Empowering the Future: Advancing Adult Education for a Responsible Future

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming higher education—reshaping teaching, research evaluation, and faculty identity. Beyond a set of tools, AI functions as a sociotechnical power that reorganizes knowledge, labor, and governance. Faculty now adapt to algorithmic expectations, managing visibility, engagement, and productivity through machine logics. This article argues that faculty development must move beyond functional upskilling toward critical engagement with AI's ethical and political implications. It introduces a layered model of AI literacy—functional, critical, ethical, and civic—that repositions literacy as a multidimensional capacity enabling faculty to use, interrogate, and reshape AI systems. Adult education emerges as a crucial space for cultivating the judgment and collective agency needed to confront algorithmic governance. The article calls on higher education to treat faculty development as a site of resistance and democratic possibility in an algorithmic age.