Future Trends Forum Artificial Superintelligence

Greetings and welcome to the future trends forum, a weekly conversation about the future of higher education. In this recording, we attempted something unusual. I ran a scenario exercise, a role- playinging simulation of a potential future event. That event was the initial appearance of artificial super intelligence in the world and the audience was invited to imagine how ASI changed things in general and in particular how they might respond to their academic situations. We didn't assign a likelihood for ASI's emergence, but I did choose a tight timeline early summer 2027. We also didn't take ASI very far into the future nor simulate any singularity level situation. Instead, we focused on how the world of colleges and universities might learn about the technology and how we might respond. Hopefully, that gave ideas for how people can think and plan. Now, structurally, I presented the scenario in two movements, each with a handful of slides. Then the forum audience took over reacting almost entirely through chat discussion which I read aloud and summarized. I thought that discussion was fascinating, thoughtful and rich. Hopefully I can post excerpts and a summary to my blog. I hope you enjoyed this session as much as I did. And as always the comment box stands ready for your thoughts and questions. >> Welcome everybody. Welcome to the future transform. Today we have uh an unusual session uh one that looks the future through role playing in the scenario and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I'm going to do something which I normally don't do in the forum uh and that is I've got a couple of slides to show you and the reason I'm doing this is because it's it's less bad than me talking at you um and hollering at you. The idea for today's session is instead of having a single guest who will be unfolding some aspect of the future of higher education with us, instead what we're doing is a role- playinging game, a simulation exercise based on the idea of one thing happening in the near future. And I'm glad you're here at PF. Um, and thanks for the support, Mark Wilson. Uh the idea that we're I'm hoping to accomplish is for us to think about what might happen if a certain technology is realized. Uh and can I just let you let me know in the chat? Can you see this? Okay, the slides go through. Yeah, Ally, thank you. Thank you. Glad to hear it. So the scenario for today and we've done this before about once a year we do a scenario and this one is based in the idea that we increasingly inhabit a world of artificial general intelligence but it goes further that sometime in the near future artificial super intelligence appears and what I'd like you to ask you consider what does that mean for you in your spot in the academic world so just and we set some ground rules just to help you get the most out of this hour. Uh first of all, I mentioned this is a role playinging exercise. So, please consider what role you'd like to play. So, it could be your current position right now, a professor, a librarian, a technologist, a student, a board member, whatever you like, or one that you'd like to play uh in the year or so. So, if you're on the job market or if you are looking for a new role, think about which one you'd like to have. Secondly, try to as you react to this, try to balance practical responses. So, what does this mean for your budget? What does this mean for your team? What does this mean for your operations with vision? How this might change the world? Think strategically as well as tactically. And also collaborate. Uh the chat will be on fire with people throwing ideas back and forth. Um and we would, you know, ask people for advice or what they think if you're not sure. Uh this is all exploratory. This is all new. So this is a great time to be able to learn from other people. Now here's the sequence that I've got scheduled out. Uh we begin with identifying our roles. So we'll do that in the chat just so you get a sense of who everybody is. Um and then we're going to introduce the scenario. We'll sketch it out, describe what's going on, and then give you the chance to respond. And so some of your responses uh may be questions to tease out more of the scenario and how it unfolds. But also this is where you start to figure out what you would do. So if you are a campus planner, if you are a political scientist, if you are a grad student, if you are a president, how this impacts you and how you might react. And then we're going to take another development. So, we're going to take the scenario which we've already shown and take it a bit further and then back to you to see how do you respond to that. And that will probably carry us right to the end of the hour. But hopefully what we'll have time to do is to reflect on what you learned from the experience, what questions you have, and any other thoughts. Um, how does that sound? We've got a lot of robot fans in the background. Uh, Andrew, I'm not hearing any background sounds right now. All right. Well, if we're on board with all this, let's proceed. Uh, Roger, we're getting there. Uh, literally, we will get there. Roger Taylor, just you wait. So, the question I'd like to ask you all is, what role do you want to play for this hour? Um, so if you just put that in the chat. Um, William Anderson went ahead with it already. workforce development strategist, for example. And I'm not going to hold you to this. I'm not going to follow up with you and say, you know, did you really do it properly? Uh, chief of staff. Oh, very nice. Uh, learning designer, instructional technologist, one librarian, workforce development, adjunct faculty, the staff that have to deal with decisions of others. Yes. Ethical thinker, learning designer, software developer. Excellent. Good to see you, Jeff. Associate director of learning solutions, a guide to the 17th century. There's a lot we can learn from that. And Katherine, good to see you in middle school and high school. Excellent. And Randall, excellent. Gamebased learning designer. Terrific. Excellent. Glad to see all of that. Uh, one of you asked for a quick definition of artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence. That's coming up. I promise. Okay. So, make sure that you're all Fahed her. I get it. I get it now. You're a herd manager. I see. That's good. Joseph is fulfilling the promise of OAR, education for all. Uh, PF, you do so much. Um, I I I think um I think you've I think you've nailed it down. Melissa, good for you. We need grants officers. Will Emerson has already given us the nerdiest moment