THE BAMBOO PROTOCOL

A particular argument is consolidating across policy documents, corporate announcements and political speeches. It runs, in essence, as follows: artificial intelligence now thinks more efficiently than academics; therefore, the portions of the university dedicated to critical, humanistic and interpretive inquiry are redundant; therefore, what remains of higher education should be reorganised around practical STEM provision aligned with economic productivity. This is not a neutral observation about technological capability; it is a political-economic manoeuvre. The genuine capacities of large language models as cover for the defunding of precisely those institutional spaces where power is interrogated, where knowledge is held accountable to lived experience, and where thinking is permitted to be slow, contradictory and unresolved.