Universities must ensure that they continue to play a critical role in the development of AI and are not cast aside as the private sector takes centre stage, a university leader has urged.
Tshilidzi Marwala, rector of United Nations University in Japan and an expert on the theory and application of artificial intelligence, said that AI algorithms and the deep learning that is used by OpenAI “came out of the university system”, but private companies have increasingly played a larger role in the technology as “the amount of computing storage available at the university level is not enough”.
“How do we ensure that universities, which played a critical role in the development of this technology, are not cast aside?” he asked delegates at the Times Higher Education Global Sustainable Development Congress in Istanbul during a session on AI and inequality. “I think the only way in which we can do that is to create an environment where you have a much closer collaboration between the private sector and the university sector.”
At Stanford University, for instance, it is not always clear whether an expert is from the university or from Silicon Valley, he suggested. “And that is good. So we need to do that, but this can only happen in certain countries with large computing facilities.”
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Part of the solution is “the old concept of mobility of staff and students, between campuses [and] between campuses and the private sector”, he said.
While historically there has been an AI divide between the Global North and the Global South, with the latter region “underrepresented in the digital space”, the power balance has now shifted to China and the US, versus the rest of the world, Marwala added.
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“Over 80 per cent of all the investments into AI are done either by the United States or China. And I don’t think that is good,” he said. “We need to have some form of rebalancing.”
When asked how universities could ensure that they are embedded in the development of an AI future that is beneficial to the world, Marwala said that, during his tenure as vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg between 2018 and 2023, he introduced a compulsory AI course for all students.
“We need to make specifically AI but broadly technology literacy a core requirement for all students, because technological illiteracy is becoming fast a human rights issue,” he said.
However, the existing ways in which universities insert AI knowledge into curricula is typically “not perfect…it’s either too technical or it is not grounded in ethics”, he continued.
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Meanwhile, Jun-ichi Takada, executive vice-president for global affairs at the Institute of Science Tokyo, said he was more concerned about students’ attitude towards generative AI than the technology itself.
“Some students trust generative AI more than the professors themselves,” he told the conference during a panel discussion on advancing AI literacy across sectors.
While the university adopted a policy on generative AI in education in 2023, which broadly trusts students to use the technology responsibly, there are no common guidelines determining to what extent generative AI may be used in courses.
“We face a problem nowadays of the copy and paste of AI-generated content, and we comment to the students that it’s [equivalent to being] enslaved by generative AI,” he said.
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