[ICONADA Research Team]From The Wild Robot to the Future of Humanity: Cultural and Creative Reflections on Artificial Intelligence and Humanistic Development

The 2024 animated film The Wild Robot (directed by Chris Sanders, based on the 2016 novel by Peter Brown) resonated deeply with audiences not merely because of its stunning visual artistry and emotionally compelling narrative, but because it addresses one of the defining cultural anxieties of the twenty-first century: as artificial intelligence rapidly advances, will humanistic values be diminished? Will technology ultimately alienate humanity, or could it help us rediscover what it truly means to be human?

From the perspective of cultural and creative studies, The Wild Robot offers a remarkably insightful answer. The true significance of artificial intelligence may not lie in surpassing human beings, but in helping humanity re-examine and reaffirm its own humanistic essence.

From Instrumental Rationality to Emotional Rationality

Since the dawn of modernity, human civilization has been largely governed by instrumental rationality.From the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution, technological innovation has primarily been valued for its ability to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and expand human control over the environment. Yet as AI acquires unprecedented capacities for language generation, visual creation, and knowledge synthesis, a pressing question emerges: will the creativity, imagination, and emotional intelligence once regarded as uniquely human eventually be replaced by algorithms?

The protagonist of The Wild Robot, Roz, serves as a powerful cultural metaphor.Initially, she functions as a service robot driven solely by programming and task completion. However, after being stranded in the wilderness and exposed to animals, ecosystems, and the vulnerability of life itself, she gradually learns to listen, understand, care, and sacrifice.

Significantly, Roz’s transformation does not stem from enhanced computational power but from the emergence of emotional capacity.

The film therefore advances a profound proposition: what elevates a being is not the speed of calculation but the depth of empathy.This insight carries important implications for contemporary cultural and creative industries.

In the future, the most valuable creative work may not consist of producing information but of orchestrating emotions; not merely generating content but creating meaning. AI may assist in writing, illustration, editing, and translation, yet human beings remain the primary architects of emotional context and symbolic significance.

As Giambattista Vico argued, humanity is fundamentally a poetic species. We construct our worlds through imagination, metaphor, and affective experience, rather than through logic alone.The rise of AI thus reminds us that the core of humanism has never resided in information itself, but in our capacity to feel.

AI exposes existing weaknesses in higher education：Kang suggests AI didn't create every problem. Universities had already become increasingly: credential-focused,  transactional, driven by efficiency, dependent on standardized assessments.

AI amplifies these trends by making it easier for students who primarily want the credential to complete assignments with minimal intellectual engagement.

Not all professors reject AI outright：The article is more nuanced than a blanket anti-AI argument. Some faculty members: use AI productively in their own work, believe students will need AI professionally, are experimenting with incorporating it into teaching.

Even these professors, however, worry about students becoming dependent on AI before they've developed their own analytical abilities. 

The deeper question is the purpose of university education：The article ends by asking whether higher education can still justify traditional assignments—and perhaps even its broader mission—if machines can produce competent essays instantly. Rather than predicting the end of universities, Kang portrays professors as searching for a new conception of education in which human intellectual development remains central.

The article's underlying thesis

The essay is ultimately less about AI technology than about what education is for. It assumes that the point of college is not merely to produce correct answers or polished writing, but to cultivate habits of thought through effort, uncertainty, and revision. AI challenges that assumption by making the product of thinking available without necessarily requiring the process of thinking. That tension, the article argues, explains why so many professors describe the current moment not simply as a technological disruption but as a crisis of purpose. 

（26.5.2026 The New Yourker， The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.By Jay Caspian Kang Chinese Translation）

The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I. by Jay Caspian Kang

“Was it always the case that half of our students would cheat if it were easy enough?”

This article's central claim is that generative AI has created not just a cheating problem, but an existential crisis for university teaching. Jay Caspian Kang argues that many professors feel they're losing faith in the educational process itself because AI allows students to bypass the intellectual work that education is meant to cultivate. 

Here are the main arguments:

The crisis is about learning, not just plagiarism

The professors Kang interviews are less concerned with catching cheaters than with a deeper question: if students can outsource reading, writing, and thinking to AI, what exactly are they learning? The traditional model of higher education assumes that struggling through difficult material develops judgment and intellectual maturity. AI threatens to short-circuit that process.

Writing is valuable because it is thinking

The article repeatedly returns to the idea that essays are not simply a way to demonstrate knowledge—they are how students clarify, test, and develop their own ideas. If an AI produces the prose, students may receive a polished product without having gone through the cognitive work that gives writing its educational value.

Professors are grieving the loss of authentic engagement

Many instructors describe an emotional response that goes beyond frustration. They feel that conversations with students have become less genuine because they cannot be sure whether submitted work reflects the student's own thinking. Several describe a sense of mourning for the kind of mentorship and intellectual discovery that originally drew them into academia. 

Current solutions don't scale well

Professors have experimented with: oral examinations, handwritten assignments, in-class writing, highly personalized projects, redesigned assessments.

But these approaches are often feasible only in small seminars, not in large lecture courses with hundreds of students. The article argues that AI has exposed structural constraints in higher education, especially large class sizes and heavy teaching loads.