Higher ed is a Treebeard. Are we going to design the future or inherit it?

Today's teaching topic comes from Dario Amodei's brand new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential.

His central image stuck with me. He compares our institutions to Treebeard, the ancient tree from Lord of the Rings who is wise but so slow it takes him a full day just to say good morning. Meanwhile the forest is being cut down around him. AI is moving at the pace of axes. Our institutions move at the pace of seasons.

Higher education is a Treebeard. A new program can take two or three years to go from idea to first cohort, while the job market it prepares students for rewrites itself every few months. And the part of the essay that hit me hardest was not about regulation at all. It was his claim that the hardest problem in an AI economy is not money, it is helping people find meaning, purpose, and agency. That is education's job description.

So here is the question I am sitting with, and I want yours: if you could redesign one thing about how we teach or train people for an AI world, and you actually had the green light, what would you change first?

I also built a free four-phase toolkit to help you move from worrying about this to designing it: https://www.harvestkernel.com/design-future-of-learning/