This course enables participants to explore two dimensions of their lives – talents and deep vocation – at the very moment when artificial intelligence and the wider polycrisis are transforming work, education and everyday choices. Today’s students are the first generation making their life decisions alongside AI: many of the professions they will hold do not yet exist, while recommendation algorithms and AI companions increasingly shape what people want, admire and choose. Individuals who know their talents and vocation carry an inner compass that cannot be outsourced to a machine – and is far better prepared to make personal, academic and professional choices.
Talents are one’s “vehicle”: we define them broadly to include not only competences but anything that defines the quality and range of one’s life – character, humanity, wisdom, genius. Deep vocation is the “road”: the direction and goal of the journey, akin to the Japanese Ikigai (the reason for being). Since “what you can be paid for” is moving fast in the age of AI, vocation must be anchored in something more stable than the current job market.
AI enters this journey in a double way. Used consciously, it is an amplifier of our time and talents; used unconsciously, it becomes an anaesthetic that erodes attention and replaces the very effort out of which abilities and character grow. The course asks not whether to use AI, but from what “centre” we use it. Paradoxically, the age of AI raises the value of what is deeply human: character, judgement, care, presence, moral imagination and the capacity for meaning. Their holistic development unlocks “higher human potential” – personal, professional and societal mastery – and can be lived in a modest, natural way (“natural good essence”).

Credits are awarded for: 1) active and continuous participation, including small group work; 2) brief presentations or sharing; 3) written self-reflection, developed from the very beginning of the course (in place of a standard examination). The final version must be sent to the instructor’s e-mail by 14 November 2026 at the latest; later submissions will not be evaluated.