Hello everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here, and I’m really thankful for the invitation. I love Vietnam. I used to live in Ho Chi Minh City back in 2021, where I was briefly associated with Fulbright University. Unfortunately, that was when COVID hit and I had to leave Vietnam, but I’m always happy to be back. I am very happy to be here with you today.

Now I'm at the University of Hong Kong and my role is the Vice President for Teaching and Learning. Most of my days are spent thinking about what the future of the university looks like. What will the university look like for you? I have been a professor for over 40 years - the very first course that I taught was 50 years ago.

I taught my very first chemistry course when I was an undergraduate, so for me there's an enormous past of understanding the university and now I'm looking at what the future will be like for you. What I find very interesting is, when I was in school there was no AI. When I was in school, we were still looking at the very basics of computing. We were already looking at many different philosophical ideas, but we were not as technologically advanced.

The topic today - "Beyond Knowing and Being"- is an exceptionally cogent, important topic, especially for young people such as yourselves. The English language is very ambiguous with those two words: "Knowing" and "Being".
When you think of other languages, German, French, or Spanish,.. both the word "knowing" and "being" have at least two variants. And therefore, there's a much more subtle understanding of those two concepts.

But for you, at your point in your life, these two are among the biggest questions that you are answering, or trying to resolve. These questions will make you into lifelong learners. Because fundamentally, when you are in elementary school, in high school, you are a consumer of knowledge. You are being flooded with knowledge from your professors and, more or less, believe the knowledge that you are receiving is the truth. You trust in the knowledge that you are receiving and you consume it in extremely large quantities while being examined and judged on this.

But then something strange happens. It's not just happening to you physically between the ages of 12 and 20, but also mentally. Between the age of 12 and 20, you stop being a pure consumer of knowledge and you begin to become a producer of knowledge. You become the one who's going to generate this knowledge.An incredibly important thing that has to happen during that period is you have to stop letting the questions come from the teachers - they have to start coming from inside you.

I always say that the biggest problem at the university, whether it's University of Hong Kong or anywhere else I've been, is that the students do not demand enough of us. The professors are always making requirements. The university is always setting curricula. And students don't want to go to class. They find it boring. They want to go and be with their friends, they want to do other things. Why is that? Because we're not answering your questions, we're asking you to answer our questions. So if we want to make the university for the future, if we want to make the university exciting, then we have to address the university with our knowledge. It’s not our questions that you are answering, or trying to imitate our knowledge. There's an essential component that it's not just what you know, but what you are becoming, what you are developing.

When I teach my courses, one of the things I tell the students - whatever the topic - is can you answer me two questions:The first question is: What do I believe today? I could say “what do I know today?”, but I want to say “ what do I believe today?” And second, “On what basis is it that I believe it?”.

Now that basis could be anything. It could be a book that was written 5000 years ago. You could tell me, "I believe the truth is X" - “ I believe that Abraham took his son to the top of a mountain and was willing to sacrifice him”,but I didn't. I say: “well, how do you believe that?”- “I believe it because it's written in this book”. But through that simple act, whether we agree or not, defining what it is that you believe and the basis by which you believe it, allows you to start to ask questions of your own, it allows you to start becoming a lifelong learner. Translating from being a consumer of knowledge to a producer of knowledge.

In order to do this, there's something that's very important. One is, to recognize our identity as human beings. If we think about the word "becoming", or "beyond knowing to being", then identity is an important component of that. And at a minimum, we should understand some identity of who we are as human beings.

I could lecture for hours and hours on this topic, but I'm not going to turn this into an anthropology lecture. However, I do want to point out a couple of things. Often when you listen to a lecture, people will say humans are special because we have opposable thumbs, because we use tools, because we see patterns. And often the discussion stops. But in reality, that can't be enough. Because if I grow up and I figure out how to use a tool, and I use my opposable thumb to operate that tool, and I see all sorts of patterns where I can develop things, and then I die, then humanity doesn't exist. I was merely a flash in the pan.

The crucial second component that’s even more important: there is a compulsion in human beings to communicate. I am here communicating with you today because there's hardly a more enjoyable thing for me to do. You go to coffee with your friends because you want to gossip, you want to talk, you want to exchange stories with one another. You go online, you make TikToks, you create influencers because you want to communicate. Communication, ultimately, is education. Organized communication becomes effective pedagogy, becomes effective communication.

Therefore, if you have your own questions that you're constantly asking, and you find small bits of answers to those questions, then run to the coffee shop and tell all your friends, or you have children and you relate those stories to them, suddenly, humanity emerges. Humanity emerges because of education, which is the ultimate expression of communication.

At your present state, you may be thinking, "Who am I?", not just am I a human or not. These are, in fact, the fundamental questions of being human, of growing, of learning. Those passions are what are going to develop your questions.

