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What the AI Expert Tells His Kids (And the Rest of Us)
May 19, 2026
Professor Aron Lindberg is focused on what technology can do for us, but concerned with what we might lose in the process. Lindberg chairs the Information Systems and Analytics area at Stevens Institute of Technology’s School of Business and is helping rework the curriculum around integrating business and AI. His days are spent studying how humans and AI work together, and how organizations can adapt when the nature of work itself is changing.
“The core of human life is other people and your relationships with those people,” he said. “Loving and caring for those people in reciprocal relationships. Business and technology are only useful to the degree to which they support those things.”
Those words land with particular weight in education, where questions about how AI may support or harm teaching and learning have defined the conversation in 2026. What surprised me was how little distance there was between what he’s grappling with as a researcher, educator and a parent. He is confronting the same problem in all three places. His answer in each case is the same: Protect the imagination, the productive struggle, and the human.
The Case for Collaborative Intelligence
For decades, complex work like semiconductor chip design was a craft. Then AI-assisted design tools arrived in the early 2000s, and Lindberg studied what happened next.
At times, designers found themselves unable to explain their own work. “The process becomes more about experimenting with inputs and outputs rather than understanding why the AI generates what it does.”
Educators are watching something similar unfold. A RAND Corporation study published in March 2026 and reported by EdWeek, found that nearly 7 in 10 students believe AI is eroding their critical thinking skills, and yet they keep using it anyway. RAND researcher Heather Schwartz explains what is being traded away: “that initial struggle, the blank page … like a tiny moment of friction,” that is where the learning actually happens. The way AI removes that friction is precisely the problem.
Rebecca Winthrop, of the Brookings Institution, whose recent report drew on a year of conversations with hundreds of educators, students and policymakers worldwide, found something more fundamental is eroding. “The most worrisome risk we uncovered,” she said on a recent podcast, “is a degrading of trust in the student-teacher relationship. If you do not have trusting relationships in the teaching and learning space, you really can’t build … good quality education.”
Lindberg is not surprised by any of this, but he is also not panicking. “I don’t think we should be trying to compete with AI on things that AI will be better at than we are. But at the same time an AI can’t be a human and therefore can’t be in a relationship with other humans.”
What his research is building towards is what he calls collaborative intelligence: designing AI systems that keep human goals, relationships, and values at the center, rather than letting the technology determine what we optimize for.
Learning by Venturing
In a classroom, applying collaborative intelligence might mean a student who starts with a real question and then uses AI to build something they couldn’t have built without it, like a fully functioning web app deployed online, rather than just a slide deck describing the idea of the web app. The thinking and curiosity are theirs, and AI makes it more powerful.
Lindberg has built his entire teaching philosophy around this approach. “The biggest mistake a young person can make is to rest on their laurels and say, ‘AI will take care of that for me.’ Because maybe it will, but nobody will pay you once AI does it for you.”
What he does in the classroom is what he calls learning by venturing. Students solve real-world problems, interview stakeholders, understand their pain points and leverage AI to design solutions. “No dummy exercises, but real solutions to real problems.”
The School of Business hosted Stevens’ second annual High School AI Pitch Competition, which drew more than 100 submissions from students across the country. This year’s winner, a high schooler from New Jersey, built GradeLift, an AI-powered revision coach that analyzes a student’s draft and offers feedback aligned to the teacher’s rubric, without writing a single word for the student. The thinking stays with the writer and AI just makes it stronger. It’s collaborative intelligence, applied by a teenager who hasn’t yet started college.
This fall, the university is launching a new School of Computing, backed by $36 million in philanthropic support, that blends computational expertise with finance, life sciences and engineering. As President Nariman Farvardin said: “The real competitive advantage lies in integrating AI with disciplinary expertise.”
For Lindberg it starts with cultivating a posture toward imagination. “What are the things we can create that are so complex and so fantastic that it would have been unfeasible without AI?”
What He Tells His Kids
That approach is one he is also living out at home. He is not keeping AI away from his children. He is fostering a way of thinking that will allow them to know what to do with it. With his six-year-old son, Lindberg builds radio-controlled cars, works through chess books and takes on LEGO projects that stretch across weeks.
“The starting point is my sons, and human beings in general, imagining what they want the world to look like, creating a plan and then executing towards that plan. You can slot AI into that process. But AI is secondary to humans. I prefer ‘AI in the loop’ to ‘human in the loop.’”
What We Actually Need Right Now
“I’m a scientist, but these days I sometimes wish I was a science fiction writer,” Lindberg said. “Because in science we think about the past. But now we need to think about and really imagine the future to shape it.”
For educators and communicators alike, that is the job. We help people find language for where they are going before the path exists. It meant something to hear an AI researcher say that imagination might not only be the thing machines can’t touch, but the thing that lets us do our best work alongside them.
“Preparing for an uncertain world requires us to be entrepreneurs, to be critical thinkers and to engage in the process of creating that world,” he concluded, “rather than waiting for the world to take shape and then figuring out how to adapt.”
Aron Lindberg is Associate Professor and Chair of the Information Systems and Analytics area at the Stevens Institute of Technology’s School of Business. His research on digital innovation, platform governance and AI-enabled collaboration has been published in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.
Julian Vinocur is a Vice President in FINN’s Education Practice, supporting clients from early childhood through higher education and beyond.
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