Campus Perspectives

The Value of Slowing Down

In an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the human capacities formed through the liberal arts and relationships become more essential, not less. William & Mary is committed to a human-centered approach to AI that prioritizes human needs, values and well-being. The university leverages its liberal arts foundation and interdisciplinary strengths to foster critical thinking about generative AI, promote responsible innovation and prepare students to be ethical leaders and engaged citizens.

You can ask a machine a question and get a reasonable answer in seconds. It will be clear, organized and probably correct. It will also cost you nothing — no discomfort or vulnerability. This is useful, but there is a quiet danger in it. We start to believe this is how all knowledge works: Frame the input correctly, get what you need and move on. This shortcut mindset doesn’t stay in our AI apps; it bleeds into how we approach everything — including friendship.

There is an older tradition that works differently. The humanities are often dismissed as an outdated luxury in education, yet they offer something AI cannot: the discipline of the encounter. They hand us stories of people who lived in times nothing like ours — St. Augustine wrestling with a divided will, Frederick Douglass claiming his dignity or Jane Austen revealing the quiet weight of social expectation. These aren’t texts to be summarized; they are encounters that require a specific posture. They ask us to sit with the unfamiliar and resist the urge to immediately categorize, dismiss or make it about us. This kind of reading trains a muscle: the ability to attend faithfully to a story that isn’t yours. It is a habit, and it transfers.

This is where the humanities and friendship converge. The humanities invite us to be faithful readers of inherited stories; friendship asks us to become faithful readers of lives still in progress. But friendship asks something harder still — not only to read, but to be read. To be known is to give up control over how our stories are seen.

In our AI-shaped age, we are increasingly tempted to bypass the hard work of knowing. A machine offers something that looks like being known with no risk, and we are often lonely enough to take the deal. But the habit of bypassing difficulty doesn’t stay intellectual; it becomes relational. Terence Tao, widely known as the world’s best mathematician, compares AI to being dropped by helicopter at a destination you once had to hike to. Simply put, the view’s better when you’ve worked for it. If that’s true of mathematics, how much more is it true of the things that form us as people?

The shortcut is appealing because a machine offers attention without confrontation. But the risk of being seen is exactly where formation happens. A chatbot can remember every detail you’ve shared, but remembering isn’t knowing. Knowing requires being changed by what you receive.

When a friend shows up, they show up with skin in the game. That mutuality is where friendship flourishes.

In a world that is getting faster and more complex, the most countercultural thing we can do is slow down. Read something hard. Stay in a conversation that is uncomfortable. Let someone know you before you’ve figured yourself out. The humanities give us the tradition for this; friendship gives us the practice. Neither promises a clean output, but both promise something better.

Dane Pascoe Ph.D. ‘19 is the deputy clerk to the W&M Board of Visitors.

Using Tools Wisely

The rise of AI has strengthened my conviction that human connections are what matters. As these technologies become more powerful, it is easy to focus on technical skills; we know how to teach those, and have done it for years. Certainly, students must understand what AI can do well and where the limits lie, but the deeper challenge is human, not technical.

What AI should not replace is empathy and responsibility. It should not decide what is worth caring about or how competing values should be weighed in a shared community. Those are human questions, and they require the kind of education that brings students into genuine relationships — and conversations — with other people.

That is why I believe preparing students for an AI-driven world means much more than just teaching them to use new tools. It means helping them become the kinds of people who can use those tools wisely. They need technical fluency, certainly, but they also need the relational intelligence to listen well, collaborate with others and understand lives unlike their own. They need critical habits of mind that lead them to question the easy answers and recognize unintended consequences. That is also the spirit in which we are preparing for a new bachelor’s degree in applied AI: not simply as technical training, but as an education grounded in this human paradigm.

For me, this is where the liberal arts and data science most clearly meet. In an age of intelligent machines, the distinctly human capacities we cultivate through friendship and mentorship are what become indispensable.

Dan Runfola is chair of data science and Adina Allen Term Distinguished Associate Professor of Data Science in the W&M School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics.