Campus Technology Insider Podcast April 2024
Rhea Kelly 29:17
So what would you say are your long, long-term goals for generative AI? What do you have your sights set on, on that sort of, you know, 10, I don't know, 10-year?
Lev Gonick 29:27
I can't see 10-year, 10 years. I think some people think that, you know, from time to time, I've, I've got an opportunity to offer some vision. I mean, I do think that there is, you know, a very long arc of transformation that is underway. I think those are probably more like in the 50-year kind of time horizons. I do think, you know, our relation, our human relationships to machines are going to, now, by, by focus and intentionality, and by market forces and by technology forces, are going to be the central issue for us to be solving. It's part of the maturity of the technology curve that is now knocking at the door. I don't think it'll be knocking at the door, I think it's going to ultimately be sort of basically breaking down the doors of our institutions and the like. And so certainly, figuring out how we, as humans, organize ourselves, our teams are organized to help students with their work and our research labs with their scientific discovery — I think all of that is going to be in radical change mode for the next, certainly three to five years. And I think that the world will largely, I mean, there is a real gap, a real challenge here, which is, you know, those universities that are able to make the shift I think will be in a different category than those who are unable to make the shift. And I don't mean this to be shrill, but I do mean this to be a clarion call, that be careful how much internal debate you want to have before you start experimenting. Because you're only going to learn through experimenting what you need to do for the next three to five years. And no time is going to be the perfect time. Making sure that you have the right guardrails, security, and basically people becoming knowledgeable through trial and error, is probably what needs to happen in the very near term along the way. But over the long term, you know, there will be a very robust, personalized, customizable tutoring for students and for people, we call it, we call them here at ACU "learners." That is to say, people who will not only be seeing YouTube as a place to learn how to fix your washing machine, but also a built-in tutor that actually can support you as you actually go try to fix your washing machine, or any of a million other ways in which we've now simply become dependent. What did we do before there was a YouTube video on how to fix things? The same kind of conversation is going to be coming up in the very near future about the ways in which AI has helped it. I think search is going to be completely turned upside down, it is already well underway right now. So just the ways we become dependent on search, I think search and generative AI are going to be entering into a very interesting and disruptive moment. Lots of business models are going to get broken and reinvented and new ones can emerge along the way there. I think certainly, all services to students are going to be, largely going to have options for a generative AI experience. We know here at ASU students are voting with their feet. They, there are certain groups of students who absolutely want human touch, and there will always be that here at ASU, but students are very comfortable with, certainly, tier, sorry, triaging the first tier of questions they have interacting with machines. They've been conditioned to do so in their consumer lives along the way. And they're also, to be honest with you, sometimes happier to interface with the machine where they don't have to worry about whether it's, they think it's a silly question, or how many times they need to have the question answered over and over again until they better understand that. You know, those are all things where patience, where machines have unlimited patience and unlimited opportunities to provide examples. Those are all the different ways I think, again, we as humans and machines are going to evolve over time, and it's really all about augmenting our human experience.
Rhea Kelly 33:53
Thank you for joining us. I'm Rhea Kelly, and this was the Campus Technology Insider podcast. You can find us on the major podcast platforms or visit us online at campustechnology.com/podcast. Let us know what you think of this episode and what you'd like to hear in the future. Until next time.