Cognitive Voyages of an Engineer’s Mind

Описание: This insightful lecture is presented by Professor Detlev Langmann of the Faculty of Design and Data Science, Tokyo City University. The special lecture was conducted for students visiting from MIT World Peace University, India, and was hosted by Professor Hom Bahadur Rijal at Tokyo City University.

In this video, you will learn how the evolving intellectual journey of engineers in a rapidly changing world is shaped by technological disruption and artificial intelligence.

The lecture is structured in three parts.

The first section, “The Engineer’s Voyage,” offers a reflective, lifelong perspective on engineering careers, addressing challenges such as rapid innovation cycles, technology disruptions, leadership values, and social and intercultural dynamics.
The second section, “The Cognitive Voyage,” adopts a techno-symbiotic lens to examine the opportunities and limitations of generative AI (genAI) in intellectual work. It introduces the idea of a human–machine cognitive assemblage, highlighting interactions between open-weight language models, human cognitive biases, and AI constraints.
The lecture concludes with a powerful call for genuine and critical thinking, inspired by Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and Friedrich Gauss’ Eureka moment in 1796.
This video is highly relevant for engineers, researchers, PhD students, and academics interested in cognition and the future of human–AI collaboration.

Video edited by Dhammika Prabhath, PhD Candidate, Graduate School of Environmental and Information Studies