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Globe and Mail
25 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
In the AI revolution, universities are up against the wall
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations. It's convocation season. Bored graduates everywhere will be forced to listen to earnest speeches about how they should make their way in a world short on decent jobs. I've given a couple of those orations myself. Here's the one I won't be giving this year but would have if asked. Hey guys! You've probably heard that philosophers are in the habit of declaring their discipline dead. Thinkers are forever claiming that everyone before them had the wrong ideas about time, being, or knowledge. Great – it's a vibrant patricidal enterprise. But I'm here today to tell you that philosophy is dead for good this time. So is humanistic education in general, maybe academia itself. The murderous force isn't just anti-elitist, Trump-driven depredation. No, as Nietzsche said of the death of god, we have done the killing. Smartness destroys from the inside out: The AI revolution has signalled the demise of the university as we know it. After all, how do we teach undergraduates philosophy, history or anything else when it's now so easy to fake the whole process? Students still think it might be wrong, or maybe risky, to have an algorithm write their essays wholesale. But increasingly they don't see what's wrong with using programs to take notes, summarize readings and create or correct first drafts. Reading, meanwhile, is tedious and hard, and so the idea of assigning entire books – even novels – is sliding out of academic fashion. Average attentions spans have shrunk from several minutes to about 40 seconds. You won't counter that by putting Aquinas's Summa or Spinoza's Ethics on the syllabus. At the same time, these same students resent knowing that professors might use countervailing programs to grade their work. They also dislike the idea that somebody in authority might consider them cheaters. Indeed, some students now resort to surveillance-society mechanisms, once the bugbear of free citizens everywhere, to prove that they are not cheating, including YouTube videos of them composing their guaranteed-human-origin essays. So: programs for recording screen activity or documenting keystrokes are now being asked to view performative acts of being-watched. And programs for cheating on essays confront programs designed to catch cheaters but also programs designed to counter the need for human grading altogether. These countervailing programs produce and consume each other; they watch and are watched, cheat and are cheated, pursue grades and are duly graded. I'm not the first to notice that there is no further need for human middle men here. Students and professors alike are extraneous to the system. A techno-bureaucratic loop enfolds them, then snips them off as messy loose ends. We have created the ultimate state of frictionless exchange, a circulating economy of the already-thought, the banal, the pre-digested, where every Google search leads to a fabricated source that eventually bounces back to base. Peak efficiency, with net gains in eliminated boredom. Yay! So why resist assimilation? Recently I sat in a seminar organized by my colleagues to consider ways of testing students in class, as a foil to chatbot cheating. The proposed tests involved various small-scale fact-finding exercises, truncated arguments, and the logic-skills equivalent of a magazine puzzle page. One professor suggested that actual written essays should be reserved only for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, if anyone. Fine, I suppose, but how would those upper-level students ever learn how to write in the first place, let alone write well? Forget AI essay cheating. Basic writing ability, always prone to deterioration, is now disappearing faster than map-reading skills and short-term memory. You can no longer assume that first-year students know how to compose even the most basic 'hamburger' essay (bun, lettuce, tomato, patty, bun). And still we believe – do we not? – that clear writing is the foundation of clear thought. Alas, that faith no longer seems so warranted. Writing seems more and more surplus to requirements. It can be off-loaded as a dreary chore, like so much dirty laundry sent out for cleaning. I recently wondered, not for the first time, if I had been labouring under a mistaken notion of philosophy, and teaching it, all along. If the subject can be distilled down to a roster of positions, specific argumentative moves and technical terms – which is how I believe some of my colleagues see it – then we can indeed dispense with sustained discursive engagement, and the clunky old-fashioned fraud-prone essay with it. But then, what would education be like? What would it be for? Good questions. Maybe the current proclaimed academic death-rattle is actually an opportunity to go back to first principles, inside the walls and out. In my discipline's case, the issue is not so much the end of philosophy, in other words, but the ends of philosophy. Like most teachers of the subject, I have long been conflicted about our mechanisms of assessment. Essays are a slog for everyone, even when they're legit products of individual minds. In-person final exams can control for essay cheating, most of the time, but they are a poor method of gauging the depth of philosophical insight. The old joke from Annie Hall makes the point: 'I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam,' it goes. 