Guest talk with Simon Buckingham Shum, Connected Intelligence Centre, University of Technology Sydney, AUS

June 13, 2025

The global “polycrisis” has been defined as “the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects“. Exacerbating the polycrisis is the mainstream arrival of generative AI, which has enchanted and dismayed in equal measure. While the complexity threatens to overwhelm our sensemaking capacity, we can look to a long tradition of computational tools that “augment human intellect” (Douglas Engelbart), of which GenAI is just the latest development. So even as GenAI profoundly unsettles education, it must surely be true that education has pivotal roles to play in equipping citizens for the future. As we identify those learning and sensemaking challenges, it thus becomes clearer where GenAI might be harnessed as a tool for personal and collective intelligence. Furthermore, diagnoses of the underlying drivers of the polycrisis (sometimes termed “the metacrisis”) point to additional uses for dialogic AI.

Within these framings, the guest talk will take a look at examples of conversational agents that are both promising and provocative as higher education considers how to equip graduates with the tools needed to engage the poly/metacrisis. The aim of the guest talk is to share these arguments, and tools-in-progress, welcoming dialogue with diverse colleagues.

Speaker Biography

Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics at the University of Technology Sydney where he serves as inaugural director of the Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC). CIC is a transdisciplinary R&D centre inventing, evaluating and scaling personalised feedback to tens of thousands of students through the human-centred co-design of learning analytics and AI. Prior to UTS, he was a founding member of the UK Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. Simon’s career-long fascination with software’s ability to make thinking visible has seen him active in diverse fields including Human-Computer Interaction, Hypertext, Argument Visualisation and Educational Technology. He has worked over the last decade to help establish the field of Learning Analytics, and most recently has been contributing to higher educational responses to GenAI. This background always draws his attention to the human factors that determine the effective adoption of new tools for thinking, and the kinds of futures they might create at scale. 

Speaker Webpage

https://Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

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