of the day. Um, that's very good. All right. So, let's keep that in mind. Put that hat on, if you will, and let me give you some definitions. So, uh, we're talking about ASI here, artificial super intelligence. And people actually do have a hard time agreeing on what this means. So, let me give you some a stab at it. A couple of the main ideas. One of them is an AI program that self-improves. So it's not improving by having its programming adjusted by humans, but the AI is able to turn it software on itself so that it can get better at it. Another way of looking at this uh is the philosopher Nick Bostonramm has this definition for super intelligence in general. Quote, any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest unquote. A third way of thinking about this is the phrase recursive self-improvement that the AI is able to improve itself then assess what it's done look at it again improve it further and so on and the improved AI is of course better at being able to improve itself and so the cycle continues which leads to the possibility of an intelligence takeoff as often opposed to artificial general intelligence or AGI where we have a software program that says you know is the equivalent of Caroline Crawford you as a human being. But this is different. This is where the intelligence takes off beyond us. Uh and the end point, the most dramatic form of this is what some have called the singularity. That is when the AI not only is faster and smarter than us and is able to improve itself, but it's able to act in a way that we can no longer comprehend. It goes beyond human understanding. So this gives you a stab at a definition. Does does this make sense? Any anyone want to add any more either in the chat or if they want to uh uh grab the mic and add a little bit more? Uh Katherine Penfield is scared already. That's a completely legit response. Jeffrey Simmons mentions Ray Kurswell. Absolutely. Classic classic works on this. Uh Alice Martinez, play the role that you currently have in higher education or the one that you would like to have soon. So, if if you're if you're on the job market or you're thinking about transitioning, think, you know, you can pick the new one. Tom Hayes is quoting the great movie Colossus, that's plenty to go on. Okay. Um Allison Wilson mentions this suggests that machines are more malleable than people. Yes. Yeah. This is predicated on the idea that machine improvement occurs at a faster clip than human improvement. Uh Steven Crawford, it sounds like corporate hype coming up, Stephen. I promise you'll see that. Uh uh PF, that would be great. Um and Roger, I've been thinking about that one for this. Okay, so we've got a sense of what a GI excuse me, ASI is and how it might work. Now, let's imagine that it's April of next year, April 2027. Now, let me sketch this out with some details. And forgive me for reading so much from the slides, but I'm going to really riff on this. One part of what we see is that there are a lot of debates about AGI that is are we living in the age of artificial general intelligence. People are arguing about are tools like Gemini or Copilot or Chad GPT or cloud are they effectively akin to a human being? I mean have we pass that point already? And there's arguments about you know are they better at humans than some things and worse than others but on average are they about the same? Are they comparable? So that debate is happening. But then there are signs of ASI. Uh first of all AI looks jagged and that is it's much better at humans in some things and inferior to humans in others. It's better to say it's some mathematics inferior in some arithmetic. Uh it is um capable of much more rapid processing but has a hard time with some basic physical operations. So that's another part of this. But in April next year, we start to see some AI improving its own code. uh in tenative steps. Now the third thing that happens and that's what kicks this off is that in April Enthropic announces the release or the appearance of ASI and they described this to be a 0.1 model that it's not full-fledged. It's not completely taken off yet but it's just starting to appear now. But they're not making it public. They are making this only available for limited release to trusted partners, including the American Department of Law, including the heads of some major companies such as Microsoft and Apple. This is following what they did in 2026 with Operation Glass Wing or Project Glass Wing, where they did not release their Mythos to the full world, but instead released it to a series of trusted partners. So, the declaration is out there and the software is in some hands. So immediately following this there are many investigations computer scientists journalists just people interested in this subject desperately try to test this out. If they can't get access to a copy they sniff all signs of this reporters press anthropic staff to you know leak this um people are trying to reproduce this in all kinds of ways. There's a lot of furious investigations. Meanwhile there are rumors, there are stories, there are conspiracy theories all over the place. Some people accuse this of being a scam. Some say this is a, as Andrew Sax mentions, this could be a fundraising effort. Uh, that this could be an operation from the CIA. People accuse this of being a corporate maneuver in order to stock coffers. Um, there are a lot of different ideas flying around this. Uh, and the culture is riving. Well, this late night TV show hosts make it up. There are a lot of memes right now. a lot of stuff starts going on and then other companies all over the world primarily in the United States and China they announce ASI projects either that they've been working on the ASI projects they just haven't said so before or they are now officially kicking them off and this is companies all over the place you know Deepseek Google open AI now campuses start to respond And they do this in a few different ways. One is there is some curiosity. You know what is ASI? How might this work? And we get access to it. How is it? You know, so you know people in computer science and media studies and just all over the map. There's some curiosity. There is also a great deal of opposition. And this builds on the current opposition to AI and says this has gone too far. uh that now we're at a point where the technology is not only more we not only do we disagree with it morally and ethically but we find it to be actively dangerous to humanity. It must stop. Now different campuses depending on how they have their AI capacity structured decide to investigate in different