The academic year is over, and it’s now June, which is NYU’s Annual Pride Month. There are a number of talks and other interesting events that you can attend, both in person and remotely, including NYU Campus Services’ 5th Annual Pride Celebration, which focuses this year on the history of Christopher Street.
We have accomplished a lot this year, and now is a good time to think back to what we’ve done to help support NYU. Much of our work involved installing, maintaining, and upgrading mature technology. We also helped our community leverage our technology to get the most out of it. We can be an important asset in bringing new technology to NYU. We’ve been through it before and we understand both our users and the technology. Or at least we should.
The buzzword of the year is AI. It’s good to remember that AI is a programming technique. The programs run on lots of data and have lots of computing power, but the structures and techniques used have pretty much been around for decades. We want to help our community to leverage AI as well as other resources to automate as much of our work as possible. AI can help.
When talking to people worried about AI, try to give them some perspective. In the 1950s, we thought we’d have a system that could pass the Turing Test in the 1960s—the 1970s at the latest. In 2015, I listened to auto industry executives saying we were five years away from fully self-driving commercial cars. Not only are we not there, but we’ve backtracked a bit. Remember how blockchain was going to change everything completely? The last bit of capability is always the hardest.
There is no doubt that AI will make some things more difficult. If it was hard to find the truth on social media, it will be even harder with generative AI and deep fakes. If it was easy to go to the top search result for the answer, it is even more tempting to have ChatGPT write our answer for us without checking it. As always, technology is a tool, and a tool has to be used correctly.
When it comes to technology hype, we should be the cool heads calming people down and helping them to understand how new tech can help them. Be there to assist them in picking the right tool for the task. Help them to understand how the tools fit (or don’t fit) our culture, privacy, and technology ecosphere. To do so, we have to understand the capabilities of the tools and the needs of our users. Our role hasn’t changed, but technology has and always will.
Summer is here and I hope you get a chance to relax and enjoy it as we start preparing for the next academic year with a new president. The opportunities are boundless, it is up to us to seize them.