Letter: The Garden and the Machine: Iowa State University as the Heart of a New Arcadia
The Garden
I believe what would allow Iowa State University to maintain its traditions while taking a step into the future would be to expand the idea of cultivation to include not just crops but also the deliberate and committed cultivation of minds through novel instructional methods and educational paradigms–comprising a range of efforts that include (but extend beyond) providing university seminars on divergent thinking, K-12 curriculum design for the age of AI, to the gamification and personalization of education for an age where print media and book learning has largely lost its sway.
The concept of stretching the bounds of the garden of agriculture has benefits from a metaphorical perspective. If the ubiquity of machine intelligence in our children’s lifetime will be what the Nile River was to the Egyptians (who built an empire on the foundation of what they planted), future generations will need to learn the art of AI-rrigation, and doing so will require minds able to think interchangeably from a variety of perspectives. Only then will they be able to decide where to direct the flow of intelligence–lest we turn thinking itself, which in the future may become inseparable from collaboration with AI systems, into something as externally defined and set along confined paths as energy is today.
Geniuses do not come to their ideas through raw intellectual horsepower, but by channeling thoughts through inner terrain that is idiosyncratic, uniquely designed, and beautiful. Each child, until taught not to be so by our educational system, is a potential genius, either in the culturally relevant sense as described or in the word’s powerful original sense (Latin: to beget, to generate). It is my hope that the university decides to uphold the pastoral, developmental spirit on which it was founded by granting these ideas and their actualization serious consideration.
Djuno Jung
Ames
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Letter: The Garden and the Machine: Iowa State University as the Heart of a New Arcadia
