Is AI going to be the answer to everything?

That seems to be the proposition of many commencement speakers at US universities this graduation season. Graduating students, however, have not always welcomed the message. At ceremony after ceremony, they have responded with boos and jeers.

Their reaction is not hard to understand. Students are leaving university at a time when AI is being promoted not only as a tool they must learn to use, but as a force that may transform the labour market they are about to enter. Yet the challenge goes beyond jobs. Universities are also being encouraged to remake themselves around AI, adopting it as a solution to budget pressures, administrative burdens and the demands of employers.

This is where the real danger lies. In the “age of AI”, universities risk becoming victims of their own uncritical embrace of the technology, especially at a time of deep financial strain. Industry stakeholders have strongly encouraged them to move in this direction.

A recent paper sponsored by Cisco, the US networking and technology giant, claimed that “forward-thinking institutions view AI as a solution to their resource constraints”, adding that “AI can automate routine tasks, improve student services and help universities operate more efficiently”. It also insisted that universities must embrace their “role as supply chains for AI-related skills”, explaining that “students entering the workforce expect AI integration, and employers increasingly demand AI literacy”.

This is a revealing way to talk about higher education. Universities are being told to see AI not only as a tool, but as an organising principle: their students imagined as future workers in need of AI literacy, their staff encouraged to streamline their labour, their institutions remade to be more efficient, more automated and more closely aligned with the labour market.

Several have accepted this........

© Al Jazeera