Postscript: Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft
Plausible AI trajectories and their potential implications to academia: a closing reflection on Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft
From the essay “Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft,” which will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming volume Academic Cultures: Perspectives from the Future, co-edited by Michael M. Crow and William Dabars (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026). Reproduced with the permission of the editors and the press.
Preamble • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Postscript
Postscript
Considering how artificial intelligence might impact academic culture seventy-five years from the present is, if we’re being honest, a near-impossible task. Even excluding some of the more extreme speculations around AI and the future, it’s quite possible that, in 2100, universities will look remarkably similar to how they do now — or that they’ve have long ceased to exist. The trouble is, artificial intelligence is one of those profoundly disruptive technologies that has the ability to confound even the most prescient of futures-forecasters.
It may be that, as commentators such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have suggested, we are collectively facing an AI-driven “compressed twenty-first century” — a future where AI accelerates the rate of discovery so rapidly that what humans alone could achieve in the next century is compressed into a few short years.1 If this scenario plays out, academic culture in 2100 will likely be radically different to the present, with human researchers and scholars quite possibly being relegated to managing the vastly more powerful intellects of intelligent machines.
A more extreme version of this vision is that recursive AI development — where AIs design and build ever-more advanced AIs at an accelerating rate — will lead to “superintelligent” artificial intelligence researchers within a few years. Implausible as this scenario sounds, it’s one that forms the basis of the speculative AI 2027 report,2 and one that would — if it came to fruition — lead to a radical rethink of academia within the next decade.
Alternatively, it may turn out that current advances in AI fail to deliver on their promise, and that the technology plateaus out over the next few years. In this scenario, AI is more likely to be assimilated into society without some of the more radical impacts associated with the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or “superintelligence” — much as electricity, the calculator, or the internet were. In this scenario, it may be that academia in 2100 will continue to be dominated by very human aspirations, ambitions, behaviors, and egos.
Scenarios like these allow speculative boundaries to be placed around plausible AI futures. But they also tend to focus on artificial intelligence as something that happens to society (and by extension, academia). Yet AI is arguably the first technology we’ve developed that has the capacity to emulate and even replicate attributes that we consider to be uniquely human — including our intellect. And this means that the very essence of who we are is intertwined with its development. Even in the present day, researchers are having to come to terms with advanced AI models that are capable of mining vast swaths of knowledge, synthesizing understanding across diverse areas of expertise, and teasing out insights from seemingly unconnected studies — all at a speed and a scale that is impossible to match by humans. And while many academics still hold onto the idea that there’s something profoundly unique to human scholarship, AI models are well on the way to progressing from emulating PhD-level intelligence to exhibiting genius-level intellect. If and when this occurs, we may need to concede that artificial intelligence is capable of achieving more than the vast majority of academics — most of whom who do not aspire to the lofty intellectual heights of “genius status.”
Such a possibility could well precipitate a profound crisis of identity and purpose within academia. For the first time in human history, intellectual elites would be facing a future where their status is jeopardized by machines that can think and reason deeper and faster than they can. But they would also be facing a crisis of abundance in a world where they’ve built their careers and reputations around an assumption of scarcity.
In his 2024 essay “What if intelligence were free?” Mark Daley talks about modern day research universities being “built on a bedrock of scarcity — not of buildings or endowments, but of cognitive capacity itself.”3 Universities — and academia as the metaphorical mycelium from which they emerge — depend on intelligence being a scarce commodity. But what if AI makes it possible for anyone with an internet connection to access more intelligence — more cognitive capacity in Mark’s words — than any university or collection of academics could provide them, and all at a fraction of the cost. The result would, I suspect, be a profound rethinking of the public value of the academy and the edifices that surround it.
In a utilitarian vision of the future, it’s quite possible that advanced AI will supplant the cognitive capacity and intellectual labor of universities, and that academic culture is diminished to the point of irrelevance. Yet this is a scenario that is based on a very narrow understanding of the value that academics bring to society. Hidden under the carapace of bureaucratic performance indicators, academic metrics of success, and the pressure to justify near-immediate returns on investment for every dollar spent, it’s quite possible that there is more to academia than meets the eye.4 It’s equally possible that social and cultural shifts instigated by AI might allow this hidden value to be revealed in unexpected ways. It’s even possible that a future fusion of human intellect with artificial intelligence could lead to possibilities that transcend utilitarianism and human-exceptionalism in academic culture.
It’s possibilities like these that I set out to explore in Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft.
The back-story behind Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft takes a middle-way approach to future AI developments, and one that neither panders to visions of exponential growth, or succumbs to the cynicism of hyped-up promises. Rather, it considers a series of social and technological developments (including an AI “reset” in 2035) that lead to the first tenured AI faculty members being appointed at the start of the twenty second century. Much of this back-story is not revealed directly in the letters, but its presence deeply influences how the correspondence unfolds between the three protagonists.