ways. So they try to figure out if there are any open- source alternatives, any kind of uh copies they could look at, any ways of testing this out. They're trying to figure out what this might mean and how this could impact higher education. Uh PF Anderson in uh in the chat says if it's true ASI, it's not limited. It's broken out. This is what people think about ASI. Um but what is happening here is that Anthropic is claiming that they have it right now coralled that they have it uh completely controlled. they learned their lessons from the past two years and that it's being shared under the strictest possible controls. Uh Katherine Penel Navara says the argument in universities goes like this. Time to repair students for ASI campus span. Okay, I'm gonna come back to that for a second. Are we wargaming for Brian's tour of the deans? Oh, this is wargaming if you want. Um Carolyn Crawford mentions the assumption that machine learning is better than human creativity. Uh in this scenario, I'm not making such an assumption. Uh I haven't referenced human creativity yet in except in so far as humans help set this up. Uh Andrew Sox is very suspicious of this. And let's turn there are more questions for this. Um, no Tom, I'm not going to define creativity. So the question is, how do you respond to these developments in your role at your institution? So if you're an editor at a scholarly publisher, if you're a history professor at a community college, if you're a librarian at a research one university, what do you do? How might this impact you? How might you respond? So, please please take to the chat. Uh, if you would like, uh, use the Q&A box, too. Um, let me just walk through what people have been saying. Shelby goes full 80s analog. Uh, Carl Falbo starts looking for John Connor because everyone wants to go back to the Terminator. Um, Stephen Crawford says, "As a community college, we're struggling to provide the currently available tools to faculty and staff. In fact, we only provide the most limited and free tools. This will lead only to more conversations and little action due to a limited budget. Our faculty will have conversations that may continue to limit our students access to AI based tools. However, our AI programs will be looking to adapt with their corporate workforce partners. For a learning innovation standpoint, the best I can do is host conversations. There's a lot there. Stephen is as always brilliant. Um so again in his role what he can do hosting conversations um but also thinking about budgetary constraints which is already an issue with AI uh and also faculty resistance uh how faculty would you know not want to uh allow for this. Andrea also flees the community joins the commune becomes an artist and a farmer. Uh Andrew Sucks goes the opposite way. Use this as a driver to accelerate the human connection, empathy, collaboration, creativity, building real solutions with AI. Uh Austin says that unfortunately he's the whims of his supervisors. I feel they'll look for ways to get rid of my position. Austin, what is that position? If you can share that in the chat, please please do. >> Uh learning design assistant. It's kind of like >> an in between um between our production environment where we um get courses ready for the next semester and instructional design. >> So I'm not like a full instructional designer, but I'm not a full like tech person either. >> Tricky tricky position. Um is this one where you go on to become an instructional designer? >> That was kind of the intended goal. >> Okay. Uh, currently that's looking less like what's going to help. >> Shoot. Well, I I I support you, my friend. I I hope you do get that position. Uh, we need more instructional designers. Um, but if I could, if you don't mind, you just hit on something that we're going to come back to, which is looking for ways to get rid of your position. So, one thing to think about is, you know, uh, downsizing, downscaling, uh, in the academy. Um, Katherine Ferlong says, "Emmed immediate response provides space and coffee for conversations. Reach out to faculty, engineering, computer science and management to host." Excellent, Katherine. Uh, Joyce gives us a strategic framing. We need clear goals, purpose of policy, what it supports and enables. And the James Martin gets psychological about this. This is terrific. You have to find a connection between human reason and student intuition with ASI. Will students suffer or expand their capabilities as they integrate these resources in their life changes? Um PF Anderson s lives of puppets drawn a blank. You're not thinking side the tabletop game are you? >> Science is a novel in which humans can now live forever. But >> if a new human's to come into life, then another one has to die. >> And so there is a protocol by which they decide who is going to die. Oh, >> but in the background of the whole story, there's a super intelligence that manages everything to do with life, the weather, the food, all of this, >> and who does not interfere in how humans manage their decisions about who should live and die, >> but it provides supporting information. And it is a benevolent um super intelligence >> kind of like the uh the minds and Ian Banks's culture series. >> I don't think I've read that one. >> Oh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. >> And then the lives of puppets is by TJ Cloon. And in that one, the the robots have decided that the greatest danger to life on Earth is humans >> and they eradicate them. And then one of them is cloned back into life and is always in danger because the super intelligence has decided that there is no greater danger to life than humans. >> Jeff, you're giving us a fine reading list. I am very excited about this. Thank you. Thank you. Um and just one note of course there is a lot of literature reference on this. Uh Roger Taylor says there's a deeper issue. It means no human would ever be smarter or wiser than AI. That's something to sit with and think about especially for our anxieties about this. Now Mike Wilker adds that relationships and community for sensemaking has to be the guiding light the course setup and the market etc. John Martin takes us back to the structure the university. There'll be university committee to consider it while students, faculty, and staff wait for official guidance and unofficially try to deal with it in isolation. Very good. I mean, I don't mean that's a happy result that I would endorse. I'm saying that's a very good observation. Uh David Steele as chief of staff says he expects to be tasked with ramping up multiple task forces attempting