Published on 27 Nov 2025

SHAPE x STEM Talk Series: Dr Tobias Rees on the Future of AI for Humanity and the University

In the second run of the SHAPExSTEM talk series, philosopher and founder of philosophical AI R&D lab Limn, Dr Tobias Rees discussed the impact of new forms of knowledge, including AI, on our concept of the human and the university. 

In the first session on 25 November 2025 titled ‘AI, experimental philosophy of the human’, Dr Rees chronicled the development of philosophical thought about what it means to be human, and invited us to consider how AI challenges the dichotomy between human, nature and machine. AI – as an entity that was ‘never alive’ – but has its own agency and is capable of inter-action. AI also offers us a new way to experience time, redefining history from finite and finished to redeemable. 

On 26 November 2025, Dr Rees asked ‘What was the University? Notes on building new infrastructures for radical excellence in research and education’. He examined the collapsing trichotomy between humanity, nature, and technology, a collapse increasingly evident with the development of AI as an entity that mirrors and integrates with human and natural systems, and other fields such as synthetic biology. Dr Rees suggested that in a new era of knowledge itself, universities cannot merely be content with interdisciplinary collaboration, but should strive for ‘postdisciplinarity’ so as to conceive of novel thought within the realm of possibilities beyond our current understanding.

After each session, Prof Jon Wilson led a conversation about AI on both a philosophical and real-world level. With perspectives from Prof Christian Wolfrum, Prof Jacob Stegenga, Assoc Prof Li Boyang and Dr Rees himself, and a lively Q&A session, attendees could truly appreciate the necessity of overlap between Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Science disciplines; neither are adequate to understand the world we live in now. Given the immediacy and relevance of new technologies and systems such as AI in our lives and education, discussants took the opportunity to share deep dives from their respective fields while embracing the need for cooperation across disciplines.


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