A few months ago, MIT president Rafael Reif announced the launch of the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing in an e-mail to the MIT community. “This new College is our strategic response to a global phenomenon – the ubiquity of computing and the rise of AI…” wrote President Reif. “To state the obvious, AI in particular is reshaping geopolitics, our economy, our daily lives and the very definition of work. It is rapidly enabling new research in every discipline and new solutions to daunting problems. At the same time, it is creating ethical strains and human consequences our society is not yet equipped to control or withstand.”
The new College of Computing is made possible by a $350 million foundational gift from Stephen Schwarzman, - chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s leading investment firms. The gift is part of a $1 billion commitment to reshape MIT to help it better address the continuing advances in technology in our 21st century digital economy, as well as their many applications , - both the exciting opportunities and the difficult challenges.
The College is envisioned as an interdisciplinary hub across all five of MIT’s existing schools: Engineering; Science; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Architecture and Planning; and the Sloan School of Management. This MIT News announcement succinctly summarized the key objectives of the new College:
- reorient MIT to bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT, allowing the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines
- create 50 new faculty positions that will be located both within the College and jointly with other departments across MIT - nearly doubling MIT’s academic capability in computing and AI
- give MIT’s five schools a shared structure for collaborative education, research, and innovation in computing and AI
- educate students in every discipline to responsibly use and develop AI and computing technologies to help make a better world; and
- transform education and research in public policy and ethical considerations relevant to computing and AI.
That morning, journalist/newscaster Becky Quick interviewed Reif and Schwartzman on her CNBC program. She asked Schwarzman why he gave $350 million to MIT, given that his undergraduate degree is from Yale and his MBA is from Harvard. The reason, he replied, is his belief that technologies like AI and machine learning will profoundly change the world. On a number of trips to China, he personally observed that China is making big investments in AI, and wants to make sure that the US is able to keep up and remain at the leading edge. Furthermore, he wants to ensure that AI is introduced in a sensible, ethical way, given its potential for massive societal disruptions, including the displacement of large numbers of workers. The transition to this emerging AI era will likely be one of the major challenges we’ll have to deal with over the next few decades.
Schwarzman added that in countries with centrally managed industrial policies, like China, governments are strongly supporting the development of AI and related technologies and applications. In the US, that responsibility has primarily rested with our research universities and the private sector, while government support has not been as strong as it once was. US leadership in AI requires the close collaboration of academia, business and government.
Reif said that the Schwarzman College of Computing was the biggest change to the MIT structure since the 1950s. The world is now demanding a different kind of bilingual graduates, that is, ones who study whatever it is they want to major in, - engineering, science, business, economics, - but who will also learn how to use advanced computing and AI tools in the practice of their profession. The new College is intended to provide such an education by integrating computing and AI tools into all of MIT’s disciplines.
The bilingual nature of the College of Computing was in evidence throughout the celebration event. There were talks on the applications of AI to diagnose and treat cancer and other diseases, to advance energy efficiency, and to help us understand our highly complex financial ecosystem. But there were also talks on the assault on empathy in our friction-free digital culture, on human-machine partnerships in the workplace, and on the role of ethics in AI.
As a companion to the celebration, Melissa Nobles, Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, invited faculty from across MIT to contribute their commentaries to a Perspective on Ethics, Computing and AI. “These commentaries, representing faculty from all five MIT schools, implore us to be collaborative, foresighted, and courageous as we shape a new college - and to proceed with judicious humility,” wrote Dean Nobles in her Perspective’s foreword. “Rightly so. We are embarking on an endeavor that will influence nearly every aspect of the human future.”
Organizing such an interdisciplinary initiative is a truly bold step for any institution, as I know from personal experience, having led IBM’s Internet Division in December of 1995 as a company-wide initiative. Let me briefly share my own perspective.
In the mid-1990s, a lot was starting to happen around the Internet. It was all very exciting, but it wasn’t clear where things were heading, and what the implications would be to the world of business, as well as to the overall economy and society. As is the case with AI today, while the Internet was full of promise, there was considerable hype around it as well, which led to the dot-com bubble.
What made the Internet job different from just about any job I previously had is that there was no one technology or product you could work on in the labs that would make you a success in the marketplace. We developed several Internet-specific products in our R&D labs, but it soon became clear that while some would enjoy reasonable success, they would not, on their own, help us achieve the leadership position we were after.
This time around, to borrow President Reif’s words, we had to become bilingual, - that is, the strategy had to come not just from the technologies and products coming out of our labs, but from their applications in the real world. Watching what our customers were doing, it started to become clear that the Internet was going to have a transformative impact on companies and industries. The universal reach and connectivity of the Internet were enabling access to information and transactions of all sorts for anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. Companies could now reach their customers, employees, suppliers and partners at any time of the day or night, no matter where they were.
We came up with our e-business strategy, - which went on to become quite successful, - by watching and learning from what was going on in the marketplace, and adjusting our products and services to make sure that we were helping our customers leverage the Internet throughout their firms.
Like the Internet, AI is a powerful general purpose technology capable of supporting a wide variety of applications in just about every discipline, profession and industry. But, attaining AI’s broad potential will require not only a continuing slew of technological innovations, but an equally important complement of application, business, economic, societal and public policy innovations. That’s the important challenge being addressed by the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
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