Hope about AI can be hard to come by—especially in higher ed. It’s helping students skate through a degree, it’s taking away the cognitive friction that keeps our brains sharp and it’s contributing to a surge in academic research that does little to advance knowledge.
But at a recent event Inside Higher Ed hosted with the University at Buffalo, leaders from across industry, policy and higher education found plenty of reasons to be hopeful about artificial intelligence. Our discussions about the future of AI centered on one principal question: How can higher ed be a, if not the, leader in shaping AI for the public good?
We considered how colleges can help their communities have more say about data centers in their backyards and whether robots are coming for our jobs (the consensus among the labor market experts in the room was no—at least not yet). Despite the negative narratives surrounding AI in higher ed, this group of leaders argued that colleges have a very clear role in this moment: to lead with what it means to be human, with all of our faults and neediness. “We’re entering a golden age of humanists,” one particularly sanguine speaker said.
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