Waseda WeeklyWaseda Weekly

The era of true AI has arrived. In the United States, AI investment by big tech companies has driven almost all of the recent economic growth. On the other hand, AI-related unemployment (*) has been making headlines. Currently, the global unemployment rate is not rising because of this, but one student at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) dropped out of college because he believes that the arrival of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) has increased the possibility of humanity's extinction and now works for a non-governmental organization (NGO) that advocates for the safety of AI.

* The introduction of AI will reduce the demand for human labor, leading to unemployment and changes in employment.

Universities' response to this era is slow, for better or for worse. Some might argue that this is simply how it is, and that it's acceptable. After all, trends are fleeting. Optimizing for immediate changes isn't always the best approach in the long run. However, universities are involved in the production of knowledge. A slow response is acceptable, but insensitivity is unacceptable. Students can simply feed their lecture notes into an AI and ask it to explain things clearly. In mathematics, AI can already solve problems that previously took a long time at high speed. Just as the Industrial Revolution (for the most part) liberated humanity from arduous labor, the ongoing AI revolution is liberating humanity from intellectual labor as well.

So, what knowledge and skills will still be useful in the age of AI? Based on US data, when comparing social skills related to interpersonal relationships with mathematical skills such as programming and data processing, those with higher social skills tend to perform better in terms of employment and wages. Cultivating social skills may still be something that universities can do. However, the biggest problem is that university faculty, including myself, cannot definitively say that we are good at teaching social skills.

(NI)

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