Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
The machines are getting better at strategy. The bigger risk is that we won’t notice when they’re the ones deciding.
Where I stand…
I regularly use AI to think through nearly every serious decision now, and at some point I started making it keep a ledger of which recommendations I actually acted on and which stayed thought exercises. I did that because I noticed I could no longer tell the difference from memory. That should have worried me more than it did.
I’ll say where I stand up front so nobody has to dig for it. Sometime before October 2028, some AI systems will produce strategic options for a university that are better than the ones my senior team and I produce on an ordinary Tuesday. I am not saying that to provoke anyone (well, a little).
I am saying it because of three announcements that landed on three consecutive days at the end of this month, and because one of them shows a problem that has already arrived and that almost nobody in higher education is talking about. We may not notice when the machine is the one making the call.
Regular readers know I reach for sailing whenever I write about Unity; I ran one sailing image through an entire essay in 2023. So here is the image for this one. Every serious boat has an autopilot, and it holds a heading better than most of us can by the third hour at the wheel, so nobody sensible refuses to use it.
The skipper still sets the course. They still watch the weather and still decide when the course is wrong. The one I worry about engaged the autopilot hours ago, stopped feeling the wheel somewhere along the way, and still believe they are steering.
Every skipper I trust keeps someone aboard who taps the compass now and then and asks if we’re still on the course we set. For more than a few years that person, for me, has been Sharon Reishus, our Board Chair. She pulled a good share of the research for this essay, and she has never once let me assume Unity’s next chapter would take care of itself (it won’t).
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