AI will decentralize the production, preservation and circulation of specialized knowledge in a way analogous to how printing undermined monastic copyist monopolies: credentialing, curriculum gatekeeping, and the university’s exclusive economic functions will be disrupted, forcing institutional retrenchment, new regulatory bargains, and alternative credentialing markets.
— This reframes higher‑education policy as a problem of institutional adaptation — accreditation, faculty labour, public funding and legal status must be reconsidered now that technology makes authoritative knowledge portable and generative at scale.
2026.01.05
100% relevant
John Carter’s explicit analogy that 'AI is doing to the universities what Gutenberg did to the monasteries' (Class of 2026) is the concrete textual hook that exemplifies the idea.
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