to coordinate campus initiatives with those off campus. Uh David uh off-campus would that be uh vendors? Would that be the local community adjacent to uh the campus or somebody else? >> Uh yes, it would be other academic institutions in our region or around the state, uh government officials, um corporations that may have, you know, R&D departments that are engaged in this. Everybody. >> Thank you. That's great to hear. That's I mean, when talking about collaboration, that's excellent to hear. I mean, if we pause this scenario right now, we've already covered almost a full road map of responses, but there's a lot more because you guys in the forum are brilliant. Tom Hayes sounds his signature clarion call, and this is so important. He says, "We need to beware automation. Instead, we need to design for augmentation." That is so smart. Um, thank you, Tom. Um, [clears throat] and PF Anderson wants to hack it immediately. Uh they say they have conversations with it if they can get access to it. Very good at finding tech breaking points. Uh Mark Lewis says he's imagining AI pushing faculty instructoral desires produce more in terms of course revisions and course developments. So Mark perhaps course development starts to accelerate uh even as AI starts to accelerate. Uh Alice, excuse me, Alice Martinez says that she would use some relational tools to bring people together to surface fears, concerns, and to identify professional development needs before making any decisions. Splendidly democratic response. Alice really like that. Again, the conversations, right? Um, Carolyn Holly says as a learning designer, she'd be thinking about how this development impacts her work, her team, how to design courses that improve the learning experience, and how will graduates and employees be using the tech so we know how to change about what we teach. Looking ahead very nicely. Um, Kyle Falo mentions the debate around higher education uh modeled around wisdom use gaining of knowledge. How this might shift things more towards wisdom uh than towards knowledge. Uh Vahed follows PF and wants to furiously test this at the largest scale for biases to understand what's there. Uh Caroline follows in the conversation uh framework but says that there are useful considerations for everything AI related but how how might faculty evolve courses that aren't merely rotation and heightens the quality of knowledge acquisition and representation that reflects actual learning and higher order thinking skills. So far faculty understand this conversation. We're working on it. uh grow to Gustavagen says considering retirement. Yeah, that's that's a theme throughout our discussion. Uh people withdrawing from this uh Joyce Augburn is a policy will have to adapt and play the campus strategy. Um so there Katherine Furlow recommends more collaboration uh with colleagues in IT. Uh and she nailed this the date of this very nicely. If this is April, we're going to discuss immediate implications for finals and exams. Why true? Um Joe Murphy is thinking about this as instructional designer. What does he mean to manage in ASI? Uh PF Anderson continues our reading list by mentioning the Pope's the Pope's recent encyclical which is a good one. Uh and more than a good one. It's a very very powerful one. Uh William Emerson asked a good question. To what extent is this AI assuming control of manufacturing, logistic and economic systems? As of this moment in the simulation, Anthropic says no. There are stories and rumors that say otherwise, but nothing has been concretely proven yet so far. Uh Jimmy Fleger says that he'll be caught between being expected to use this to accelerate his own work and having to clean up the work of other non-developers who are vibing out applications. Uh I've heard the phrase vibe chipping this week, by the way. uh a startup company in I believe in Boston that was using AI to produce chips. Um Alice Martinez draws attention to another social dynamic that is so important. She says that at Glendale Community College only the full-time faculty have access to Gemini. Um that's a really important thing to mention. I'm not picking on Glendale but just to say that you know within the academic body who gets to have access to these tools is very very important. and equity issues. Uh and there's a lot of discussion about that. Now, Andrew goes on to say, "Benevolent super intelligence better than the real stupidity we have in leadership today." Yes, maybe. So, and that may be why some people really like to have this. Katherine Penfield Navaro goes further. As a professor, she wants to ask students to consider the consequences, host conversations, remind students that they want to learn. This is the time and place and as a human being to start holding more in real life offline conversations to determine the humanity we want to preserve uh and a lot of conversations from this and Shelby wants her 80s playlist. Shelby talk to me. I've got some good stuff. Start with the return of the living dead soundtrack. Um John Martin turns to research which is so important. Faculty and researchers will adopt and use in their research mostly spectating at the marvel. Students will adopt and choose their passion. No more traditional tests for traditional teaching and learning and research. Hear that everybody. That is a huge huge clarion ball right there. Katherine goes in the opposite direction. Says shut down the internet and then people have all kinds of decision responses. But again, there's that that negation response. Um Ally Wilson says that she's an architect and decarbonization advocate. How can we use the inevitable growth in campus data centers as a catalyst to drive campus decarbonization? And also, is there enough waste heat to generate steam? Great question, Sally. Um, no mention in the story so far of more data centers for this yet, but that's a really, really good point. Uh, Monica Swindle, hello, Monica. The first thing she's going to do is learn as much as she can to try out these tools a lot. Try to get through the hype to the actual capabilities and limitations of this new tool. This is excellent. Excellent. And Monica adds avoid the binary end of the world versus solution everything response. Glad Jim Fleger adds there's a notion that ASI would be the last invention as it would then take over all future inventing. Then it's an interesting question of what that means for higher education as we do inventing as we do research. Uh Shauna Pope, good to see you. Shauna says this scenario hurts her brain, her heart and her soul. Too many conflicting institutional logics to come up