Over the last two years, we have felt the ground shift beneath our feet in higher education. AI has transformed what we do in college classrooms. The generation of students we now teach, fresh from school, first encountered AI in their formative years and (most) took to it like fish to water. Their reliance on it is exceptionally high. All elements of university life — teaching, learning, thinking — have been touched by this sea-change.

Public conversations around AI and its pitfalls usually circle around its effects on the environment and commerce rather than what it does to our minds. Concerns about its environmental degradation are often raised, for example, the hyper use of water resources as coolants at burgeoning AI data centres. We also hear fears being voiced regarding the large-scale theft of copyrighted material, indicated in recent reports about rare books being purchased, scanned and fed as training data for AI, only to be destroyed afterwards.

These public concerns also extend to the nightmarish scenarios around AI’s capacity for learning, and eventually replacing forms of manual labour, captured in widely circulating images of factory workers in the Global South being forced to wear cameras on their foreheads, effectively training AI robots to replicate their hand movements. “It feels like working in your own grave,” one of the workers remarked, reckoning with his own eventual redundancy.

And most recently, apocalyptic dread around the super-rapid development of super-intelligence, which can quickly get out of hand on a planetary scale, as has been confessed by AI’s big three — Altman, Amodei and Musk.

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© National Herald