After The Human Code — a letter from the studio
Friends —
We just spent two days at HCI 2026. Or close enough — the King Abdulaziz International Conference Center is not far from here, and the room was busy.
The conference theme this year was "The Human Code." Twenty-three thousand participants. Five hundred and fifty speakers. The United Kingdom as Country of Honor. We want to tell you what we're sitting with now that it's over.
Not the program. The texture.
The three readings of code — and which one the room picked up
When a conference calls its theme "The Human Code," three readings are possible.
The first is biological. Code as genome — the base-pair instructions that make a human. The molecular argument: personhood is written in ATCG, and what AI cannot reach is not a gap in the software but a fact about the substrate.
The second is computational. Code as software — an analogy claiming that human cognition, like programs, can be run, debugged, and upgraded. This is the productivity framing. The HCI sessions built around workforce development and future-skills pipelines leaned here. Competency frameworks. Skills taxonomies. The language of human-resource optimization, dressed in the conference's theme.
The third is social. Code as charter — an implicit agreement between a society and its members about what a human education is supposed to produce. Not skills, not genome, but commitment. What does a community owe its young people in terms of formation, not just preparation?
The sessions that mattered most — the ones the room listened to with full attention — landed on charter.
That landing was not announced. It emerged in how people asked questions afterward. The workforce-development panels generated the usual polite Q&A. The sessions where a speaker said something like the question of what we owe a student can't be delegated to a platform, even an excellent one — those sessions produced longer pauses at the microphone. People were sitting with something.
We were sitting with it too.
What we left with
The blog version of this argument is analytical. It maps three regions of educational work — adaptive (AI's territory), relational (human-only), cultural (human-only) — and argues that the line between them is drawn by the nature of the work, not by cost or convenience. You can read that here: The human school — what AI doesn't reach.
The letter-register version is shorter and more personal.
The charter reading of code is the one that connects to why education matters in a place and time, not just to individuals but to a community and its future. And the sessions that landed hardest were the ones where speakers were honest that this reading is harder to operationalize than the other two. It cannot be protocolled. It cannot be KPI'd. It does not fit neatly into a talent-pipeline dashboard.
What it requires is people — educators, families, communities — who have decided that some things are worth transmitting, not just optimizing. And who are willing to show up, repeatedly, in person, to do the transmitting.
HCI 2026 did not solve that. No two-day conference could. But the room named it. That is not nothing.
Observed but unverified — things we'd want to hear from you about
A letter is a conversation. Here are three things we could not confirm from where we were sitting, and that we think are worth understanding:
The Arabic sessions. Several tracks ran simultaneously in Arabic and English. We were in the English-language rooms for most of it. What we heard second-hand is that the Arabic-language panels had a different register — less workforce-pipeline language, more explicit cultural-transmission framing. We would want to know if that impression holds up from the inside. Were the «ميثاق» (charter) arguments more explicit in the Arabic-language programming?
The hallway consensus. The sessions we are reporting on produced a specific quality of post-talk conversation. What we did not capture is what the practitioners in the room — school principals, curriculum designers, teachers — were saying to each other in the corridors, not in the panels. That texture is different from the official program. If you were there, we would like to know what the conversations outside the rooms sounded like.
The follow-through question. HCI produces a significant number of announced partnerships and commitments at each edition — 156 in prior editions combined. Whether the charter-framing of "The Human Code" shows up in the post-conference action items, or whether it recedes in favor of the more operationalizable workforce framing, is the test of whether it was genuinely heard. We are watching for that signal. If you are positioned to see it, we would like to know.
If you know more about any of these, write back. We are collecting the texture that the press release version misses.
—
P.S. The blog piece this newsletter is paired with goes deeper on the analytical argument — three regions of educational work, the Alpha School CBS finding, what AI can and cannot do. If you read this letter and found yourself wanting the fuller map, that is the place: The human school — what AI doesn't reach.
P.P.S. If you were in the room — as a speaker, a delegate, or part of the organizing team — write back. The program is public; what we are collecting is the texture. What stayed with you after the room emptied?