I'm a Kansas City guy. Most people know that, but for those of you who didn't... you do now. My dream was always to be a dentist so as a senior in high school I made an appointment with the admissions office to see what I needed to do to make my dream happen. At that appointment they told me that getting an undergraduate degree from UMKC would look good on my application. I hadn't even considered staying in KC for college, but that sealed the deal for me.
With that story being told, we now come to the actual post for today. As regular readers know, I cover a lot on AI here. In fact, just last week I had a post about the big announcement made by Trust AI at the Chicago MidWinter Meeting. Let's face it, AI is impacting us everywhere from our phones to the federal government. It is changing the way we practice and the way we interact with the world.
As a UMKC grad I get email updates from the alumni society on a regular basis and the latest one I got made a pretty cool announcement. It seems that even my small undergraduate university is now working toward offering a degree in Artificial Intelligence. From the newsletter:
The University of Missouri Board of Curators approved the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s plan to launch a new Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence degree this fall, pending approval from both the state and the Higher Learning Commission.
I realize that this isn't a groundbreaking announcement, but when I read it my thought was "if my small college is offering a degree program in AI, that just shows how ubiquitous it is." There truly is no stopping this train. Like most people I have concerns about it. As a tech lover, I'm excited about the possibilities it unlocks, but I also am not 100% trusting in it.
The systems make mistakes and need supervision. It's critical that there is always "a human in the loop". With the recent news stories about AI in the Pentagon, we definitely need people in charge of the machines. Plain and simple, AI is a tool, but not a solution. I consider AI to be a bit like dynamite. You can do tremendous good with it, but you can also use it for tremendous evil. Human supervision and control is imperative.
