Campus Technology Insider Podcast May 2024
Rhea Kelly 11:08
It sounds like laying the foundation was sort of your step one. What is your vision for step two? Once the, the foundation has, is set, what, what is your vision for what's next?
Shlomo Argamon 11:22
Well, the, the, the aim, our aim in terms of education, is to prepare our students for the new work and social environment that AI is facilitating, that AI is, is catalyzing in the world. And this is not just teaching our students how to use AI as a tool so that when they graduate, they'll be able to use it in their jobs and so forth. Because, first of all, the AI that we teach a freshman today is not the same AI that's going to be available four years later when they graduate college. It's going to be changing tremendously. So first of all, we have to give them the conceptual tools to be able to approach the new AI, not just when they graduate also, but two years later, four years later, 10 years later. It's going to keep changing. So they have to have the conceptual tools to be able to grow and to learn with these technological changes, but also to get the, the tools to be able to be agile, lifelong learners. Because so much in, in terms of professional life, and in terms of society, is going to continue to be changing very, very rapidly. One of the key things in AI, and you've mentioned generative AI a few times, one of the things that a lot of people talk about is disinformation and misinformation from, from generative AI. And there's intentional disinformation; there's also unintentional disinformation. You ask generative AI to, to give you an answer about something, and sometimes it just makes things up when it can't give you a good, accurate answer. We need to teach our students how to think and look at things critically in a way that allows them to navigate this much more perilous, as it were, information landscape, but also without becoming cynical and mistrusting of everything that they see as well. So the goal on the education front is to be able to teach students these, you know, more, you know, general skills that allow them to both use and to critically deal with AI as they move forward. And related to that is just simply bringing together people from across the university, you know, in all different fields. There's a sense in which AI is something that, since it touches all professions and all disciplines to some extent, I believe that it can help with addressing the malaise, in a sense, that a lot of higher education sits in. We hear it today a lot of discussion about the crisis in higher education, from, from various, you know, and there are, there are various ways of thinking about it and various problems that people talk about. The integration of AI in a broad and centralized fashion across the university, I think it helps to address this because it can help to bring people together across the university. We need to think about the relationship between people and technology, which means also thinking very deeply about the relationship between people and people. And bring together people, in different disciplines across the university, around issues of shared import for them. While the implications are different from field to field, the basic principles of how we need to think about AI, these principles also of critical thinking and critical analysis, are general. And it gives us a direction for what we should be teaching our students as sort of at a deeper level than just the professional knowledge and skills in their particular discipline, but really how to think. And this is something that I think we've lost the way a little bit over the last couple of decades in higher education. I personally see things as having, that higher education has a little bit of an identity crisis, in terms of, what are we trying to be? What are we trying to teach? And I think this may, and this is my hope, be something that helps us to regain a focus and revitalizes higher education.