A recent Washington Post article explained that it requires the equivalent of one 12-oz. bottle of water (as coolant) to produce one AI-generated email of 100 words. That same week, plans were announced to reopen the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant for dedicated use by a sin-gle customer – specifically, to operate systems infrastructure and data operations in support of Microsoft’s AI platforms.
These events crystalize just two examples of growing concerns, even angst, regarding “full-throttle AI” – sustainability in environ-mental circles; and, industrial concentration in the capital markets and among their regulators. Similar anecdotes abound in fields as varied as privacy, data integrity and security, IP and personal brand identity rights, cybersecurity, intelligence and defense, and critical infrastruc-ture – to name just a few.
Yet with an enormous velocity in capital investment, AI is transforming cognitive work at startling adoption and penetration rates. Just as the assembly-line revolutionized manufactur-ing in the early 20th century, there will be no turning back.
Ethan Mollick characterizes this future as one of “co-intelligence.” He and others foresee AI-enabled bots, custom-designed to collabo-rate with specific humans, to do specific work with hyper-productivity.
The disruptions for knowledge workers during this transition are, and will continue to be, considerable and painful. Yet for those who focus, prepare and adapt, rewarding opportu-nities abound. Indeed, the “democratization of expertise” that such “Human/AI collaboration” portends carries the potential for scaled social mobility.
That hits close to home at the CSUN David Nazarian College of Business and Economics where we’re committed to and acting upon our responsibility to educate and prepare our stu-dents for a future in which AI-related skills are the keys to success. Our determination is not without risk or existential threat as AI chal-lenges almost every aspect of higher education.
SCHOLARLY ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND PEER-REVIEWED PUBLISHING
Researching and publishing are the bedrock of academia. They rely upon ethical, individual effort and collaborative processes and norms to advance entire disciplines through the accu-mulated literature. Advances in AI bring both promises and perils for today’s research faculty – especially those still on tenure-track.
On the one hand, AI can automate and accelerate data collection and analysis, and initial scans and summaries of the literature. From these vast troves of existing research, AI can help form innovative and novel hypotheses to explore previously overlooked research direc-tions and accelerate discovery. AI is particularly good at detecting patterns and insights other-wise hidden in plain sight within massive data sets that might elude human researchers. This presents the potential for breakthrough advanc-es, especially in medical and scientific fields.
Scholarly advances often depend on the “replicability” of the academic research and its outcomes. AI can meticulously track and record every step of the research process. This improved documentation and standardization can lead to more reproducible studies, address-ing a significant challenge in the study of com-plex problems.
Finally, AI can be a democratizing force in modern research making sophisticated analyt-ical techniques more accessible to researchers with limited resources or technical expertise. This has the potential to level the playing field and foster more diverse contributions to academic knowledge. Yet as with all industries, these profound and powerful AI capabilities threaten the future role of humans. Tools like the AI Scientist, which can automate entire research processes, raise the prospect that while we will still need smart PhDs to collaborate with the machines, we may not need as many of them.
Ethical concerns about bias in the training of AI platforms have been widely discussed, with various standards and regulatory solutions proffered. Until those congeal, individual researchers must do their own due diligence to ensure that their research does not perpetuate or amplify biases inherent in the data upon which they rely. It’s a daunting task and a heavy responsibility to avoid skewing research out-comes that can have far-reaching consequences.
Finally, the power of these AI systems to process data might obscure serendipitous dis-covery – those paradigm-shifting moments of inherently human genius and creativity that lead to “eureka,” from which major scientific movements and advancements ensued.
Over the past five years, the Nazarian College faculty has risen to this challenging and highly competitive scholarship environment, producing a 31% increase in the number of unique papers published in peer-reviewed journals over our previous five-year accreditation cycle. Similarly, the number of publications per faculty member increased by 38% from cycle to cycle. This collective body of work has demon-strated thought leadership in fields such as AI, blockchain, cryptocurrency, machine learning and privacy.
AI TEACHING INNOVATIONS UNDERWAY AT CSUN
Even more encouraging, our faculty are bringing AI into the classroom with:
• Assigned AI-assisted student presentations
• Multimedia content creation for faculty lectures
• Personalized AI tutoring, with customized AI chatbots that combine course material and student profiles for mass-individualization of the tutoring experience
• Interactive learning materials with AI-enhanced textbooks and platforms with summarizations, explanations and quizzes to support student learning outside the classroom
• Real-time analysis of data gathered from students in the classroom to foster engagement and dynamic, interactive learning – even in large group settings
• Experiments with enhanced digital lectures with voice cloning and avatar creation for video lectures for online classes.
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
Strategic Planning: This past Spring, the Nazarian College began a long-term strate-gic planning exercise with a lengthy survey of open-ended questions sent to some 5,000 students, faculty, staff, alums and community leaders. We processed the rich, voluminous, and unstructured data gathered through an AI engine that summarized major themes and constructs, ranked concerns and recommendations by prevalence, summarized contrarian points of view, and spiced the analysis with the “Top 20 Provocative Quotes.” These outputs were used to drive focus groups and tabletop discussions at our annual faculty-staff retreat. This AI-enabled approach not only accelerated the process, it made the process possible.
Professional Education Beyond a Degree:
This award-winning, four-year initiative encouraged faculty to assign skills-based certifi-cates, offered by respected third-party corporate and academic content authors, as assignments that would complement and augment class-room learning. The intent was to balance the long-term value of a four-year degree, with the short-term necessity of graduating students as “job-ready on day one” – with skills that matter to employers. The JPMorgan Chase Foundation awarded a grant to expand the program to students across all nine colleges of the CSUN campus, with an emphasis on “tech skills” that are valued in every discipline and indus-try – data analytics, machine learning, cloud computing, technical risk management and cybersecurity, AI and Python.
Over the course of the PEBD initiative, Nazarian College students earned 5,548 third-party certificates. As a result of the JPMCF grant, 522 Coursera Academy tech-skill certificates were earned by 423 students enrolled in CSUN degree programs ranging from geophysics to fashion merchandizing, elec-trical engineering to journalism, literature to global supply chain management.
AI and the Workforce of the Future Symposium:
At 4 p.m. on November 19, the Nazarian College will extend our impact in AI by sponsoring a symposium that will bring together global thought leaders – each of whom is moving the needle on artificial intelligence, each from a different perspective and each with a different mission.
Elsewhere in this publication, a full-page ad appears that introduces our keynote speaker and panelists and presents a link to register for the event. We hope all of our employer, busi-ness and community partners will join us on campus at the Soraya for what promises to be an informative and thought-provoking evening.
The Nazarian College ranks among the top 5% of business schools by virtue of its AACSB accreditation and has been regularly awarded top accolades from the Princeton Review, US News & World Report, CEO Magazine, Money Magazine and other esteemed agencies over the past six years. With over 6,700 majors and 400 minors, the college offers one of the largest undergraduate business programs in the nation and top-ranked graduate business programs. As part of CSUN, which is a certified Hispan-ic-serving university, the Nazarian College student body boasts ethnicities, races and nationalities from around the world as well as members of all socio-economic strata.
Bob Sheridan serves as the executive director of the Center for Career Education and Professional Development at the CSUN David Nazarian College of Business and Economics, where Deone Zell, PhD, is a professor of management.Â
