① The Well-Rehearsed Play

Last winter, I needed to learn robotics. A group of students in my lab wanted to build a walking, talking, object-gripping robot, and I, as a business school professor with no engineering training whatsoever, needed to understand enough of the field to guide them.

There was a time, not long ago, when this would have all started at a bookstore. I would have brought home a few thick introductory texts, cracked open chapter one, and begun the slow climb: the history of automation, the taxonomy of actuators, degrees of freedom. I would have highlighted things I didn't understand, then highlighted things I didn't know I didn't understand. Months later, maybe, I'd have a rough sense of the terrain.

Instead, I described to an AI what I wanted to build. That was it. Within minutes I had a map: what to learn, in what order, what to skip entirely. I gave it a destination, and it gave me directions. Two weeks in, I had the kind of contextual understanding I once assumed required years of formal training. Shallow compared to a real engineer, no question. But functional. Navigable.

It was genuinely exciting. And then the excitement curdled into something else.

Because if I could do this, a middle-aged professor fumbling into an unfamiliar field, then so could my students. With their own courses. With my course.

I teach at one of South Korea's most prestigious universities: Hanyang University Business School. I've won teaching awards. Students rate me well. I say this not to boast but to make a point: what I'm about to describe is not a crisis of competence. It is the system.

Every week, I stand in front of seventy students and deliver the same material at the same pace in the same direction. Some of them already know what I'm saying. Some of them are lost. Most are somewhere in between, passively absorbing just enough to pass the exam. I used to believe this was the best I could offer: a knowledgeable human being, live in the room, fielding questions in real time. Two years ago, that might still have been true. Certainly.

It isn't anymore. An AI can adjust its explanations to each student's level. It can rephrase a concept ten different ways. It never moves on until you're ready. I can't do any of this for seventy people simultaneously. And I know this isn't theory, because I just lived through it myself, on the other side.

A recent article in one of Korea's major newspapers reported on a growing debate across university forums. Students are arguing about classroom etiquette; some complaining about classmates who zone out during lectures, others responding bluntly: why pay attention when AI can teach better? The two sides think they're disagreeing. They're not. They're both describing the same broken thing.

Here is what I find hardest to admit. Everyone in the room already knows. I know. The students know. We walk in, we take our positions, we perform, and we do this very elegantly. I perform the act of teaching. They perform the act of learning.

We do this because the syllabus requires a certain number of hours, and their transcripts require a certain number of credits. Not because anyone believes this is the best use of the time.

Somewhere along the way, my classroom became a theater, and my lectures became a well-rehearsed play. The script hasn't changed. But the audience has stopped believing it.