The “Department of Intellectual Craft” that the story is built around was inspired in part by C. Wright Mills’ 1959 essay “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.”5 Mills set out to describe his scholarly and intellectual process to students, and in doing so he began to reveal his “intellectual craft” as something more akin to that of an artisan — something that was neither prescriptive or outputs-driven, but rather a process, a lifestyle almost, that defined who he was as much as what he did. And while Mills was writing specifically about sociologists, his description of the craft of being an intellectual extends far beyond this.
The idea of intellectual endeavors as craft intrigues me, as it helps begin to tease out the “secret sauce” of the academic (if indeed such a thing exists) as distinct from mere productivity. And in the face of machines that threaten to replace academic productivity, it opens up ways of exploring how this craft might influence academic culture in an AI-dominated future.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that such craft is seen as an anachronism in a future where AI has transformed the nature of knowledge production. In some ways it already is. In their 2020 book The Fifth Wave, Michael Crow and William Dabars describe the institutionalization of “small-scale craft production” of knowledge in elite universities as a “boutique” production strategy of the pre-industrial era — and one that continues to persist, despite its lack of scalability in the modern world.6 And yet, they also acknowledge that artisanal modes within academia “may remain essential to discovery, creativity, and innovation” —suggesting that the relationship between the craft and the utility of the academic in an age of AI may be more complex than might at first seem.
I’ve written previously about how AI-augmented research and scholarship could lead to the rise of the “artisanal intellectual” as someone who eschews the affordances of intelligent machines in favor of the process of human-driven discovery and meaning-making, painfully slow as it might be in comparison.7 This concept is also woven into the correspondence in Letters — along with the idea of “slow scholarship.” Yet even though these are initially indicated to be little more than intellectual affectations, the story reveals surprising insights as it unfolds into their potential value and relevance in twenty second century academic culture — albeit within the narrow context of intellectual discovery.
No matter how the next 75 years play out, AI is likely to challenge and transform what it means to be an academic in some form, as well as the nature and value of scholarship and intellectual labor, and the place and purpose of universities within society. And while I would be surprised if we ever see a discipline of Intellectual Craft emerge as it’s described in Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft, I would also be surprised if there isn’t reckoning at some point where academics are forced to re-evaluate their role in society — much as Arthur Hale in the story was forced to confront his.
As a final note, the process of developing and writing Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft was also an intentional meta-reflection on the ideas the story explores.8 The back-story behind the piece was developed through working closely with OpenAI’s deep research model — a process that led to over a hundred pages of detailed fictional history leading up to the appointment of the first AI faculty member in 2100.9 Yet the correspondence itself was very intentionally developed and written without the aid of AI (apart from occasional grammar and style checking). As a result, it reflects both the emerging affordances of AI, and the affectations of an intellectual artisan who values the craft of the process as much as the product.
It is, I would like to think, a juxtaposition that, looking back from 2100, Professor Elys Grey would approve of.
The complete Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft:
Preamble • Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3 • Postscript
Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better,” essay, 2024, accessed May 9, 2025, https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace.
Daniel Kokotajlo et al., “AI 2027,” 2025, accessed May 10, 2025, https://ai-2027.com/
Mark Daley, “What If Intelligence Were Free?,” Noetic Engines (Substack newsletter), December 5, 2024, accessed May 10, 2025,
Marcia McNutt and Michael M. Crow, “Universities Are the Invisible Hand,” Issues in Science and Technology 41, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 36–39, accessed May 10, 2025, https://issues.org/interview-mcnutt-crow/. McNutt and Crow argue that there is most definitely more to the societal value provided by universities than often meets the eye.
C. Wright Mills, “Appendix: On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” in The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 195–226. There are a number of places on the internet where the compete manuscript is available — including the appendix. A good starting point is the Internet Archive: https://ia600103.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.101543/2015.101543.The-Sociological-Imagination_text.pdf
Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars, The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 211.
Andrew Maynard, “The Artisanal Intellectual in the Age of AI,” The Future of Being Human (Substack newsletter), February 16, 2025, accessed May 10, 2025, https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/the-artisanal-intellectual-in-the-age-of-ai.
The mode of storytelling in Letters from the Department of Intellectual Craft was inspired in part by Julie Schumacher’s highly-recommended novel Dear Committee Members (New York: Doubleday, 2014). Even though it is set eighty-six years earlier, a keen reader will notice that many features of academic culture remain strikingly familiar in 2100!
Andrew Maynard, “The Legacy of Early 21st-Century Academia: A Foresight Report from 2100,” Future of Being Human Initiative (Arizona State University), May 10, 2025, accessed May 10, 2025, https://futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu/2025/05/10/21st-century-academia-and-ai/.