Technological innovations have always affected the work and the role of educators. The arrival of artificial intelligence at universities requires a reflection of the consequences of this latest disruptive change because it does not only change what we do as researchers and teachers, it also changes how we think.

Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. As balanced predictions about what it will bring are difficult to market, paradisiacal and dystopian visions of the future predominate. Anything can be justified by selective perception and cleverly chosen examples. Much remains in flux, however, and any assessments of future developments is highly speculative. What is certain is that there will be major changes in many areas. This is this case for higher education and the future role of the professor.

This is nothing new, as there have always been transformations in the past, especially in the wake of technological innovations.

Tech and knowledge in history

Before the invention of printing, existing knowledge was collected in manuscripts, which were kept in monasteries and libraries. As places of knowledge, they were only accessible to an educated few, those who could read and write. As the quantity and variety of the knowledge was still manageable, those who had access were able to train as universal scholars and generate further knowledge.

Scholars communicated with each other, founded schools of thought, and advised those in power, who in return sponsored their scholarly life. They researched, taught, and instructed the offspring of their patrons. Within a population much smaller than today, scholars were a tiny minority.

The explosive spread of knowledge brought about by the invention of printing, as well as the democratization of education through compulsory schooling, meant that education was no longer only open to a small elite, and also represented an important political resource for gaining and maintaining power. A large section of society now had access to knowledge and education. The printed book made popular education possible and helped combat illiteracy. Knowledge increasingly took the place of physical labor, resulting in an explosion of wealth during the transition from manual to mental labor.

In the 20th century, this meant that professors in such societies were expected to create and impart knowledge through research and teaching. Scholars shared the results of their work in publications and lectures. Students were given the passive role of internalizing the material presented and being able to repeat it in examinations as closely as possible to the original. Among the learners, a small selection was given the prospect of following in the professor's footsteps.

Teaching and learning with the internet

The invention of the internet further democratized access to knowledge and nurtured the hope (unfortunately not yet confirmed) that ignorance would diminish as the barriers to accessing information continued to fall.

The professor was no longer the central source of knowledge and its dissemination. Instead, search engines now provided information that previously had to be found, processed and transformed into new knowledge in analogue form in card files, reference works and catalogs, which in a scholar’s life took a great deal of time and organization.

As a result, the role of the professor transformed from being a carrier, creator and mediator of knowledge to an organizer of the rapidly growing volumes of knowledge that a single person could no longer manage. He or she became a guide through the jungle of knowledge, a sorter, classifier, reviewer, moderator of discourses and a critic. At the same time, the professor also became an increasingly specialized scholar, as the sheer volume of existing knowledge and its exponential expansion offered fewer and fewer employment opportunities for generalists. The university system differentiated itself further and produced more and more specialists.

While this was already a revolution for the role of university lecturers, who had worked exclusively in analogue form on card files during their studies but were now learning and productively applying the new possibilities of digitalization, the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) is now bringing about another revolution.

Artificial intelligence at universities

Artificial intelligence not only finds sources, but also processes and evaluates huge amounts of data that go far beyond what a human being can digest quantitatively and intellectually. AI finds existing information and knowledge and recognizes patterns, producing previously unknown solutions and creating new knowledge, images, texts, podcasts and videos. This not only changes the role of the university teacher, it also changes the role of the student.

Because AI shifts the focus of education away from the process of studying for the sake of understanding and “thinking with a pen”, to a focus on the end result without “wasting” time with the process, people and their approach to knowledge are also changing. The recently deceased Henry Kissinger went so far as to speak of the end of the Enlightenment as a consequence of artificial intelligence. Those who can no longer understand and comprehend the process of learning and are only fixated on the result, are distancing themselves from the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment, which sought to deconstruct authority through the power of applied reason. Part of the empowerment of Enlightenment thinking lies in the process that takes place in the learner while he or she studies, understands and thinks further, in the sense of: “Until I read what I formulate, I don’t know what I think”. Just as young people’s sense of direction atrophies when they rely solely on the blue dot of their navigation system to guide them safely from one place to the next, intellectual abilities also change when the use of new technologies is geared towards finding results and less towards formulating and verifying causal relationships, as well as acquiring knowledge through the process of understanding.

This has consequences for the ability to be critical, to deconstruct supposed truths and truisms, to deal with contexts or to differentiate between man-made content and content created by machines.

In the short term, therefore, university teachers must not only produce and impart knowledge, they must also contribute methodically to the confident use of new technologies in order to achieve a form of digital literacy, which must be trained much more strongly to deal with visual information and large amounts of data, in comparison to what was required before the “iconic turn” and the time when the word above all described and explained the world - or at least what was thought to be the world. Artificial intelligence is also changing this: it is opening up linguistically and culturally closed knowledge and communication spaces and providing access to far greater and more diverse data “treasures” than was imaginable in the past. What this means for the users of these possibilities, their thinking and their humanity cannot yet be predicted. The changes will probably be more far-reaching than those that have been observed since the invention and dissemination of the internet.

^{* Prof. Dr. Ulrich Brückner is an EU Jean Monnet Professor at Stanford in Berlin and Academic Director at the Center for Cultural Diplomacy Studies (CCDS)}