Articles such as “Intelligent Learning: Area Colleges Tackle Challenges, Opportunities of AI in the Classroom” [May 1, Xpress] make me bristle. Our universities must go beyond merely teaching the use of artificial intelligence; they should also connect with current industry professionals and teach how to develop, evolve and maintain it. I’ve come across too few educators capable of teaching the skills that we’re actively using to build and maintain AI solutions. Developing successful AI applications involves far more than just programming; it also includes developing and managing content and knowledge assets for AI, if not more so.
Generative AI is increasing the need for taxonomists, ontologists, knowledge graph architects, AI trainers, data ethicists, intelligent content architects, user experience designers and more. AI has already begun to change the nature of many jobs, but it is not something to fear.
Many are needed to develop and continually manage and maintain the technology, content and knowledge assets that will permeate our entire technology landscape; it’s not a one-and-done proposition as many incorrectly assume or ignore. Generative AI in particular is terrific at regurgitating existing content; it cannot generate novel knowledge and needs a great deal of augmentation to make it more accurate, reliable, trustworthy and explainable.
As a senior industry leader in content and knowledge engineering management with 42 years of experience on the bleeding edge — 38 of which I spent as a content and knowledge leader at IBM — I’ve reached out to several schools and professors over the past three years, only to be ignored except for one with whom I connected — Lance Cummings, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Lance is my hero; he has since immersed himself with (literally) hundreds of my industry peers both online and in person for quite some time. He has been doing the hard work of educating himself in real time on real issues with industry professionals and then bringing that knowledge back into the classroom.
We need more Lance Cummingses and fewer novice prognosticators in our university classrooms if we’re going to maintain our global edge and prepare our students for the many diverse and emerging careers in and related to AI.
— Michael Iantosca
Senior director of knowledge and platform engineering, Avalara Inc.
Weaverville
“I’ve reached out to several schools and professors over the past three years, only to be ignored except for one with whom I connected — Lance Cummings, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. We need need more Lance Cummingses and fewer novice prognosticators in our university classrooms if we’re going to maintain our global edge and prepare our students for the many diverse and emerging careers in and related to AI.”
What else is there to say than …OMG/ Lord help us. I mean, way way way down the rabbit hole here. whew. And sorry to hear of your being ignored …and those awful novice prognosticators in our universities …my gosh. You might try imaging a world where thinking for yourself rather than have your all consuming AI do it for you is a possibility …it’s a big beautiful world out there chock full of non AI generative possibilities ;)
oh and btw, there’s is no such thing as generative AI ( …other than to the zealot devotees of it of course). There are autonomous systems and they pose all sorts of problems without adequate regulation …we’re about to find this out the hard way over the next decade. Anyway, it’s regurgitated AI…. without access to a very large database ( ..for instance Youtube, which Google is busy mining to create many of its future AI projects) ..it’s without “knowledge”. No cognitive thinking is involved, ever. Nor should the requisite accompanying algorithms be construed as anything other than software …whether it’s created by a human, or a machine ( ..which much of it is nowadays ..hence an autonomous system when it starts writing it’s own playbook). And, our universities need to be teaching more, not less of the liberal arts …it’s there that imagination is nurtured and fed ….and without a lot more of it we’re headed straight to poorer/ harder times. Just saying.