The ‘Ideas That Matter: The Future of Earth and AI’ event invited students to participate in a discussion surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) and its future impacts on society.
The Lewis Honors College hosted the event on Monday, Oct. 6, to discuss the impact AI will have on academics, the environment and the workforce in the coming years.
The event featured four lecturers from the honors college, seed planting, pizza and finished with a screening of WALL-E.
Sherelle Roberts, a lecturer in the Lewis Honors College and event organizer, said it took her over a year to plan.
“We’re going to be having a conversation about AI and its impact on the earth, the future of work, all of our lives and that’s pretty serious,” Roberts said. “One of the conversations we’re going to have is ‘Are the robots going to take your job?’”
Roberts said the rise of AI is similar to the decline of society within sci-fi or dystopian movies, saying the best way to think about AI is to consider its impact on the environment and how people use AI in their everyday lives.
Roberts said that as a society, we should be thinking about the future similarly to the Industrial Revolution.
“We look back at it fondly, saying, ‘Oh my gosh, that Industrial Revolution, that was amazing,’” Roberts said. “But we always forget about the starvation, and the joblessness, and the breadlines, and the death. So I think whenever we’re having any huge technological move, we have to say, ‘Are we prepared for the fallout?’”
Roberts said she doesn’t tell her students what to think, but rather how to think. She said they should determine for themselves how much AI they want to use in their assignments.
“I like to ask my students this, ‘Do you want a doctor giving you surgery that passed all of their tests with ChatGPT, or do you want a doctor who learned the material and learned how to use AI as a complement to their pre-existing knowledge?’” Roberts said.
AI ethics is similar to how students choose what to eat, when to sleep and where to go out, Roberts said.
“One of the questions I like to bring up is how much AI do we want in our lives?” Roberts said. “Do we want it to be our companion, our mate, our best friend? Every person has to decide for themselves.”
Trey Conatser, Lewis Honors College affiliate, said that the fast advancing nature of AI programs is important to the future of academics and why lectures like these are important to attend.
The impact on the physical environment of the Earth and within classrooms, Conatser said, is critical to talk about as the pace of generative AI models expands rapidly.
Conatser said he has worked on the relationship between AI and education since ChatGPT was first introduced in 2022.
“I have spearheaded some university-wide efforts since then (2022), to train up faculty and staff on how AI works, what is both effective and not effective for learning and education,” Conatser said.
On Sept. 12, the University of Kentucky announced it would be adding an AI major next fall, according to the Kentucky Kernel.
Conatser said that universities should take advantage of AI tools in classes because they can prepare students to work with AI and can help students gain an advantage with knowledge on how to use AI.
“AI research has been around since about the 1950s, so it’s been around for a while, but generative AI can potentially change the way we teach and learn,” Conatser said.
Julia Borgstrom, a freshman human health science major, attended the event because she wanted to learn more about AI after discussing it in her class, but also to earn extra credit.
“My biggest takeaway I thought was really interesting, how they were talking about the environmental impacts of AI and how it actually uses a lot of water and mining things, cause I’ve never thought about that before,” Borgstrom said.