with a quick answer here. She'd go back to examining the system and where the pressures are most felt. Look for the options that triage those hot spots without upsetting the rest of the system. even better looking for options that position the rest of the systems to grow through new camps. So, we've got again more desires to test this out and to push it and see what it does. As Monica said, to cut through the hype. Uh Carolyn goes back to the structure of campuses, saying that we need task forces to gather points of data. Uh Steve Crawford wondered why it's the Terminator and rarely C3PO. Yeah, I I'm kind of bored of the obsession with the Terminator here. There there are a lot of other good examples out there to to play with. Um, Katherine also says, "Practice more yoga. Invite others." It's a good idea. Jeffrey Simmons says, "Uh, universities need to encourage students to leverage AI while being transparent regarding the use, in particular how the student improved on the use. Now, universities are in trouble regarding a high cost. When the human aspect becomes the weaker link, asynchronous learning becomes synchronous, authentic simulations become dominant with learning becoming fully adapted and personalized for students. hands-on may be a saving grace along with a major role of researchers of universities teaching how to think when the answers are given before you even ask and Donnie good to see you Donnie says that appears critical thinking skills are never been more necessary again so back to critical thinking and what we can teach humans to do in the age of apparent ASI Joyce warn or cautions us that we'll be too slow in responding So, there's more coming up here. Um, uh, PF Henderson has an issue in poetry men. Uh, I haven't seen that yet. Um, a friend of mine just published a book of poems against AI. Um, Katherine Ferlong says, "I hope we would have time to step back and think this through. Intelligence means so many different things. AI that is super intelligent doesn't mean it's either super or intelligent. I refuse to underestimate the human capacity." So again we've got we've got questions of definition of research and of reflection. So Austin says if it becomes an ASI wouldn't it push for automation itself. So so far that hasn't come out from anthrop Austin in this in this particular scenario. Um we haven't heard from them but again this is not for public release right now. Uh David um uh Guy asks, "How does the emergence of ASI one year from now affect the anti-arning, anti-education culture in the US administration?" David, I've got some notes for that in the second part of the scenario, but everyone should be thinking about that. Um you know, thinking about the Trump administration's various policies towards education. Uh not just the Trump administration, but also state governments. Andrea also thinks big. would courses even be necessary at this point and you're she's supported by a whole bunch of folks behind her who think that's a really good point and we could do this in different ways. Susan the Hines gets very practical and says every response probably needs a contingency plan. If you're embracing the AI tutor for example and discovery humans just don't want to learn or demonstrate little learning from machines. What's the contingency? Very very good point. Fahed wants us to at last prepare faculty to become guides on the side. So the classic learning design start uh David Steel as these are the sorts of situations that stretch commitments to shared governance. Boards of trustees will be freaking out. The vulnerable i.e. adjun junior untenure faculty will be made more vulnerable. Opportunists will exploit chaos to undermine tenure accreditation general education etc. Excellent point David. I'm glad you're here. Um so question is in that given those dangers how does a college how does a university or anybody else in higher education space you know a publisher a foundation how do they prevent how do they you know help the boards how do they protect the people who are vulnerable now Carolyn Holly says the thing she struggles with is anticipating the knock-on effects of the range of implementations okay well um so this is a really really great thing to to observe And we're going to do a little bit of that in a few minutes. But Carolyn and for everybody else, what might some of the knock-on effects be with the potential the story of ASI appearing? So how might that appear in the futurist field? By the way, we have this acronym called steep um social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. A way of thinking about the effects of something across all those domains. Okay, we have a lot of responses. I'm really glad that this that this seems to have struck a nerve right now. Uh friends, um I'm hoping to publish this as a blog post. Um let me know if you want um me I'm going to anonymize people here, but if there's anything you'd like me to put in um that, let me know. Or if you don't want me to quote you, uh let me know. Um question from PF Anderson. Is the ASI given egentic access to anything or is it purely and solely advisory? So far, Anthropic says it's mostly advisory that they've been testing it out with some ejectic access, but again, they maintain that it has not yet escaped. Jog Martin brings up the great thought experiment of the paperclip paradox. Um, that's a really really good one to have. Uh, Brent Enders mentions uh data centers in space. Roger Taylor, a man after my own heart, talks about a Dyson swarm. There's a lot going on. So, this is really opening things up wide. Let's go still further. In the interest of time, I'm glad to see so many different responses, but I want to make sure that we get a chance to go a little further. Let's advance the clock a few weeks. It's now early May 2027. Things have been ticking along bit by bit. There have been ripples. There have been revolutions. Let me just sketch out some of what's occurred. First of all, now early May, a bunch of applications now claim to be ASI or ASI integrated, including open-source ones and some from China. Second point, around the world, when people see security hacks, infrastructure failures, economic spasms such as a flash crash or physical accidents, they blame that or ascribe them to ASI. Uh, so far, nobody has been able to claim for everyone's satisfaction that such a thing is true. But the idea is out there. Plane isn't able to take off. A city loses power. Um, a stock market just doubles and then contracts. And people say this has got to be ASI or meanwhile some enterprises are laying off people citing ASI as the reason for it