Universities confront AI and human singularity

Universities are becoming one of the first places where the AI argument stops being abstract. Not “will the technology improve?” but “what, exactly, is a human teacher still for?” That is the real subject of a May 4 column in *Diario de Sevilla* by Víctor J. Vázquez, built around a recent classroom session with the philosopher Víctor Gómez Pin. The claim is simple but sharp — the university should not answer AI by imitating it more efficiently; it should defend the parts of teaching that are unmistakably human. (diariodesevilla.es) ### What happened here? Vázquez describes sharing a classroom with Gómez Pin, who delivered a lesson on “human singularity” in the face of AI. The scene matters. It was a large tiered lecture hall, a blackboard, chalk in hand, a professor moving physically through an argument. At the end, Gómez Pin joked that an AI could not have given that class. Vázquez treats the joke as the point, not a throwaway line. (diariodesevilla.es) ### Why does that joke matter? Because it flips the usual panic. Most AI talk in education starts with substitution — can a model explain the material, summarize the reading, answer questions, grade drafts? But Vázquez is pointing at something else. A class is not just information transfer. A real lecture also carries authority, tim(diariodesevilla.es)much harder to simulate than a tidy answer box. (diariodesevilla.es) ### What does Gómez Pin mean by “human singularity”? This is his long-running philosophical terrain. In recent work around *El ser que cuenta*, Gómez Pin argues that human beings are not just data-processing animals or objects among objects. His focus is language in the strong sense — not merely generating sentences, but meaning, sy(diariodesevilla.es)classroom anecdote. The lecture was not only about AI. It was also a defense of the idea that human thought has a distinctive kind of depth that reductionist accounts miss. (cronicaglobal.elespanol.com) ### So is this anti-technology? Not really. The column’s target is not AI as a tool. It is the temptation for universities to hollow themselves out while pretending they are modernizing. If a university treats teaching as content delivery, then AI becomes an obvious replacement pressure. But (cronicaglobal.elespanol.com)y commands it, the comparison changes. (diariodesevilla.es) ### Why focus on the lecture format? Because the lecture is unfashionable, and that is partly why Vázquez uses it. He argues that university conversation matters, but it cannot become a chat among equals just to seem democratic. Students are there to encounter knowledge they do not yet have. The old-fashioned “master class” can stil(diariodesevilla.es)structure. In that sense, the chalkboard is almost a stress test — can the teacher create an event, not just distribute notes? (diariodesevilla.es) ### Why does this land now? Because higher education is already under pressure from several directions at once — AI tools entering coursework, administrative pushes toward scale and efficiency, and a broader need to explain why expensive in-person education is worth it. In Spain, that debate is landing alongside wider education anxi(diariodesevilla.es)titutions feel squeezed, the easiest move is to automate more. Vázquez is arguing for the opposite instinct. (diariodesevilla.es) ### What is the real challenge for universities? Basically, they have to decide whether they are platforms or communities of thought. If they become platforms, AI fits neatly. If they remain universities in the older sense, they have to protect situations where knowledge is embodied in a person — fallible, charismatic, dema(diariodesevilla.es)## Bottom line? The column’s deeper point is that AI may be forcing universities to remember their job. Not to out-machine the machines, but to stage the kinds of encounters that make human intelligence feel singular in the first place. (diariodesevilla.es)