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Two Saturdays, A new relationship with AI.
Short Course · Two Saturdays · 8 Sessions
Thrive in the AI Era:
Understand AI, Unlock Opportunities, Become Your Best Self
A two-Saturday course on AI for humans who want to thrive, not just survive
AI is not coming for you.
It is coming for the version of you that never asked the deeper questions.
Most people facing the AI revolution are handed one of two stories: fear or hype. Fear tells you that your job, your relevance, your income are under threat. Hype tells you to move fast and adopt every new tool. Neither story is true enough to be useful.
This course offers something rarer: genuine understanding. Led by one of Australia's leading AI researchers and a lifelong explorer of mind, meaning, and consciousness, Intelligence, Reimagined takes you inside AI at the level that actually matters. Not just what it can do, but what it is. Not just how to use it, but how to think with it, build with it, and remain unmistakably human alongside it.
By the end of two Saturdays, you will understand AI from the inside out. You will see clearly where the real opportunities lie. And you will leave with a vision of yourself not as someone AI is happening to, but as someone shaping what happens next.
Understand what AI actually is and dissolve the anxiety that comes from not knowing
Discover how to use AI as a partner that amplifies your reach, your craft, and your income
Reconnect with what is irreducibly yours, the qualities no model can replicate or replace
The programme
Eight sessions. One complete arc.
Each lecture stands alone and rewards the whole. The arc moves from understanding to action to identity, the three things AI forces every one of us to revisit.
Saturday 1
Knowing · what intelligence really is
1
Knowing
Foundations
What is intelligence, and what is AI?
We begin at the very beginning: what intelligence actually is, and what AI truly means. From there we map the entire landscape of AI as it exists today: machine learning, computer vision, robotics, neural networks, deep learning, generative AI, and agentic systems. By the time this session ends you will have a clear, honest picture of what AI is, what it is not, and why the fear surrounding it so often comes from a fog that genuine understanding dissolves completely.
The foundation that makes everything else make sense
2
Knowing
History
The rise of AI, a human story
From the ancient legends of artificial beings to the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, from the AI winters to the ChatGPT moment that changed everything overnight. This is the story of human ambition, failure, obsession, and breakthrough, told with the honesty it deserves.
Context is the antidote to panic
3
Knowing
How it works
How does AI learn?
Learning with a teacher, learning without one, learning through trial and reward. We map the different modes of machine learning onto what we know of the human mind, conscious, subconscious, and collective, and find something surprising: AI's way of knowing is both alien and deeply familiar.
Demystified. Completely.
4
Knowing
Large language models
Large language models, parrots or genuine minds?
The most contested question in AI today, answered with the first rigorous mathematical proof of its kind. When a model trains only to predict the next word, does it genuinely understand or merely mimic? The answer, and what it reveals about the nature of understanding itself, will surprise you.
Groundbreaking research, made human
Saturday 2
Doing and Being · how to act, and who to become
5
Doing
Causal AI
From correlation to cause
Current AI is extraordinarily good at finding patterns. But patterns are not causes. Understanding why something happens, not just that it does, is the next frontier of AI and the frontier where human judgment still reigns supreme. Causal thinking may be the highest-value skill you can cultivate right now.
The insight that separates the exceptional from the average
6
Doing
Agentic AI · entrepreneurship
The one-person business, powered by AI
For most of history, working for yourself required capital, connections, and luck. AI changes this entirely. An individual with the right understanding can now do what once required a full team, reach audiences that were once impossible to serve, and build a business aligned with their own purpose.
Your permission slip to begin
7
Being
Responsibility · identity
When AI replaces work, who are you?
Bias, fairness, alignment, the ethical landscape of AI laid out clearly and honestly. But beneath the policy questions lies a more personal one: if the role that once defined you is automated away, what remains? This session reframes identity around purpose, contribution, and mission rather than job title or output.
The most important question AI is forcing us to finally answer
8
Being
Consciousness · synthesis
Becoming the cause in an AI era
AI is a master trimmer. Whatever can be automated, replicated, or predicted will be. What remains after the trimming is the most revealing thing: meaning, discernment, love, moral clarity, creative intuition, embodied presence. The qualities that have always defined a fully human life. This final session is an invitation to step fully into yours.
Not just survival. Liberation.
Everything that is included
8 lectures across two Saturdays50 minutes each, with time for questions and reflection between sessions
Lunch on both daysPrepared by Samurai Teppanyaki Hyde Park, one of Adelaide's most celebrated Japanese restaurants
Coffee, tea and snacksThroughout both days, so you can settle in fully and stay present
Course materialsCurated readings and reference notes to carry the learning forward
Lunch is brought to this course by a friendship that began long before AI was the conversation.
Through that relationship, guests receive a quality of hospitality that simply cannot be bought at any price.
Learn more about Samurai Teppanyaki at samurai-teppanyaki.com
About the instructor
Professor Javen Qinfeng Shi
Professor of AI at Adelaide University, Founding Director of the Causal AI Group, and a Director at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. His research spans causation, machine learning, and the philosophy of mind. He is also a lifelong metaphysician whose inquiry into consciousness, causality, and the nature of reality brings a dimension to AI education that is genuinely rare. He is a recipient of the prestigious ACM SIGIR 2025 Test of Time Award for the pioneering work on visually-aware recommender systems, and a winner of the Open Catalyst Challenge at NeurIPS AI for Science 2023, where his team used AI to discover new energy materials.