Would You Declare A Major In A.I.?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Lisa Corian-Philip (0:39)

Hey Chicago, I'm Lisa Corian-Philip in for Sasha-Ann Simons, and this is In the Loop.

Stick around until the end of the conversation to get a breakdown of the day's top local stories. But first, students at some local universities are able to major or concentrate in an emerging field we've all been hearing a lot about, artificial intelligence. So, what can the course look like, and what do educators involved in those programs think about the growing conversation around whether AI is developing too fast? At the table with me was Samir Khuller, Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering. Starting this fall, his department will be home to an AI major. Also, Michael Bennett, Associate Vice Chancellor for Data Science and AI Strategy at UIC, which offers artificial intelligence as a concentration, not a major.

Professor Khuller started by giving us an overview of the AI major at Northwestern. Here's Professor Khuller.

Samir Khuller (1:47)

So, the AI major, which is brand new and launches this fall, will overlap with the computer science major to some degree, but computer science as a field has grown substantially now.

And so, we felt that with the introduction of something like 20 AI courses that the department currently offers, we should allow students who are focusing on that sub-area to actually major in AI. And the way it's designed, it's also easy for a student to add AI as a second major, whether they be majoring in economics or business or engineering overall.

Lisa Corian-Philip (2:19)

Okay, I see. And I know that there are other universities in the area that are also rolling out programs or have existing programs. I think Illinois Institute of Technology debuted its program in 2019 The City Colleges of Chicago is starting to offer an associate's degree.

Professor Bennett, I'm curious about the AI concentration at UIC. What does that look like?

Michael Bennett (2:41)

Our university has taken a methodical approach to introducing AI into our curriculum. It's also taken an experimental and incremental approach. And so in addition to the concentration, which allows students pursuing various majors to augment those traditional pathways with AI training, we've also partnered with Google to offer up what we call the Accelerator program, which allows our students, staff, and faculty to acquire Google certifications.

And then we, in the experimental sense, we've also sprinkled AI elements across any number, well, most of our 16 colleges. And so students, even though there's not a degree focused exclusively on AI, all of our students now have access to a broad range of augmenting additions to their traditional program paths.

Lisa Corian-Philip (3:39)

I see, I see.

And as the school year is getting started, there's a big conversation going on about the future of AI. Over the weekend, we heard from Dario Amade, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude. He published an essay calling for an AI slowdown. Here's what he had to say on a CBS special.

Dario Amodei (3:59)

I won't lie to you, there are real dangers. And I think for too long, the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.

Lisa Corian-Philip (4:11)

He went on to say this.

Dario Amodei (4:12)

It doesn't mean we need to panic today. It doesn't mean we need to shut it all down.

What I would say, it's a warning sign. It's a warning sign that we need to slow down.

Lisa Corian-Philip (4:25)

Professor Bennett, what went through your mind when you heard this?

Michael Bennett (4:29)

Immediately, I thought that this was a rather dramatic articulation. I have a lot of respect for Dr. Omodi, and I have a lot of respect for that company as well. But this articulation struck me as bordering on science fictional in its intensity. The technology, the broad family of technologies that we are pointing to when we say artificial intelligence right now, certainly extraordinary, possibly by many accounts, including my own, possibly an epoch-defining technological development. But this announcement struck me as quite dramatic.

And also, it seems to implicitly kind of discount some of the impacts that the technologies, again, artificial intelligence, whether talking about large language models or agentic AI, some of the impacts of the technologies presently. This is a potentially remote problem that he's pointing to. Conceptually understandable, but I think many people are concerned with more immediate impacts right now.