Albert Einstein - super brain, relativity, physicist. What did he say about education? When asked: "How should my children become smarter?" - Albert Einstein answered: "You should read them fairy tales." Fairy tales are the stories that you tell young children to explain some aspect about society but using animals, or using a fairy princess, or using some fantasy creature. And they say, "But Professor Einstein, what if we want them to be really intelligent?" And Einstein said, "Read them more fairy tales."And Einstein's point - this super brain, his point was that imagination is more important than knowledge. Because it is in imagination that questions arise. It is in your belief that you can create the future, that you can create new things. That is where questions arise, that is where learning comes,and that is where education is at its best.

Now this doesn't mean that every fantasy that you develop will come true. But many will. Many more will become apparent when you first look at the world. So it's very important that when you enter college, you have a set of questions. Because I guarantee you, if you go into college with a set of questions, you'll want to go to every class. You'll want to read every book.

My father was a blue-collar worker. My mother worked as a clerk in a convenience store. My father used to take me on the weekends into the shop where he worked the machines, which was a plastic factory. There were these big mounds of plastic, and I used to play on them. I'm sure I'm going to get some disease from having played with all these toxic chemicals. But then over lunch, we would sit together, we'd eat a sandwich and I would look through these technical books he had, with all of these crazy pictures of crazy line drawings. And at some point, I realized: “This is my father. This is my father's identity through his work. I want to know more about this”. And in that process, I learned to ask questions about chemistry. I was fascinated by matter. I was fascinated by the forms it could take, how it could transform itself, how it could be transformed by human beings in creative ways. And suddenly I recognized that for me, chemistry was the right mix of creative spirit. I could do architecture and sculpture on the molecular level, but also science. I could blend this art and science together and then it would answer the questions I wanted to answer about myself and about my father, about my life.

That meant so much to me that I - not only went to all of my classes - but went in the evening to other classes. I took a job while I was in high school and in college, working as a pharmacy technician because I wanted to understand the chemistry of pharmacy. I ended up being so obsessed that although I was not a very good student - by the way, I don't want to confuse you, my GPA was very low. But nonetheless, the professors allowed me in my last year to teach a freshman chemistry course, because they recognized that the passion, the questions being asked, the enthusiasm, the love for the subject was more important than whether I got the answer right.

And this is what I want to convey to you. I'm not saying you should be a chemist, maybe you want to be an artist, a historian, a linguist, maybe you want to be a nuclear physicist, whatever it is, there will be something in your world.

I want to close the topic here and open it up for questions. I want to talk a little bit about AI. Because I think AI is in everybody's lips, you hear it every day.

I like to use a song that we teach children in America. It goes like this: "Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O." Because I think we shouldn't take these things too seriously. We should have humor about what's going on. And so when people talk about "Oh, AI is going to replace all the jobs" or "AI is going to take away your life" and “AI, AI, E-I-O.”

The point I want to make is “Don't let someone else control the narrative of your life. For sure, if AI falls away, when we find out that it costs too much energy to run the data centers and - and I can talk in detail about the limits of what AI's epistemological core is - when we find out that AI fails, humans are okay. We've been doing this for thousands of years. If we don't have AI, we might produce a whole lot less waste.

But in reality, we're pretty good, right? And so therefore don't let the narrative flip. The narrative, the reason we have society, as I just explained at the beginning, is that humans love to communicate. Humans love to be with other humans. And so we're never going to let technology replace us with respect to each other, what's called a reciprocal relationship with one another. We don't have to worry about that.

We need to stay focused on the fact that we can use AI, but we will not release the concept of humanity to AI.

Whether AI is with us or not, 10 years from now, 90% of AI will be subconsciously deployed. By that I mean when you go into a taxi that is run by AI, you don't have to know AI. You just go in and say "take me to the park". When you go into your house and there are things that are being controlled by AI, you don't need to know anything about AI. In fact, the vast majority of technology today, you don't really know how it works.

But what you do need to know is the human part. And that is: do I want it to work? Do I want to step into a taxi that's run by AI? Do I want the temperature of my house to be controlled by AI? Do I want the security of my community to be determined by AI? And I'm not biasing this yes or no, but those are the human questions, those are the questions about AI. And so the reason to learn and understand AI is not so you can become a super open-claw programmer, although I'm sure that will have its own advantages. The reason is that these are things that are affecting your humanity and these are fundamental questions that you will want to answer because it's your future. I'll be long gone, the future will be yours, those are the questions you're going to need to answer.

So in closing, I just want to say that, think about the fact that each of you, as you mature, will gain two important things that you never want to get rid of. And one is a sense of agency, a sense of ownership, a sense of responsibility for what it is you do in your life. And the second is your voice. I'm not talking about just your speaking voice, I'm talking about your inner voice, the message you want to convey, the communication you want to share, the education you want to provide the world.

I think if you keep those in context, the future of the world is very bright. There's an enormously promising future and it's through interactions with institutions like Van Lang University and the educational ecosystem that we're going to build this new future together. Thank you very much.

