Dear Students,
How should you approach the topic of learning how to think in this new era when machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools are so widely available? This is such an important topic that a university-wide faculty and instructor committee grappled with it throughout the last academic year and its thinking featured prominently in both my College Convocation and Graduate Orientation remarks last week. I am sharing those same reflections with you today. As you are here to learn how to think, take some time now to inform yourself and to think for yourself about what is at stake for you.
You will have heard from me about the importance of learning to ask good questions and of the immense value of dialogue with others during your journey here. Today you can ask questions in a genuinely new way; you can “just” ask a machine, an AI of one kind or another, which seeks to leverage past knowledge in service of the new. I am certain that you are already quite familiar with these tools, if not yet the underlying conceptual breakthroughs that have made them possible.
Today’s versions of AIs produce answers quickly, with results of variable quality, sometimes astonishing, often bland, and too often for comfort, entirely wrong. Here too, as I am sure you have experienced, the art of the good sequence of questions makes all the difference in the quality of the outcome.
These tools are new, and in the years ahead new conceptual breakthroughs will advance them in ways we cannot entirely anticipate. As a scholar and curious person myself, I find these developments exhilarating. Yours is the first generation that comes here wanting to learn how to think, whose relationship to knowledge will be shaped differently than all those that have come before. Are these shortcuts that forestall your learning? Are they powerful tools that let your intellect soar higher? Yes and yes.
The faculty demand that you approach the use of machine learning and AI-based tools in ways that are ethical and urge you as well to be both skeptical and ambitious.
Some faculty and instructors are building entirely new approaches based on deep integration and even new development of these tools, while others are firm in their belief that you must put them aside in their classes in order to truly learn. It is the ethical thing for you to follow the rules of the road for AI use in each class.
No matter what domains of knowledge you will pursue in your studies here, your goal is to become an educated person. Today we see emerging a new way of thinking, one that leverages the computational and statistical lenses of thought. To be educated today, you will need to learn to think in those ways at least well enough to be able to judge them critically, and to deploy them creatively and effectively when you choose to use them. Our curricula already offer so many ways of learning this, even as our courses will evolve to embed this new thinking more systematically in the years ahead. You and all future students here will gain the level of understanding essential for you to be skeptical as well as ambitious in this new era.
Here is the take-home message. You came here to learn how to think. Today that means learning to think with machines and learning to think without them. If you honor that approach, yours will be the generation that indeed soars well beyond the levels of knowledge previously imagined.
All the best,
Paul
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Paul Alivisatos
President