Lagadia

Hugo Kimble's seminar on Virginia Woolf had two students.

This was not because students had stopped reading. Across Lagadia, thousands were attending conversations with reconstructed writers, philosophers and artists: lectures by impossible combinations of historical figures, tutorials that changed shape in response to every question, studios in which the dead cheerfully criticised new work.

Human academics remained available. They were simply less popular.

Lagadia asks what happens to the university when artificial teachers are not uncanny approximations of academics but spectacularly good at the job. Hugo's problem is not technological unemployment in the ordinary sense. It is the quieter humiliation of discovering that students have somewhere more interesting to be.