers a keynote address online from London during the 2026 Korea Times Global Conference at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry building in Seoul, Tuesday. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
Kapur calls for more experiential education, protection of creative human work
Universities must ensure that people work with artificial intelligence (AI) and not for it, King’s College London Vice-Chancellor and President Shitij Kapur said, calling for a fundamental rethink of learning, employment preparation and the public purpose of higher education in the age of AI.
Delivering a keynote speech at the 2026 Korea Times Global Conference, titled “Beyond AI: Building human-centered leadership for next era,” Kapur said universities face a defining task: shaping how AI affects education, work, research and society as a whole, rather than simply adapting to the technology’s commercial imperatives.
“The slogan for universities, and dare I say, for humanity has to be that we will work with AI and not for AI,” he said in his online address from London on Tuesday.
He argued that AI will not produce a single universal future, as countries will develop and apply AI according to their own needs and ambitions. Still, he said, universities everywhere have five central responsibilities: redefining the essence of learning, preparing graduates for a changing labor market, defending slow and creative scholarship, promoting AI for the common good and ensuring that AI enhances humanity.
Kapur said AI has put traditional university education under pressure, challenging lectures as the main method of teaching, essays as the principal form of assessment and degrees as the core credential.
According to him, randomized controlled research studies suggest that AI can improve immediate output without necessarily deepening learning.
“So untutored AI will be a disaster for the university,” Kapur said.
Rather than banning AI or allowing unrestricted use, universities should deploy “scaffolded AI,” he said — tools designed around a course’s learning objectives and used with guidance. Such systems can improve student academic performance, with the greatest gains among lower-performing ones.
Kapur also said university education will need to place less emphasis on purely cognitive and analytical tasks as AI takes over more reading, writing and routine knowledge work. Schools should therefore shift more of their educational focus from cognitive and analytical work toward experiential, emotional and relational learning, he added.
In this sense, universities must also preserve their function as communities where students develop personal and professional identities, Kapur said. That role will become more critical today as AI reshapes not just how students learn, but also how they work after graduation.
Kapur said universities should also resist equating speed and scale with intellectual value. AI may be able to process huge volumes of information and solve some research problems like the Navier-Stokes equations faster than any humans can. But higher education must keep in mind that it has a responsibility to protect areas in which slow, creative and scholarly work remains essential, he said.
“So here is a problem humans were not able to solve across the world, talking to each other, for 70 years. And here is OpenAI, 10,000 agents, 3 million messages, $15 million, solved in 88 hours,” he said, citing what he described as a recent OpenAI effort involving the Navier-Stokes equations. “We should actually try and identify the places where slow, creative scholarly work is essential, and then defend those places.”
Kapur concluded that the crucial task is to protect human agency, genuine relationships and the embodied, finite nature of human life. AI may communicate fluently and even imitate empathy, but people should not mistake such simulations for genuine human intimacy. Nor should societies inadvertently confer legal agency on AI systems, he added.
“To be human is not merely a thing,” he said. “It is to author one’s life.”
He said the role of universities is not only to develop and adopt the latest technology, but also to remind society of what should matter in an AI-driven world.