'I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.' Like many philosophy professors, I prefer discussion in seminars, close reading of textual passages, and face-to-face assessment over both essays and exams. I ask for short, ungraded weekly reflection papers that my students seem to enjoy writing and I certainly enjoy reading. But these small-bore tools are not scaleable for our vast budget-driven enrolments. And always, grades loom far larger than they should over the whole enterprise. Once you start questioning assessment, you slide very quickly into uncomfortable thoughts about the larger purpose of any teaching. The irony is doubled because asking 'What is the use of use?' is one of those typical philosophical moves. Updated version for the age of neo-liberal overproduction: What is the use of asking what is the use of use, when large language models can do it for you?' I admit I get impatient when, at this stage of things, people invoke some vague notion of distinctive humanness, a form of species-centric superiority. I mean those hand-wavy claims that there is something about what we humans do that is just, well, different from AI versions of things. Different and better. No AI could ever match the uniqueness of the human spirit! Well, maybe. But let's be serious: This line of argument is ideological special pleading. There are some 8.2 billion unique human souls on the planet. Yes, a minority break free of the sludge of mediocrity, and we celebrate them. We also cherish the experience of our own lives, however mundane. But we're now forced to realize that some, even many, sources of human pride can be practised as well, if not better, by non-human mechanisms. Art and poetry fall before the machines' totalizing recombinative invention. Even athletics, apparently deeply wedded to the human form, are being colonized by cyborg technology. You might think this is just griping from another worker whose sector is destined for obsolescence. True, neoliberal overproduction and dire job prospects have likely produced more philosophy teachers – and many more student essays – than the world needs. From this angle, AI's great academic replacement is just a market correction. It completes a decades-long self-inflicted irrelevance program, those thousands of punishing essays that nobody reads, the best ones published in journals that are, more and more, pay-as-you-go online boondoggles. I still think those abstruse debates are important, though, and you should too. We are at a transitional point that demands every tool of critical reflection, human or otherwise. Anxiety about the future of work and life is pitched high, for good reason. For now we are still mostly able to spot uncanny AI slop, bizarre search-engine confabulations, and bot-generated recommendations for books that have been invented by bots – presumably so that other bots can then not-read them, scrape the data for future reconstitution, and maybe submit unread book reports for academic credit somewhere. We can even, for the moment, recognize that non-bot government bans on actual books, and state-sponsored punishment of legacy liberal education, pose a threat to everyone's freedom. But I still think we are losing, in the current murk, something that only philosophy can provide. It's something that has always been posthuman in the dual sense of transcendent and transformative. I don't just mean a critical-thinking skill set, or body of facts, or even the basics of media literacy and fallacy-spotting – though these are essential tools for life. I mean, rather, the things that animate the hundreds of students who still come to our classes: the value of self-given meaning and purpose, the pleasure of being good at hard things for their sake alone, a consuming joy in the free play of imagination. A desire to flourish, and to bend the arc of history toward justice. I don't know if those things are exclusive to humans; I do know that they are threatened and in short supply among existing humans. The love of wisdom can't really be taught, for it is a turning of the soul toward the beautiful and good. You can't justify the value of that turning to someone who has not yet felt the necessary shift in value. That's the paradox of all philosophy, and of all philosophy teaching. There will be no exam after this lecture, graduates. The real test is no more, but also no less, than life itself. You are a speck of dust in an indifferent universe. Now make the most of it. Is AI dulling critical-thinking skills? As tech companies court students, educators weigh the risks Will AI go rogue? Noted researcher Yoshua Bengio launches venture to keep it safe Stopping the brain drain: U of T professor aims to launch 50 AI companies with new venture studio Axl AI adoption is upending the job market for entry-level workers In Imagination: A Manifesto, Ruha Benjamin argues that the Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world have usurped our ability to dream of better futures. But it doesn't have to be that way. She spoke with Machines Like Us about what could be done differently.
