Hein, the chief technology officer at Google Public Sector, spoke via video call to a room of Florida university leaders on Wednesday afternoon.
AI can solve some mathematical equations that humans have not been able to, he said. In other areas, though, it performs worse than a grade-school student.
“We need to be able to put the right guardrails in place, so that when you’re using artificial intelligence at a university system, you’re keeping in mind that there is this incredible opportunity, and yet there is also going to be quite a bit of risk that we need to be able to accommodate for,” he said.
Hein, along with three Florida university provosts, discussed possible ways for the State University System of Florida to use AI during a Board of Governors meeting at the University of West Florida.
A handful of big questions came up: How should universities prepare students for a changing workforce? How is AI already being used at Florida universities? What guardrails need to be put in place?
Board member Edward Haddock, the chairperson of the system’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity, said the task force will produce a report with recommendations on the use of AI in public Florida universities in the near future.
“Artificial intelligence will be built and bled into every aspect of every major of every economic field moving forward from this point,” Hein said. “You’re going to start to see what we would call diffusion of this technology throughout the entire ecosystem.”
PREPARING FOR A CHANGING WORKFORCE
Board chairperson Alan Levine said he thinks many Florida students in the next few years will go through four years of education and won’t find a job because of how AI is changing the workforce.
He said that U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, predicted at a forum this week that the unemployment rate will be up to 35 percent in the next two years for recent college graduates.
Florida International University Provost Elizabeth Béjar said AI should be embedded across all disciplines, in a similar way that writing is taught across disciplines.
“Students need to think from an AI perspective whether their discipline is business management, the social sciences, engineering, or indeed artificial intelligence,” Béjar said.
Prasant Mohapatra, provost at the University of South Florida, said the university’s Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing is an engine for AI innovation while promoting research across disciplines.
The college is rolling out new majors in the fall, he said, which pair AI with social sciences, criminology and business. USF hopes to expand the college by 5,000 students and 100 faculty in the next four years, Mohapatra said.
At the University of Florida, Provost Joe Glover said AI is taught across the entire university’s curriculum. Every student who wants to put in the time and energy can become AI literate, or an AI expert, he said.
Glover said he doesn’t think there’s any way for the Board of Governors to create a uniform AI policy for all public universities.
“AI is really a basket of techniques,” he said. “The important thing is, put those techniques in the departments, let the faculty and the students take the ones that are most relevant to their disciplines, their future occupations.”
Employers think that nearly half of new employees in the workforce lack critical thinking and social skills, Mohapatra said. It’s important to make students adaptive and resilient, because AI will probably not be the last technological change they see in their futures, he said.
HOW AI COULD TRANSFORM THE CLASSROOM
AI also has the potential to transform how faculty teach and how students learn, Hein said.If professors offload lower knowledge tasks to AI research assistants — which are quite good at reviewing and summarizing information — they can gain valuable time back to work with their students, Hein said.
The same is true for researchers, who Hein said should have access to secure AI systems. Many researchers have won Nobel Prizes in chemistry in the last few years using Google’s artificial intelligence products, Hein said.
“These are the types of innovations that are now driving the rest of the molecular biology field forward,” he said.
He said students can also use AI to dive further into their classes and learn in ways they’ve never been able to. They might use it to build an audio podcast or use coding tools to build a website, he said.
Board member Nick Sinatra said while AI can increase efficiency, it could also drastically reduce the role that university systems have in research and eliminate faculty positions.
When Levine asked about putting up guardrails around student use, Hein said it’s been important for Google to build AI that is not simply answering questions but works back and forth with the student to make sure they understand the topic correctly.
Board member Carson Good said he doesn’t think AI can match what some people can do. Take a great litigator, investment banker, third grade teacher or stand-up comedian, he said.
“These are the students that are going to get ahead of the AI,” he said. “Maybe eventually AI becomes sentient and can beat those, but I think that’ll be a while.”
Lucy Marques is a reporter covering education as a member of the Tampa Bay Times Education Hub. You can contribute to the hub through our journalism fund by clicking here.
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