that we don't need so many staff because ASI can take care of that. uh what we hear about from the ASI uh philanthropic is weird programmed outputs start to occur and strange behavior and people who are trying to build their own versions of ASI claim the same thing that strange things are resulting you might think about how when Google's AI beat go masters at go that the go masters thought that was not a human move that was a strange move and we're seeing some of that we're seeing weird designs and strange language. We're seeing some software begin to create its own languages. Now, across the world, there are popular calls to shut this all down. And they come from politicians, they come from cultural figures, they come across social media, um and uh they come from polling that this is we've gone too far and we need to stop. At this point, as of a few weeks after the initial advancement, there is no government action that we can point to. governments are arguing about this. Uh the Chinese state has been pretty stalled that they are still pro AI. The US government is doesn't hasn't issued anything coherent. The European Union is trying to apply is AI act. Other countries are working on this but none have been able to produce anything coherent and meaningful in this short period of time. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of people who call themselves leites arguing that the best thing to do is to destroy these machines. uh and a new social movement modeled after the great uh American uh science fiction novel Doom. This social movement calls themselves the bootar and jihad. Uh and they think that we have committed a terrible violation by making machines that are not just the image of but succeeding human minds and that they need to be stopped. They need to be destroyed. Campus reactions continue. So there are now calls from within campuses but also from outside of campuses to use ASI in education. So for example some uh in poor areas or in uh underdeveloped areas uh parts of the global south uh rural areas around the world argue that ASI is something they should be able to use in order to improve their economy and to improve their learning. uh we see more and more academic vendors announcing ASI integration or that they are ASI ready and we see some researchers start to describe uses of AI uh excuse me uses of ASI in order to improve things. So they are either modeling a hypothetical if they have access to it or they are using some different tools that call themselves ASI faculty are experimenting with pedagogies and as usual there's a lot of experimentation it's hard to distill at all. A popular view across higher education is that assessment as we know it is now no longer functioning. That it is collapsed. That tests, quizzes, papers do not work right now. That uh we have to figure out how to do assessment from scratch. So things are beginning to spiral out. There are more and more ripples, more and more chaos. Now what do you think? How does this advanced level of ASI start to change your work? How do you respond further? Uh Mike Wilker asks a good question. Will there be Oh, sorry. It's a statement. There'll be a massive labor force of people the government will need to manage uh versus mass layoffs, economic crash as companies migrate whole untouchable sectors to ASI. Yeah, that's a knock on effect. If that occurs, if these ASI layoffs start to scale up. Caroline Crawford is suspicious. um because she offers the alternative which is that instead of layoffs you just get the technology infusing work back to Tom Ames's idea of workers using ASI to augment their work. Uh Mike Welker who actually knows Dune very well suggested it's time for a retreat and to join the jihad. Um PF Anderson asked another great big picture question. How would ASI modify resource allocation through the nation and the world? Um so Austin Derton mentions more Austin forgive me if I mangled your name. Um he says that more data for FY data centers. Uh why he thinks that ASI would improve cooling sort of make it easier to cool. Um and we might see uh some form of either people humans allocating resources to better support ASI or people citing ASI as a reason to reorganize some of the resource distributions. Mike Wilker recommends that we collaboratively define relevant universal human capacities UHC for what role work learning will be relevant at all in the new environment. Um which is a really good really good point. Um Fleger Jim Fleger says that if you blame enough layoffs in AI, ASI, AGI, people resort to retaliation. I can see a small skilled group crashing US electric grid to take AI offline. Jim, did you see that uh New York Times piece a couple days ago about crashing the grid? If not, let me know. Um, it's a it's a good one or you just Google it. Um, Joe Murphy asked a good question. Uh, what have we hit on that's different in this situation than we might predict in a year anyway? Well, what's different is um Mark Kovville sounds a good sarcastic answer. Um, we haven't gone further enough. Uh, that's true. Uh, we haven't seen this take off into true alien behavior yet. Um, John Martin says traditional assessment collaps before fall 2026. I I agree with you on that, but it's not universally agreed upon. Uh, David uh recommends that or observes that ASI becomes a bridge across the Clark data boundary moving developments from preposterous to real unprecedented short time. Katherine Furlong gives the small liberal arts college point of view. Uh she's thinking of what to triple down on planning for interdisiplinary living learning communities. Focus on ethics, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, arts, deep breathing practice, and performance. Ensure we have psychologists and spiritual counselors at the ready. Think about hands-on in-person learning building on maker spaces and crafting communities, but almost like the arts and crafts utopian movements in a liberal arts context. Beautiful, car Katherine. That's really, really well said. Um, again, we're seeing all kinds of road maps in this conversation right now. Um, Stephen Crawford has a good one, too. Alpha School announces their AI schools expanding into higher ed. Alice Martinez agrees. So, there's more and there are so many comments. Um, I'm really glad to see this. Uh Kyle Falbo, hello Kyle says that he develops professional development programming that re formalizes human centric pedagogy that doesn't hide from the technology but leans into value and branding of humanity. Um this might be a time to reread Joseph Aoon's book robot proof uh thinking about how you redesign