Experiential Learning at the Crossroads of América + LLMs(!?)

Here's a picture of some of Havana's famous classic cars, which I took during a trip to Cuba in 2023, when I went with a research group made up of social and economic historians.

In some ways, the trip was a bit of a vision quest for me.

I arrived hoping to better understand a place that had always hovered at the edges of my own story. Raised in South Florida, I grew up surrounded by conversations about Cuba, exile, revolution, memory, and loss. Yet I had never experienced the island for myself.

What I found was a crossroads.

Havana felt like a place where multiple worlds meet: Europe, Africa, and the Americas; empire and revolution; memory and forgetting; decay and resilience. Walking through the city, I was struck by how many seemingly contradictory realities could coexist in the same place.

I've spent much of my life trying to navigate similar crossroads.

As a teacher, writer, and life-long learner,  I've always been drawn to questions that live between disciplines, identities, codes and languages. My work has taken me from literature to economic history, from English to Spanglish, philosophy to cultural studies, from archives to classrooms. Again and again, I find myself searching for connections between worlds that are often treated as separate.

History tells us that during the industrial revolution, or because of it, the shape of human animal societies changed. 

Like many people, I've found the emergence of Large Language Models both exciting and unsettling. Its capacity to generate ideas, patterns, and connections is extraordinary. Its capacity to amplify misinformation, inequality, bias, and alienation is equally real.

My hope is that we can use AI not to replace human thinking, but to deepen it.

What excites me most is the possibility of using new tools to discover unexpected connections across fields, histories, and communities, to help us see patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. To imagine new worlds of work, communal belonging, and communicate with one another no matter the language.

In many ways, that's what Havana taught me.

The city reminded me that understanding rarely emerges from a single perspective. It emerges from encounters. From conversations. From the productive friction that occurs when different histories and ways of being in the world come into contact, like the disparity between countries and GDPs, or needing to hang my laundry and design a college class at once, walking to the plaza for Wifi but then meeting new friends.

None of the new tools can do the most important thing. It can't live the experience.

It couldn't walk Havana's streets. It couldn't feel the weight of history in a crumbling building, hear Bad Bunny drifting from an open window, or grapple with the contradictions that make, a place, and a life, so compelling.

That's still our work. Even as the LLMs alter job titles.

Somewhere between Havana, Flushing, Miami, and Silicon Valley, I suspect Che is laughing at me and us all.