A timely and insightful book offers new possibilities for education as artificial intelligence reshapes talent, opportunity, and society in India and beyond
As machine intelligence rapidly transforms how we learn, work, and imagine the future, noted author and academic Saikat Majumdar presents a compelling new book, Open Intelligence: Education between Art and Artificial. This incisive and accessible work asks essential questions about the evolving relationship between education, human potential, and technological change.
In Open Intelligence, Majumdar interrogates the long-standing tensions between passion, college, and career, and explores how ideas of talent, merit, and personal growth are being redefined in an AI-driven world. Charting AI’s rapid move from particular domains of Artificial Competent Intelligence (ACI) toward the possibility of a larger Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the book considers the skills, values, and ethical frameworks that will be essential for individuals and institutions alike as machine intelligence approaches the latter.
Blending storytelling with cutting-edge research, Open Intelligence offers a panoramic yet deeply grounded critique of the Indian higher education system. It highlights how AI is not only creating new opportunities but also reshaping patterns of privilege, exclusion, and social inequity. Majumdar argues that unless education evolves in thoughtful and collaborative ways with technology, existing disparities will deepen in unforeseen ways.
A sequel to Majumdar’s widely read College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), Open Intelligence is written for a broad audience—including students, parents, educators, policymakers, and employers—anyone invested in the future of learning and growth.
As Majumdar reflects, “How do we retain a human and humane future as the artificial looms larger and larger all around us? As someone who has thought about and worked with higher education internationally over the last two decades, this was a question that has drawn me sharply. Extensive research as well as direct interaction with students, professionals and institutions in multiple cultural and national contexts have made me believe that we can survive an AI-driven world if we are able to heighten our idiosyncratic humanity and shape our own unique narratives. The AI revolution may be inevitable, but its impact on society is still, to a large degree, in our hands. This book tries to outline the different ways we can shape our learning, education and professional training to that end.”
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist, columnist, scholar, and educator. He is Professor of English & Creative Writing and Head of the Department of English at Ashoka University. A former faculty member at Stanford University and a Fellow at Wellesley College and the Institutes of Advanced Study in Budapest and Stellenbosch, he is the author of five novels and four works of nonfiction.