higher red for what humans do well in the age of automation. Alice Martinez has another vote for apprenticeships. Um, and uh, Monica suggests, "Man creates AI. AI eats STEM. The humanities inherit the university." You can see, Monica, you got a bunch of fans there right now, except for Andrew. Um, uh, the Joyce Augburn adds that government relations offices will go, more campaigning and lobbying for funding to adapt to, perform research, redesign, education. Uh Brent Anders says that he thinks that AI will become the biggest issue during the next US presidential election. Roger Taylor wants to know about theologians and how they would respond. A full-blown ASI would be indistinguishable from a god. Um and there's some good responses that follow through with that, including some very funny ones, very thoughtful ones. Uh Karen Katherine found the New York Times piece. Thank you. That's a very well-reported, well-written piece. something I've been a following for a while but I recommend to everybody. Um it's uh it's chilling in a lot of ways. Um Mark Lewis asks ASI provide a solution for diminishing aging faculty for some institutions allowing them to make do with the remaining faculty and also what about the loss of a pool of replacements through immigration policies. Two great big questions Mark. Uh excellent ones. Excellent. Stephen Crawford points out again this is the calendar there's not much to be doing done in May our faculty shared governance process will not be available to help shape the response that said there'll be a lot of watching and learning so we can continue conversations in August when faculty return so that's an important point about this timing uh I picked this deliberately uh to add to the crisis of this that this is something which is happening when we have our in theory downtime you know when faculty and staff excuse me the faculty and all of students are off campus. How that how we respond to that? And Steve's response is we're going to we're going to wait. But another question is how will this impact our enrollment? Our CTE programs may or may not see immediate impact. Not sure how ASI could build a house or install HVAC, plumbing, repair a car, etc. It's a really good question. Uh where do we see people with ASI saying, "Well, heck, I'm not going to spend money on an education like that." And then Mark Wilker asks a great question. consult ASI to develop a whole new form of education, leverage how to promote ASI. Um, Katherine Penfold Navaro goes a great critique about assessment, which is really good. And then David Steel comes back to this. I would be very curious to know how those May 27 developments reshape ongoing conversations about the justifications for certain kinds of IRA institutions. I could be wrong, but I think my state would probably respond to these developments by closing all the regional campuses and consolidate resources for the flagship. I think the small privates would be would be even more stressed than they already are. Um, that's a brilliant insight. Uh, there's really clear vision. I can see that. Um, Andrea, glad to see you. Really glad to see you thinking about this. Uh PF Anderson leans hard on on the ASI takeoff wondering if we'll have a broad ASI consuming all the resources it can get for digital personalities with their own laws. Good questions. Uh Jim Fleer thinks with true ASI once this is out of the box I think companies will try to replace nearly all knowledge workers except Cale. What skills will they still pay messy unreliable humans for? Good question. Very very good question. John, I'm glad I'm glad you enjoy it. Um, and then Katherine brings up library. Thank you, Katherine. The imperative to try and preserve the scholarly record and trust in the truth of what the ASI knows. Really, really good point. And then Alice Martinez brings us back to community connection. Colleges become real hubs of the community. Very, very nice. Uh Shelby says, "I guess I'm naive, but after meeting four classes of first year students twice each this week, I see they still want the chance to pursue their futures and have purposes. I don't see any form of AI fulfilling those roles satisfactorially for them." That's wonderful. Um again going back to Joseph Owen's idea, you know, what is the purpose of higher education in the age of automation? What do we do that automation does not do well? And that's a really nice sketch of what we can do. Uh Alice Martinez adds just in time learning makes a huge comeback as we address the changes in the workforce. Yeah. Now are we able to provide that? Uh Carol Holly recommends that we survey Gen Z and alpha to think what see what they think uh how they use ASL. Very very good point. Very good point. Katherine Penfold cites some of her experience this week. Uh, one student says, "Why is my teacher sending me an AI generated welcome mail and then telling me in stern terms not to use AI in her class?" And Tom HS has a funny response. So, David goes back, "If ASI is by definition beyond human intelligence, then it would certainly be able to devise and choose to live by its own ethics, would those be compatible with human ethics?" An excellent question. And so far, David, in this scenario, the the talk about alien behavior and unusual outputs suggest it'll be different. Donnie Sendelbach makes us all shiver and she says it feels like it's August 2019 and we know the pandemic is coming. Jim Fleger says short of a UBI or universal basic income. It does not matter what people want. It only matters if a business will pay for it. I think with ASI that would be very little. So this is one of the, you know, the whole economic dimension of this is so important to think about. Um, and that's a really good primer or pointer in that direction. DF Anderson remembers that there are lessons to be learned for how AI created recipes and the process involved to make those recipes edible. Uh, Monica Swindle recommends or forecast that AI universities spring up with whole new lines of edtech. The elite don't want they have their children go to traditional universities that focus on critical thinking and human intelligence while colleges and universities that serve the public promote tech infused and a AI run education as the new thing. Another good vision. Um, okay friends, we're coming close to the end of this entire exercise right now, which is wild how quickly this has been uh been going on, how far we've come in just a bit um of conversation. Um, I want to wrap things up by asking you a couple of questions. Um, Katherine is even more scared now and Caroline says no. No. Um, so we'll