The release of ChatGPT and Google’s Bard has sparked anxiety around AI’s potential to upend white-collar jobs, leading to historic market turbulence and corporate unease. However, companies centered around large language models have powered over half of this year’s S&P 500 gains, with chipmaker Nvidia becoming the sixth public company in the world valued at over $1 trillion. The future trajectory of AI is complex and impossible to predict accurately. The tremors of AI advancement extend well beyond market volatility and corporate anxieties to reshape the employment landscape dramatically. Companies like British Telecom have announced unprecedented job cuts, with AI replacing up to a fifth of roles. Trade unions are increasingly accepting AI’s role in job transformation, while creative sectors resist its intrusion into areas that demand human creativity. This reaction suggests a possible threshold: we welcome AI’s role in easing our burden from mundane tasks, but we will resist when it challenges our unique human capacities such as creativity and critical thinking.
IntroductionFaculty update their courses to maintain relevance as disciplines evolve, enhance student engagement, or for a plethora of other reasons. With the emergence of generative AI tools, faculty...
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