Throughout students’ undergraduate studies, and likely secondary school before that, there is a strong focus on course grades both by the student and by the instructors. Universities heavily rely on grades, necessarily, both as a measure of learning outcomes and, secondarily, a comparative metric of student understanding and skills. Students with above-average grades are sometimes rewarded with scholarships, Dean’s List mentions, and offers for graduate studies. Students with below-average grades are increasingly offered supports and additional learning opportunities, but sometimes find themselves on academic probation or even failing out. From the university perspective, grades are not the only measure, but they are the primary performance metric used for student learning.
We are still in the very early days of widespread AI usage; the impacts, however, are becoming increasingly clear. In my immediate environment, there are large numbers of hard-working undergraduate and graduate students who face increasingly complex concepts in their courses, heavy workloads, and co-op jobs that sometimes start only a few months into their degree program. AI augmentation of our workload has great potential for benefits (e.g. improved efficiency, shorter working days) and, I would argue, greater potential for drawbacks and even dangers. In the university environment, I am increasingly observing students and employees struggling to benefit from AI and frequently getting themselves into bad situations. While resources, guidance, and training are increasingly being made available to all of us around AI concepts and usage, we are still in the early days and free time to leverage these resources is limited. I have started the SUS-AI project to try to provide a short, simple, and easily understandable “starting-point” resource for those who want to use AI sustainably and safely.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology. And it’s terrifically dangerous.”
— E.O. Wilson1
On the evening of September 23, the Waterloo Forum, a student-run initiative that hosts public debates on campus, convened a debate at the University of Waterloo’s main campus on the motion “Are tech bro executives the greatest threat to humanity?” between Dr. Umair Shah (in favor) and myself (in opposition), moderated by Psychology undergraduate student Jordan Bauman. The highlight of the evening and the bulk of the event were dedicated to questions from the audience. An article on the debate is forthcoming in The Imprint, the University of Waterloo’s student newspaper. This note is a reflection on the argument that I made against the motion, written out in more detail than the version compressed into the event’s opening statement.
Before I started university, I was overly focused on the label on my degree, the degree program I would choose, not the career it would enable. This was a common trap, one that most students tend to fall into: focusing on the next step instead of the destination. Fortunately, I had parents and a socioeconomic context during my youth that pretty much required me to focus on career outcomes as I grew older, started high school, and refined my understanding of the next steps in my life: university education. My parents and other mentors asked me useful questions about what jobs a university education in a particular field would result in, and whether I would be employable, financially independent, and (last and somewhat least) happy in those jobs.
I am an MIT reject, but it was likely one of the best things that ever happened to me. Instead, I was accepted into the engineering program at CMU,1 where you were admitted into two different degree programs and had to choose one at the end of your first year. I was offered electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and chemical engineering (CHE). After taking introductory courses in both, the choice of CHE was clear to me. It is, from my experience, the broadest engineering discipline, with mechanical engineering a close second. I wanted concepts and skills that would give me access to a broad range of future jobs, and the combination of physics, chemistry, math, and team project work in CHE was the best fit. The software/hardware aspects of ECE did appeal to me, but I realized that what I was actually interested in was computer science, not electrical engineering. Those skills were still accessible through a minor or double major, where I chose the latter.
My career started off in a relatively orthodox way. Coming from a family with modest means, I did not want to take risks early in my career. When I started my undergraduate degree at CMU1 I made sure to learn as many technical and employable skills as possible, which led me to choose chemical engineering as a major at the end of my first year.2 I had a simple career plan: prepare for a well-paying, secure job with the potential to transition into technical management.