have to see which way this unfolds. Uh, and Brent Anders takes us to the biggest picture. This maximize our ability to do space exploration aka Star Trek the next generation. All right, let me pause you all here. Let me ask you to uh step back and say what do you derive from this exercise and what here let me stop sharing slides at you so you can see each other a bit more what do you determine from it what do you derive from all of this um both what we've been talking about um and both how this worked out uh and what you derived from all the discussion so far. PF says we missed a lot of important aspects of the question. PF, what are a couple of the leading ones that we need to address? >> We I'm thinking when the pandemic started and what was unexpected and what really hit the hardest was the way infrastructure broke down. um that we didn't have freezer trucks, we couldn't move things from place to place, we couldn't get supplies to where they were needed. >> And so I'm thinking ASI, it's that's where it's going to go first. It's going to go to which bridge is going to break down first. You know, what do we need to do to keep infrastructure going? Is it important to keep human infrastructure going? you know those kinds of things and that is going to shape everything else. I feel like you think of Maslo's hierarchy of needs and ASI education's kind of down there. >> It's not at the top of that pyramid. >> And I think we need to look at some of the things that are higher up on the pyramid >> in the in the Matrix movie. What do the um what do the robots call humans? Um copper tops. That's that's what the liberated ones call us because we're just batteries for electrical power. Um so that's that's pretty far down PF. I I think you're absolutely right. Um when I was sketching this out, I actually had a third and fourth level uh coming out and but we only have so much time. Uh so part of the third level was to see um how some of these impacts occurred. Uh how we see governments starting to publish uh news that they didn't authorize. How we see some companies taking steps like rolling out products and closing offices. Um and we start to see some uh really interesting deep action across the economy uh from finance to uh raw materials. Um thank you PF. Uh Allison Alli Wilson says there's no one clear answer. How do we get to consensus at a scale that's big enough to drive collective action? Alli, by collective, do you mean across higher education or across the nation or the human civilization? >> I think at any scale that's big enough to keep us from becoming atomized, right? There are a lot of threats at a lot of different scales for a lot of different communities and there are a lot of answers to what we're facing. Um, but 8 billion people going off in their onesies and twzies and doing their own thing is probably not a great effective pathway forward. So what is a scale that's reasonable to get enough people together of a mind to do a thing together? I'm a couple of years ago I would I would have had a whole bunch of ideas but but honestly right now I'm I'm I have one idea >> onesies and twzies sounds pretty good right? [laughter] Well, no, it's it's that what I've seen of how how higher education responds to um AI since uh since ChhatP3 came out, which was in a very atomized way uh and has many ways struggled to have any kind of organization about this. Um but where I where I left the scenario with the uh the lite movement, that's not that's as a for as a forecaster, that's me seeing something right now and just running it forward. We already have people call themselves like I think Brian Marchant for example has you know has stage plays where you know you know reigns a technology and auditions it for crimes against humanity um Bolerian jihad one uh friends if you're new to the idea in in Dune in the future um in the novel there um humanity outlaws artificial intelligence in fact all computation basically that's digitally routed uh and I've been talking about this for about 20 years and now people are starting to use the term kind of unironically in part because they've seen they've seen the movie. Um, but I'm I I think maybe that kind of antithesis that that objection is one organizing poll. It's a clear principle that finds a lot of excitement now, especially when people are opposed to data centers like MAD. Um, Ally, thank you also for presenting the uh decarbonization angle. Uh Jim Fleger says, "I'm glad people are thinking about this before ASI arrives to try to make plans and policies." That's why I'm doing this. That is precisely why I'm doing this. I wanted to get you all thinking about this ahead of time. A futurist, that's what we that's what we do. But this one in particular is a hard one because as we've seen, the idea of ASI is pretty complex and slippery and we're also trying to cope with an awful lot right now. I want you to be thinking about this ahead of time. Um, David has a nice uh a nice tweet about u hybrid mixed people. Um, there's a lot of different comments. Katherine, thank you uh for being here. Um, let me add one more thing. Um, you all for this past hour have been fantastic. Um, I'm astonished at how much ground we covered. Uh, this chat box is actually beyond my ability to control. I'm pretty good about this. Um, you have so many good ideas coming from different professions, from different types of institutions, from different geographies, from different perspectives. This is a really, really rich conversation. I haven't quite seen anything like this in the higher ed space. I'm going to do my best to digest it. Tom will help me feed this probably into Notebook LM. We'll see how this goes. Um, but for everybody else, I'm going to try to post a recording soon uh on YouTube uh and then try to get a digest of uh of the entire uh conversation so far. Um, if you haven't had a chance to yet, uh, we have a lot of sessions coming up scheduled. By the way, just go to forum.futureed education. US and we have sessions on a whole bunch of different topics right now uh coming up including storytelling, universal design for learning, going beyond the financially focused campus, campus dialogues, degree completion and of course another session or two on AI. Just head to the forum website and you can find out more there. I've got three o'clock Eastern time which means we have come to the end. Thank you all. This has really been terrific. Um, we did a good a good run at a possible future. Congratulate yourselves. And for everybody, good luck with the fall semester. Be safe. Be well. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.