Filippo Bianchini

"Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines," by @STurkle, is our 43rd recommended book. See the full list and join the AI book club below.

🚨 Are universities still relevant in the age of AI? Will they continue to provide economic value to students and society in the coming years? Can they SURVIVE AI disruption? Over the past few years, we have watched AI models become as capable as or more capable than humans in most cognitively valuable fields, and many young people today are deeply uncertain about the skills and career paths least likely to be undermined by AI advancements. We have also seen AI enter schools and universities as students use it for homework, projects, and as a learning assistant, while teachers struggle to adapt their materials and teaching methods to this emerging ‘co-learning’ environment. Many watch these developments and declare that universities are dead and that pursuing a degree is a useless or futile endeavor. Maybe not, if they evolve and reshape their mission. In his new paper, “The University after AI,” @profjasonpotts offers a fascinating analysis of the role, function, and value of universities, explaining in detail how AI is disrupting them and putting them at risk of becoming irrelevant in the post-AI age. When describing universities, he writes: “A university is a self-governing micro-republic, corporate in form, approximately 1000 years old (older than nation states, younger than religion), that exists within but always apart from society (for instance they often have their own police and justice tribunals), and which serves as the custodian of knowledge, creator of new knowledge, and whose primary business is to upload that knowledge into a select group of the next generation. This is a service that students want and that society is willing to pay for.” He also states: “A university, then, is neither a cloister nor a factory but a platform, or a multi-sided market whose primary economic function is to reduce the transaction costs of matching distinct groups who wish to trade with one another.” In light of the threat posed by AI, the author offers the following ten proposals to restructure the role, function, and value of universities: - Institutionally separate certification from instruction - Restore the costly signal - Rebuild the missing junior loop - Fast-response accreditation - Sell the cohort - Host scholars rather than employ them - Move to the new frontier - Shed sides - Make the claim on graduate outcomes explicit - Governance as the production technology of the warrant The paper offers a fantastic economic analysis of AI’s impact on this 1,000-year-old institution, informs broader discussions on AI ethics, policy, and regulation, and makes for a great weekend read. 👉 You can find the paper and my follow-up recommendations below. 👉 To receive all my paper recommendations, classes, and essays on AI, join my newsletter's 100,500+ subscribers below.