(Educational) Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age
OpenAI has released a white paper Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First which outlines some policy ideas for the coming age of superintelligence. This is a mix of ideas tossed around Silicon Valley and Washington policy circles for years. Things like “Modernize the Tax Base” and “Public Wealth Fund” are concepts that sound good to most of us. Reactions to the document have been mixed to say the least. Some folks are glad to see a lab engaging in this conversation while others see this as an overt attempt to blunt the public backlash against AI or just a cynical ploy that is disconnected from the actions of senior executives at OpenAI.
We don’t pretend to have a deep understanding of the politics here [note: Nik does have a forthcoming book about hydroelectric power generation and political battles in the Pacific Northwest so we are adjacent to actual expertise for at least one of us]. We do want to zoom in on what this document says and does not say about higher education and what this imagined reality might look like for us.
The limited focus is on research instead of teaching. The sole mention of universities has to do with the dissemination of research and technology. “Both laboratory and production infrastructure should be deployed broadly across universities, community colleges, hospitals, and regional research hubs, not concentrated in a small number of elite institutions.” This sounds fine. It would be a refreshing change to see broad distribution of research resources instead of consolidation at elite universities. If we imagine a future infused with AI it makes sense to democratize access to the infrastructure needed to support it.
There are several mentions of education in the broadest sense. In terms of sharing in the prosperity of AI the document references access to “better health and education.” This is a theme throughout the document. For the most part education is treated as a goal unto itself, but the overt theme of this paper is about disruptions to the economy. So if education is at least in part, workforce training, the question remains, education for what?
There is one window into an answer to this question in the “Right to AI” section and it is, from my perspective, a little grim. The authors argue “Support the education, infrastructure, connectivity, and training needed to use these systems effectively, and make sure that workers, small businesses, schools, libraries, and underserved communities are not excluded from the capabilities that drive productivity and opportunity.” So the only thing stated here that we need to be educated about, is AI itself.
I don’t think there are clear answers in this document about the future of education because there are not clear answers, not because OpenAI has a secret plan they are not telling us. If we are honest with ourselves we have not been great at articulating the value of college to the broader public for quite some time which is one of the reasons we see flagging polling about the perceived value of education. We do need a conversation about what higher education looks like in the age of super intelligence and (this part is good news) I think we need to lead it. Nils Gilman wrote a wonderful essay on the future of higher education and what we might build for the economy of the future that we highly recommend. He closes on an optimistic note on liberal arts education “To unlock your creativity and value-add in a world with ubiquitous high-powered AI tools, you will need enough hands-on experience to have good domain judgment and confidence to assess results, plus enough metacognitive awareness of how to talk about it to guide others.” That is a conversation we are ready to have and a future we want to participate in.