AI: democratize the criterion
Faced with the emergence of a truly disruptive technology, initial reactions are usually predictable. Positions oscillate between two radical extremes: closed resistance to preserve traditional forms, or absolute delegation to embrace change blindly, reducing the institution in question to a mere platform for content, applications, and algorithms. As is almost always the case, neither stance resolves a dilemma with perverse tensions, because the answer lies somewhere in between, in a position tied to three fundamental and urgent realities.
The first indisputable fact is that artificial intelligence is, in essence, a tool. Therefore, our use will determine its goodness or evil. However, we are not dealing with an ordinary instrument, but one that has a qualitative progression capable of altering the rules of the game on a large scale. The great collective challenge is to prevent AI from becoming a lever to deepen existing differences or to create a new social, labor, and democratic fracture. If access, control, use, and training become a harmful privilege, we run the risk of automating economic inequality (the abyss between rich and poor), precariousness in work environments, and weakening the quality of our democracies in an ecosystem already collapsed by infoxication.
Secondly, generative AI, the agentic AI, and whatever may come next hold up a mirror to an underlying problem: rethinking from top to bottom how we educate. In a world where factual knowledge (not always reliable) becomes an abundant good, the scarce and valuable resource becomes criterion. The university's contribution can no longer lie in the result or in the mechanical, replicable answer by any algorithm. We must shift towards the quality of questions, the deep understanding of processes, deliberation, and critical judgment. If before its emergence, the review of our teaching methods was a highly recommended practice, today it has become an inevitable imperative. We must definitively incorporate a new step: moving from knowing how to do to knowing what to do with it.
Finally, the university finds itself at the forefront of this historical crossroads. We have the obligation to be proactive in defending the educational legacy received, but at the same time we must act as engines for strengthening a future citizenry that does not lose its way: an equitable, critical, cohesive, and educated society. Faced with a challenge of this systemic dimension, small-scale solutions or those for restricted audiences are not a valid option. Therefore, the challenge is no longer what or how, but for how many. We need scale.
This perspective is not new to us; it shows absolute coherence with a three-decade trajectory. Since our public foundational mandate, the UOC has lived and worked on this unique frontier where knowledge, technology, and society converge. If in the early days of the internet era we contributed to democratizing access to higher education, today it is our turn to lead the rethinking of the entire model to make critical thinking a skill accessible to everyone. This model already has a name today and is underway: UOC.Ωmega. The choice is not accidental. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, evokes the humanist legacy of classical knowledge, and it follows a dot that signifies the threshold of a new extension or version of the university.
This projection implies navigating a series of dilemmas with no single or definitive answer, but which express deep tensions between values, interests, and worldviews. We no longer operate with universally valid solutions; we need contextual, imperfect, and consequential decisions. And this changes the nature of the debate. On this path, the university must learn to move between tensions such as public mandate and sustainability, uniqueness and system recognition, agentic personalization and academic coherence, automation and ethical and human responsibility, or sovereign control and accelerating dependence.
Deciding where we stand is not easy, because, depending on how we position ourselves, we put the very essence of the university at stake, and even more so, that of society itself. We risk the capacity and speed of the future educational social elevator. We need to influence the design of AI if we want it to be inclusive and gender-sensitive, if we opt for an ethical digital infrastructure that speaks Catalan, if we want to generate spaces of freedom for new intellectual dialogues and new educational formulas.
The debate goes beyond evaluations and absences and calls for solutions beyond diagnoses and controls. We need citizen, political, and generational dialogue to build, spaces to experiment, and collective trust to propose. And in the specific university sphere, since space is limited and time is pressing, here is the choice: public mandate, educational uniqueness, agent collaboration, ethical supervision, democratic governance, and scalability.