In the AI era, universities need to strengthen students? creativity

AI will not eliminate humans, but it will redefine the economy, creating many new jobs and making some of the old jobs obsolete or less dependent on human intelligence.Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a book by Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun, discusses how the universities and higher education institutions will have to adapt as “any predictable work—including many jobs considered ‘knowledge economy’ jobs” come within “the purview of machines.”Aoun’s message: “to stay relevant in this new economic reality, higher education needs a dramatic realignment.” And in Robot-Proof, he provides a roadmap for developing a lifelong education system that will enable future generations to engage in not one but many professional careers throughout their lives.AI is not the first technology to change the way we work. Meanwhile, humans can quickly apply abstract concepts learned from one domain to another, while for AI, every new task is a fresh new challenge that must be learned from scratch.“Creativity combined with mental flexibility has made us unique—and the most successful species on the planet,” Prof. “The students are encountering an entirely novel situation but are able to step back and understand how, embedded in the context, they can use their knowledge to solve a problem,” Aoun says.By applying their classroom learning to workplace tasks, students in co-ops repeatedly practice far transfer, cementing their cognitive capacities—critical and systems thinking, entrepreneurship, and cultural agility.Efforts in AI transfer learning have so far been limited to very narrow tasks, such as tuning a trained image classifier on a new set of images. For humans, being to apply abstract concepts from one domain to another will be key to constantly learning new skills as AI transforms the world around us.History shows that we’re very bad at predicting the future, and we don’t know exactly how the future of AI will unfold. But what’s for sure is that the current and next generations of learners will have be very versatile and flexible in their acquiring new skills as algorithms become smarter and smarter.“Our potential to master far transfer is our competitive advantage over intelligent machines,” Aoun writes in Robot-Proof.This article was originally published by Ben Dickson on TechTalks, a publication that examines trends in technology, how they affect the way we live and do business, and the problems they solve.