AI's challenge to universities: What happens when EQ trumps IQ?

Artificial intelligence will soon surpass knowledge workers in most tasks for which they are trained. Should universities switch from educating the mind to educating the heart?

- Simon Chesterman and Loy Hui Chieh

Nov 30 marks the second anniversary of the release of ChatGPT—though few professors will be celebrating.

As the large language model raced towards a hundred million users back in 2022, academic social media was abuzz with gloomy speculation about how this transformative technology that simulated human reasoning and communication might be used by our students to cheat in their papers.

There was hand-wringing and head-scratching over ChatGPT's ability to produce in seconds what had once taken days or weeks. Some academics exhibited the classic five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—regarding the impact of this new software on their life's work.

As the months now stretch to years, it has become clearer that there is a lot of hype about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the economy and society. This has long been part of the history of AI, with the term "AI winter" coined to reflect the mismatch between expectations and reality.

Yet generative AI is already changing our relationship to information, from how we seek it (chatting with AI rather than searching with Google) to how we produce it (from writing to prompting).

It also offers new ways of engaging with material. Google's NotebookLM, for example, can ingest articles or whole books and create an engaging podcast between two speakers.

This is all very exciting. But, to the extent that the functions of a university are to cultivate knowledge and educate the citizenry, these changes herald a seismic shift in what universities do, as well as what they are.

In particular, after centuries of attention to training of the mind, a more holistic view of education may mean refocusing on the heart.