For hundreds of years, higher education has focused on understanding three worlds: the physical world, the biological world and the social world.
Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun said in a webcast Thursday that a new, fourth world is upon us — the artificial intelligence world — and higher education needs a strategy to include it.
“The first thing we need to do is try to understand how we are going to integrate the four worlds and not only understand AI but understand AI and its implication on the other three worlds,” Aoun told listeners to “Next Office Hour” hosted by Jeff Selingo, a noted author, journalist and former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“That’s what the strategy has to be built on,” Aoun said.
In a wide-ranging interview, Aoun, the author of “Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” discussed how colleges and universities can incorporate AI to benefit students, faculty and staff, and the greater society.
But doing so will require a change from higher education’s “protectionist and very conservative” reaction to the new technology, Aoun said. And he predicts that it will fundamentally change the higher education field.
“Every university is looking at AI from the point of view of technology and adoption of this technology,” Aoun continued. “But I think that there is another dimension that is more fundamental than that — and it is the impact of the new phenomenon called AI on how we are going to approach knowledge and how we’re going to approach learning.”
Aoun stressed Northeastern’s embrace of “humanics” as key to this new approach toward knowledge and learning.
In his book, Aoun defines humanics as the integration of three literacies: technological, data and human literacy. This approach enables students to transfer knowledge across domains and adapt to diverse challenges, Aoun said.
The approach is further put into practice by emphasizing several of Northeastern’s key strengths, Aoun told listeners.
He cited experiential learning through co-ops in 146 countries and the university’s commitment to providing lifelong learning opportunities in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom.
Ultimately, it’s not just students who need to be robot proof — it’s also higher education.
Aoun delivered a message of hope.
“I believe that higher education will become more relevant than ever because it’s not about knowledge — it’s about integration of knowledge. It’s also about socialization. It’s also about understanding what we do that machines cannot duplicate,” Aoun said. “That is something we have to bring to the fore in order to keep our relevance.”