Launching AI, academia, and the future

Firing up this Substack

What might artificial intelligence mean for higher education?

Answering that question is the job of this newsletter. Here I’ll explore the many intersections, impacts, effects, and relationships between emerging AI and the world of academia.

Who am I, and why should you read me?

I’m Bryan Alexander, a higher education futurist, and that’s why I’m doing this work. For two decades I’ve been researching, consulting, publishing, and teaching about how colleges and universities might develop over the coming years. You can find sample of this on my blog, at my weekly video program, and in books like Academia Next (2020).

That’s well and good for academia’s future, you might be thinking, but what can I say about AI in particular? What do I know about LLMs and GANs?

I’ve actually been tracking AI and education since the 1990s, dating back to when I was teaching at a small liberal arts college. That was both the dot.com era and also an AI winter, yet I was fascinated by the potential AI showed, at least to me. I taught Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines to undergrads and provoked faculty colleagues about it, while researching and teaching speculative fiction. In the 2000s and early 2010s I worked for a nonprofit, helping hundreds of small colleges and universities grapple collaboratively with emerging technologies. Back then that meant wild stuff like Web 2.0, mobile devices, gaming for learning, and videoconferencing, but my job also entailed carefully following stranger tech, like augmented and virtual reality, and… AI.

Me presenting a report on emerging tech for higher ed. New Media Consortium, 2007. Photo by Alan Levine.

In the mid-2010s my wife and I started a consulting firm about higher education’s future (still going strong), and in this work I’ve continued following AI. I’ve led workshops on creativity and AI before DALL-E ever appeared, written about what AI might do to campuses in Academia Next, tracked this every month in the FTTE report, and taught about AI in education for seminars in Georgetown’s Learning, Design, and Technology graduate program. Over on the Future Trends Forum we hosted a series of sessions on AI over the years, with guests like Jamey Heit, Nigel Cameron, Robin Hanson, Satya Nitta, and Larry Johnson.

In 2022 the generative AI revolution exploded, starting with image creating tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, then taking off with text apps like ChatGPT. I mobilized my background and networks to obtain and share intelligence on the topic. Naturally I fired off a string of blog posts, but more important was hosting a bunch of Future Trends Forum events (1, 2, 3, 4) where experts joined hundreds of interested academics to explore what this technology might mean.

Now I’m taking my research here, to Substack. I’d like to focus my AI work in one spot. The subject is of potentially enormous importance and needs continuous, forward-looking effort. That’s what I’m doing here, starting now.

I hope to post once or twice each week. These posts should include my forecasts for particular ways AI and academia intersect, including recent news and links to good analyses. I’ll share experiments I conduct with various tools, and in various settings, including classes. I’m also leaving room for emerging topics and themes, since the generative AI revolution is so fluid and developing so rapidly.

I would also like to hear from you. Which aspects of AI and academia are you most interested in? Have you been conducting your own experiments, which we could share in this venue? Please don’t hesitate to ping me either through Substack or other media.