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The programme’s focus this morning poses vital questions. We are in transition from the industrial and knowledge economy and into the technological revolution, with all the consequences from artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of things. The signs of disruption are already evident as whole occupations are transformed, replaced or ended. In the coming decades, up to 90% of our economy might be automated. While many new and yet unimagined roles will be created, it is not however clear if the scale will match those lost through automation.

From the earliest days of our civilization, humanity faced change and dislocation, and yet the human spirit showed its adaptability. Heraclitus said ‘Panta Rhei, ‘everything flows’. Today’s acceleration, however, is unprecedented and risks significant global and human dislocation. In recent years Stephen Hawking has raised concerns about the risks posed to the future of humanity and society by the pace and scale of technological change and our danger of drifting into such an era.

It is clear that the economic, social, political and human implications will raise existential and tangible questions about what we do and who we are. How can we educate for such a world?

University is a preparation for life and thus must help societies and individuals adapt to what is coming. The university will both have to prepare and accompany the student through the whole of life continually equipping them to change to multiple roles and careers. The tangible and the existential questions will not be juxtaposed because future jobs are likely to be those which machines can’t replicate.

The columnist and thinker Dov Seidman says that ‘more work will move from hands to heads to hearts’. And the technological revolution will force us to ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human. For Seidman, the answer to the tangible and the existential rests with one-thing machines will never have, ‘a heart’.

The ‘Idea of a University, written in the middle of the nineteenth century by Blessed John Henry Newman, remains the benchmark for Western Universities. For Cardinal Newman believed in a wide and holistic education over narrow specialisation. A formation which provided a mindset capable of speaking throughout a student’s life, and not just a part. Universities today have a key role in preparing young people for a world of work, but it is much more than that. It has to be a formation, which speaks to the whole of the person, and not just a part and in so doing it will answer the truly burning tangible and existential question of the age. It is not a coincidence that Cardinal Newman’s motto, was ‘Heart speaks unto Heart’.

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