CTV News
29 minutes ago
- CTV News
SoftBank pitches US$1 trillion Arizona AI hub, Bloomberg News reports
SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is envisaging setting up a US$1 trillion industrial complex in Arizona that will build robots and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Son is seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) for the project, which is aimed at bringing back high-end tech manufacturing to the U.S. and to create a version of China's vast manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, the report said. SoftBank officials have spoken with U.S. federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the report said. SoftBank is keen to have TSMC involved in the project, codenamed Project Crystal Land, but it is not clear in what capacity, the report said. It is also not clear the Taiwanese company would be interested, it said. TSMC is already building chipmaking factories in the U.S. with a planned investment of $165 billion. Son is also sounding out interest among tech companies including Samsung Electronics, the report said. The plans are preliminary and feasibility depends on support from the Trump administration and state officials, it said. A commitment of $1 trillion would be double that of the $500 billion 'Stargate' project which seeks to build out data center capacity across the U.S., with funding from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle. SoftBank and TSMC declined to comment. The White House and U.S. Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The proposed scheme follows a series of big investment announcements SoftBank has made this year. In March it announced it would acquire U.S. semiconductor design company Ampere for $6.5 billion and in April said it would underwrite up to $40 billion of new investment in OpenAI, of which up to $10 billion would be syndicated to other investors. This week SoftBank raised $4.8 billion from a sale of shares in T-Mobile TMUS.O.
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Here's How Much a $30,000 Investment in the Nasdaq 100 Today Could Be Worth in 30 Years
Growth stocks can generate returns far superior to those of value stocks or dividend stocks in the long run. These are the types of companies that investors are drawn to because if they're growing, they are expanding their operations and likely innovating and potentially diversifying along the way. Names like Amazon and Nvidia are two exceptional examples. Over the past 20 years, the former has produced returns of 12,000% while the latter is up more than 60,000%. Investing $30,000 into either one of the stocks back then would have made you millions of dollars. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More » Picking the next big growth stock is easier said than done. But the good news is that you don't have to pick the next Amazon or Nvidia to achieve great results. The Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ: QQQ) is an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that will give you exposure to the top 100 nonfinancial stocks in the Nasdaq exchange, also known as the Nasdaq 100. Amazon, Nvidia, and many other top tech names are included in that list. Here's how a $30,000 investment in the fund might grow over the long haul. The Invesco ETF is a no-brainer option for growth investors The best growth stocks in the world are often found on the Nasdaq. And by targeting the top 100 nonfinancial companies, you won't have to worry about keeping an eye on which growth stocks to buy. The Invesco fund will adjust its holdings over time, removing poor-performing stocks and replacing them with rising stars. Some of the top holdings in the ETF today include Costco Wholesale, Netflix, and Broadcom. While it is a tech-heavy fund (tech stocks account for 57% of its holdings), about 20% of the portfolio is also in consumer discretionary stocks, followed by smaller positions in other sectors. And more than 97% of the holdings are U.S. stocks, which can minimize your exposure to international markets. It's little surprise, with so much focus on growth, that the Invesco QQQ Trust widely outperformed the S&P 500 over the past decade. At 430%, it has averaged a compound annual growth rate of more than 18%. QQQ Total Return Level data by YCharts. How much can the ETF grow a $30,000 investment in the long run? As impressive as the Invesco ETF's returns have been over the past decade, they've also been skewed in recent years by a flurry of tech spending, which may not persist in the very long term. That's why it may be a good idea to scale back expectations of what its future returns may look like. Rather than 18%, perhaps closer to the long-run average of 10% for the S&P 500 might be appropriate. The table below shows what a $30,000 investment might grow to at varying rates after 30-plus years. Years 9% Growth 10% Growth 11% Growth 12% Growth 13% Growth 30 $398,030 $523,482 $686,769 $898,798 $1,173,477 31 $433,853 $575,830 $762,313 $1,006,653 $1,326,029 32 $472,900 $633,413 $846,168 $1,127,452 $1,498,413 33 $515,461 $696,755 $939,246 $1,262,746 $1,693,206 34 $561,852 $766,430 $1,042,564 $1,414,276 $1,913,323 35 $612,419 $843,073 $1,157,246 $1,583,989 $2,162,055 Table and calculations by author. There's no way to know what growth rate the Invesco ETF will end up averaging, especially when you're looking at such a long period of time. But the big takeaway is that with the effects of compounding, you can potentially build up a significant portfolio simply by putting $30,000 into a top growth fund like the Invesco QQQ Trust and letting it sit. It's a perfect example of a buy-and-forget type of investment. Should you invest $1,000 in Invesco QQQ Trust right now? Before you buy stock in Invesco QQQ Trust, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Invesco QQQ Trust wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to172%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. David Jagielski has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Costco Wholesale, Netflix, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and Nasdaq. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
