The University of Hawaii at Mānoa just announced a new master’s degree in artificial intelligence (AI), along with graduate certificate programs in AI and data science. Which is great, because advanced AI is not the future; it’s the present.
Computer science aficionados are the most likely candidates for this timely master’s offering, and the timing is propitious. AI, in our midst for decades, is now a huge determinant in many facets of our lives (including workforce “opportunities”), and UH is wise to cater to students (and workers) interested in this burgeoning field.
AI laser-focus and increased funding has allowed for exponential growth (AI keeps getting smarter), yet caution flags remain about what more advanced artificial intelligence will allow for and result in. For every amazing opportunity in medicine or science where AI optimizes solutions and expedites answers to long-term dilemmas, some nefarious individual, consortium, or country seeks to take advantage of AI in ways that we must prepare for… now.
This is not Chicken Little “the-sky-is-falling” worrying; it is the existing morality reality. We’ve already seen manipulation via drones, social media, false narratives, deepfakes, chatbots, phishing, intellectual property theft, scamming of the elderly and other examples of technology running amok. Heck, maybe I didn’t actually write this?! (I did).
In 2021, American oil company Colonial Pipeline experienced a major ransomware cyberattack via a compromised password that caused an East Coast gas shortage and consumer panic. 2021 seems like the Stone Age in AI-speak as upgrades occur geometrically (see Moore’s Law). Bad actors won’t play by whatever international rules might invariably be set up. Social media companies have been accused of betraying initial mission statements and ethics charters. Tristan Harris, a Google design ethicist who left Google in 2013, became a spokesperson for more ethical technology design and speaks eloquently of this reality.
This decade, AI might be performing tasks that heretofore required human intuitive and empathetic thinking, beyond the concept of AGI (artificial general intelligence). Is that good? These “what if” hypotheses might creep you out. What if AI courses are taught by AI-trained machines? Would that benefit humans, or just be more efficient? Noted NYU professor/author, Jonathan Haidt, suggests that already “…the transition from a play-based to a phone-based youth has ‘rewired childhood’” (USA Today). Wow.
Here’s hoping UH’s AI programs can become leaders in transformative and “human” AI training… and perhaps even provide some job development.
Think about it…