In May, UNIST's new Open Stage series opened with two conversations that approached the AI era from very different worlds: the game of Go and contemporary media art. Together, they offered a sharp answer to a question now facing universities everywhere: when AI can generate answers, what should humans learn to do better?

The first   UNIST Open Stage event, held on May 6, brought together UNIST Collaborating Professor Sedol Lee and Go grandmaster Changho Lee. Under the theme " The Future Foretold on the Board ," the two reflected on how AlphaGo changed professional Go and what that shift reveals about judgment, creativity, and learning.

Their message was not that AI has made human thinking less important. It was the opposite. AI may calculate faster and suggest stronger moves, but people still decide which questions matter, how answers should be interpreted and what values should guide action. In that sense, the board became more than a metaphor for competition. It became a way to think about education in a time when correct answers are increasingly easy to obtain, but meaningful questions are harder to form.

The discussion also turned to failure and resilience. In Go, losses often remain longer than victories. They demand review, humility and a willingness to rethink one's assumptions. That lesson sits close to the educational philosophy behind UNIST's School of GRIT Convergence Studies: students need not only knowledge, but also the capacity to stay with difficult problems, cross disciplinary boundaries and build their own intellectual path.

The second   UNIST Open Stage event, held on May 28, shifted the conversation from the board to possible worlds. Internationally acclaimed media artist and UNIST Collaborating Professor Ayoung Kim led a screening and artist talk under the theme " Expanding Stories and Possible Worlds: Imagination in the AI Era with Media Artist Ayoung Kim ."

Through works including  Delivery Dancer's Sphere (2022) and  At the Surisol Underwater Lab (2020), Professor Kim explored how technology changes the conditions of human life — how people move, work, remember, survive and make choices. Her worlds are fictional, but they are not detached from reality. They make visible the pressures already shaping society: platform labor, algorithmic systems, climate crisis, migration and the uneasy relationship between human agency and technological environments.

“Imagining a possible world is not an escape from reality,” Professor Kim noted. “Rather, it is a way to see the questions we have missed in the present more clearly.”

That idea connected naturally with the first  UNIST Open Stage . Sedol Lee and Changho Lee asked what human judgment means when machines can produce powerful answers. Ayoung Kim asked how imagination can reveal the hidden structures that shape human choices. One conversation began with Go; the other with media art. Both arrived at the same educational principle: the future will belong not simply to those who know more, but to those who can ask deeper, more original questions.

For UNIST, the Open Stage series is more than a public lecture program. It is an expression of the direction behind the School of GRIT Convergence Studies, which aims to support students in designing their own academic pathways around original questions. As AI transforms how knowledge is accessed and produced, UNIST is placing greater emphasis on intellectual breadth, creative risk-taking and the ability to connect science, technology, art, and the humanities.

In that sense, the first two Open Stage events offered a fitting beginning. They showed that the AI era is not only a technological transition. It is also a human one — a challenge to rethink how we judge, imagine, learn, and create.