Dr. Luong Thi Phuong Nhi

Hello. Thank you so much for your provocative sharing. And I see that from your keynote, it highlights that developing students is not about knowledge acquisition anymore. It's about developing students’ confidence - confidence in terms of asking questions and developing some critical skills like critical thinking skills, the spirit of inquiring for things around us, observing, asking questions and trying to become more confident in yourself, more independent learners and more importantly, the way that the student can communicate and share ideas. So that is something you shared from your talk. I'm very impressed.

So I have one question I would like to ask. From your HKU's perspective, what are the most critical shifts in teaching philosophy and learning design that truly develop student’s confidence, independence, and assertive ways of expressing their ideas in a very complex and global context? Thank you so much.

Prof. Jay Siegel

Thank you for the kind words and the question. So first, as almost every question, it's context-dependent. But I think when I start my course, one of the other things that I often do in the very first year of chemistry is I ask all the students to give me problems. What are problems in the world today? They don't have to be chemistry problems. They can be any problem. And by surveying them over time, I've got some interesting problems, but I also I get to see a trend in how things are going.

To the question that's asked, that initial act of dropping the wall and asking the students on day one to be a participant, to be a contributor, already starts to build confidence, right? And then from those questions that I design spontaneously the first lecture. I don't have any notes or I don’t make PowerPoint slides. I don't worry about that at all. I let the questions determine what we will talk about in the beginning. Because then I've not only dropped the wall, but I've shown respect. I dropped the wall to ask you questions, but now that I have your questions, I show you the power of the expertise that I have obtained in the years to be able to address your questions and repay your respect. That already makes an enormous difference.

Later in the course, I have office hours not in my office, but I have office hours in an auditorium. Why in an auditorium? Because I don't answer office hours, you do. So students come, somebody has a question, they raise their hand. I don't ask them what the question is, I say please come to the stage. And we come to the board together and ask them to write their questions on the board. And therefore I engage you . I show again, it is not my job to prove to you what I know, it is my job to extract from you what you know and show it to you, right? That process, which then in the classroom is extremely effective, opens people up, gets people to feel good.

Oftentimes I would have these office hours starting at 4:00, they're supposed to go from 4:00 to 5:00. We would sometimes be there at 8:00 at night. Because it's just so much fun, right? Everyone realizes they can learn from each other, everyone starts talking to each other. That is what the real joy of being a scholar is, is that you're a member of a great community. These are the pedagogies. I think great pedagogy has to be shown through great risk-taking on the part of the instructor. The instructor needs to put him or herself in a state of vulnerability and yet survive that vulnerability, thereby conveying to the student the power that comes from knowledge, right?

Dr. Luong Thi Phuong Nhi

Thank you so much Professor Siegel. That's lovely when you say that we try to empower the students to get engaged in the teaching and learning process. Let them have their voice heard during the learning process. And the lecturer as an educator, we should be risk-takers. It means that we need to try and adapt our teaching and learning approach to help our students to maximize their capacity. Thank you so much.

So I see that when you look at things, you always look at things in a very positive way. When you mention Artificial Intelligence, you see that AI is something we can't change, we need to adapt to use AI effectively in our teaching and learning context. So my question is how should universities balance between leveraging AI and developing students' capabilities like critical thinking skills? You talk about the identity, the agency, and the authentic voice. So how should we do it as universities?

Prof. Jay Siegel

So the good news is that we don't have to worry about AI for that. The teaching of agency, the teaching of voice, the teaching of lifelong learning, way predates even me and I'm an old guy, right? So I graduated high school before most of your parents were born. And yet we were already dealing with this issue because the fundamental issue are those two questions: What do I believe and on what basis do I believe it

Now it's changed. It's not a book that was written 5,000 years ago, it's now an AI program that was constructed in some in Google or in Anthropic or somewhere else. But the fundamental questions are the same. Claude, tell me what the boiling point of water is. Claude gives me an answer and I think to myself, hmm, I now know what Claude thinks it knows, I wonder on what basis does Claude know that? And that cycle automatically puts me in control. I am controlling the narrative, I can always reject what Claude says, right? When the salesman comes and tries to sell me something, I don't give up my sense of disbelief. I go in an aggressive mode to question that.

The same thing has to be true with your sources of information. I think that's an absolutely crucial component that we use the technology, but we use the technology with the same way we would ask ourselves, what is it that this thing is telling me is true and on what basis? Is there any real reason to believe that what it's telling me is true?

Dr. Luong Thi Phuong Nhi

Thank you so much Professor Siegel. Another, I think maybe the last question, we talk about AI and the future of learning. And what do you think, will the capabilities become “non-negotiable” for students to obtain in the next five or ten years?

Prof. Jay Siegel

So I sound like a broken recorder, but we're going to go back to this again. I'm fully believe that the engineers who are working with AI will find ways to make it easier to access. Just already in the last two years we've gone from having to prompt ChatGPT through a whole series of questions to an open Claude system where we can say make me an app and it does it for us. So access won’t be a problem.