What I told our HoDs about AI

On teaching, research, social impact and admin

Yesterday I gave a talk to twenty-five of Stellenbosch University’s Heads of Department about artificial intelligence. I wanted to write it up, partly because the argument is easier to follow as an essay than as twenty slides, and partly because I suspect others might find it interesting.

One thing to mention first: When I started preparing the talk a week ago, two of the tools I ended up using did not yet exist. Opus 4.7, the model I use most, was released only last Thursday. Claude Design, which I used to build the slides, appeared the next day. If I had given the same talk a month ago, several of my examples would not have been available. A week from now, parts of this essay will already read as slightly dated. When I wrote a post here listing the AI tools I use, only six months ago, almost nothing on that list would survive today. That is the tempo we are working at, and it is the first thing a Head of Department needs to understand.

It helps, before going further, to place this in the frame economic historians use. General-purpose technologies are an old story: the plough (see an earlier piece here), steam, electricity, the computer. Each reallocated labour rather than eliminating it, but each also rewarded some people, places, and organisations sooner than others. The interesting question has never been ‘will it replace us?’ It has always been ‘where does labour go, and who gets there first?’ AI fits that pattern, with one new wrinkle. It automates cognition itself, and its speed of diffusion is unusual even by the standards of earlier GPTs. That combination is what makes the present moment genuinely different…