I saw a bit more of the future of AI at work this week, and it shows every sign of vastly boosting productivity, while also causing a crisis of meaning in many organizations.
Mollick, E. (2023). Setting Time on Fire and the Temptation of the Button
This may seem premature, given the nascent state of generative AI as a consumer product, but I feel like I can see early glimpses of this issue in higher education. We’re not there yet, but what happens when everyone in the world has access to a personal tutor and universal teacher in their pocket?
It seems, to me at least, that universities are nearing a moment of reckoning, and are going to have to find a response to the question, What is the purpose of higher education?
Comments
2 responses to “A crisis of meaning in higher education”
Hi Filip. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree with your concerns about AI and productivity. I tend to use that word as a shortcut to encompass ‘work that we care about’, although I can see how that’s problematic when the common usage could be almost the opposite. And while my own experience is that generative AI helps me to do better work, faster, I don’t think that this is the real endgame. In my experience, AI is also helping me to be more careful and thoughtful in my writing. For someone else, it may mean that they can do the same work more quickly, allowing them to spend more time thinking, or reading, or walking. It’s enabled me to slow down and reflect on some of what I want to say, in ways that don’t come naturally to me. I don’t know enough about the potential impact on patterns of production and consumption, and will need to think about that a bit.
Regarding the part of the quote that I highlighted (which is really the part that’s aligned with what I am thinking about the most), I do think that generative AI is causing a crisis of meaning in higher education. And that’s because I see generative AI as having the potential to take on many of the professional tasks we (used to) think are the sole domain of human beings. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what a university is for (as well as what a university actually is), and I’m strugging to find an answer to that question, in the face of generative AI.
What do you think?
I wonder of the constant push of this narrative of productivity as something unquestionably good in all talk around AI Michael. Do we have good evidence that more and faster is actually better. It seems to me we have the opposite given the unsustainability of hitherto production and consumption patters. Or are the production patterns spurred on by AI in any way substantially different from what we have seen so far? We already have an essentially unresolved crisis of production and consumption, and I’m not sure how AI is contributing to its resolution. Maybe by highlighting the meaninglessness of productivity? Just thinking out loud.