In this episode of In Conversation With, Mary Margaret Olohan sits down with Dr Jonathan Sanford, president of the University of Dallas, to discuss the state of Catholic higher education and what artificial intelligence means for the students coming through it.
AI is Sanford's first subject, and his argument runs against the grain of both the fears and the hype surrounding it. Drawing on the philosopher Shannon Vallor's image of AI as a kind of digital Narcissus, he says the danger is not that machines will out-think us but that people will mistake a compilation of digital history for a thinker in its own right. AI can summarise, he says, but it cannot think, and it is not a creative partner in the way so many now expect it to be. His answer is not caution but formation: a real liberal arts education, grounded in mathematics and the hard sciences as much as history and literature, is in his account the only thing that will let graduates master the coming disruption rather than be mastered by it.
