CHICAGO — While instructors and administrators weigh if and how to incorporate artificial intelligence into coursework, the emerging technologies pose broader existential questions about the role of higher education.
Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT are poised to disrupt white collar and professional work, according to Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King's College London, who has written a handful of books on tech’s impact on work. That, in turn, could have important ripple effects on colleges, which have long served as the training camps for those workers, he said.
Susskind spoke at a keynote event Monday during the Higher Learning Commission’s annual conference in Chicago. He pointed to automation’s revolutionary impact on industries like agriculture and manufacturing — which has created huge gains in output with far fewer jobs — and to more recent advances in fields such as medical diagnostics.
“We tend to think of the work that blue collar workers do as being relatively routine, relatively straightforward, relatively process-based, relatively easy,” Susskind said. “Conversely, we think of what white collar workers do as requiring subtler faculties — things like creativity, judgment, empathy.”
AI has yet to replicate those functions of the human mind. But it doesn’t necessarily need to when trying to solve some of the problems in professions such as medicine, accounting, architecture and law.
Blindness to this state of things amounts to what Susskind called the AI “fallacy.” That, he said, is “the mistaken assumption that the only way to develop systems that perform tasks at the level of human beings is to somehow copy, replicate or imitate the way the human beings perform that task.”
AI doctors, lawyers and accountants
With massive increases in computing power and data storage, AI can perform some of the same tasks through the blunt forces of processing and analysis that higher ed has traditionally helped to hone in humans.
“So a whole realm of activity that, until very recently, we thought was out of reach of these technologies turns out not to be,” Susskind said. “And it's often concentrated in the world of white collar work.”
The best response to this potential disruption is training and education, according to Susskind.
This could mean focusing education on preparing students for tasks that can’t yet be automated or to outperform AI systems.
“There are large areas of human activity that lie beyond the reach of even the most capable technologies,” Susskind said, pointing to interpersonal communication, judgment and empathy, among other areas.
Colleges could also focus on training students to build the AI systems that might take over more human activity.
Higher ed responds to AI advances
Many higher education officials are anticipating AI’s potential to change the sector. HLC devoted multiple panels to the topic at its conference, and the accreditor placed AI — and the “promises, opportunities, and threats” it poses — at the top of its annual higher ed trends list for 2024.
For institutions, AI could be incorporated into teaching, learning and personalized instruction and in all the areas of the enterprise that other organizations are looking at deploying it, HLC noted in its forecast.
At one of the conference panels, officials with Grand Canyon University described how they developed an institution-wide AI strategy tied to its mission.
The Arizona for-profit started its process with a committee, as so many colleges do. Its early stages focused on brainstorming and surveying stakeholders to see what their needs were.
That process churned out ideas such as using AI to develop curriculum content and monitor real-time student feedback. The committee went on to build a strategic model for how AI might be used at Grand Canyon, as well as to help develop resources for staff and faculty.
“No matter what decisions we make around AI — and those will change — and no matter if our perspective shifts around AI, the core of who we are as an institution is not going to shift,” Meredith Critchfield, dean of Grand Canyons's college of education, said at the panel Monday.
