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Being in Charlottesville for these first two weeks
in January for the J-Term class is kind of a quiet time.
Most of the university is not back from their break yet.
We come back for this two-week class on this single topic.
This class-- AI Design Challenge: The Rise of Bots--
was kind of a unique class, because it was open to people
from any school at UVA.
They wanted to draw from a bunch of different backgrounds,
so we can look at all the different areas
artificial intelligence would apply to.
Open Grounds is the place where we bring together
design thinkers from around the university
to work on the big challenges.
I came into the class with the idea of artificial intelligence
as being that science fiction that we've read about.
What I'm really learning the more and more time
I spend reading about it and trying to build some of it
myself--
it's pretty incredibly accessible.
And a big design challenge of this class
was saying, if we can use these really intelligent systems, how
do cities start to look?
How does the interactions of a nation start to look?
What's a reasonable failure rate?
Is there a reasonable failure rate?
And what does the design process look
like, now that these systems are starting
to make autonomous decisions?
This J-Term is unique in bringing together faculty with
an external partner--
Willowtree Apps-- to take on a central challenge of the time.
Willowtree plays a really big role in this class.
They're helping us with all of the technical implementation,
bridging the gap between theory that's
always discussed in the classroom
and the practical application that they're
doing in the real world.
We're in the midst of a technological revolution
as big as the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.
And this is why we need to be thinking
not just about the technology, but what this technology means.
That's why we need to bring the students
from religious studies, from computer science,
from mathematics all together with people
who are developing these technologies
and to think in new ways.
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