January 24, 2026

The Rise of the Answer Machines

By: Brendan McCord

This article was originally published in Financial Times.

Every spring, I take red-eyes from Austin, Texas, to Oxford, England, to teach a graduate seminar on AI and philosophy. When I land, I change into a suit and a tie, something I never did as a start-up founder. Crossing the lawns of St Catherine’s College, I feel like an actor stepping into costume.

What if, instead of turning in finished essays, students turned in evidence of their thinking?

In the seminar room, the students are already seated. Rhodes scholars, philosophers, MIT-trained computer scientists. The kind of people who will build the next generation of AI. Each week, we pair old questions with new technologies: we read Plato or Mill, then hear from someone at Google DeepMind or Midjourney about what’s newly possible.

Read the full article on Financial Times.

More from CNAS

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia