Justin Khoo

Universities, and more broadly, our existing research institutions (peer review) have a key role to play in furthering and protecting human understanding. These institutions are designed to be slow-moving: they are supposed to be august, conservative places that protect the highest standards of rigor and truth-seeking, against short-lived fads. But I worry that at this moment, universities and our research institutions are not moving fast enough to help students and especially younger scholars in areas where learning and research is being reshaped by AI. Many have made extraordinary efforts to change their teaching strategies and assessment methods on a dime this semester (mathematicians moving to oral assessment only, philosophers focusing on in-class writing etc.) Many others people have yet to adjust and there is a lot we could do better (e.g. in admissions), but I'm far more optimistic than I was six months ago that faculty are waking up. Still, I'm worried that within philosophy (and perhaps elsewhere too?) we're not having a sensible conversation about papers and journals, which in turn means we're not having a sensible conversation about hiring and promotion. Even if capabilities completely stop advancing now, the standards for journal publications in my areas of philosophy, for instance, must already be completely transformed. This doesn't mean humans are useless in these areas, or that these areas are somehow trivial: human understanding remains extremely valuable; indeed, fostering such understanding seems arguably more important for individual and societal flourishing going forward. But in these areas I doubt that beautifully constructed papers will be the best instrument for conveying or producing human understanding going forward. I also highly doubt that the time-lag of our current peer review system (which was already overburdened and far too slow) will make sense in a world where individuals have the power to resolve whole swathes of open problems very quickly. (I expect journals to begin to be swamped with papers this semester if they aren't already.) I don't have answers for how things should look going forward. But even this year's academic job market will be affected (never mind future years); we need to have a broader, serious conversation among tenured faculty about what to do (maybe it's happening somewhere I missed?). Here are two small disparate positive thoughts: - I can imagine that digital artifacts which record a wide array of results, and which can be easily navigated by both humans and AI could be most effective at recording what is known in some subareas. (I'm inspired by this Logical Maps zacharygoodsell.com/logical-… project of Zach Goodsell, in collaboration with Cian Dorr among others.) Maybe such artifacts, with associated verifications of the proofs, could be quickly assessed by outside referees, and perhaps we could have "journals" that link to ones which have been peer-reviewed (hopefully on a shorter timeline)? Perhaps alongside this, there will be more large collaborations on such artifacts? - Innovative pedagogy and, relatedly communication about research, should be reweighted relative to discovering new results. We seem to me now already in a world where new results are abundant while excellent exposition and thoughtful, careful teaching is scarce. I don't pretend to know how this will evolve going forward, but my guess would be that, just as MOOCs failed to transform university teaching, this revolution will in key respects fail to transform human learning. People are ultimately social and we will continue to benefit from and seek out community in learning and understanding (and arguably it's intrinsically valuable to boot). Teaching and learning is as much about conveying values of care, rigor and curiosity, and building community around those values, as it is about conveying information, and that will continue to be true in the future. As a profession, it seems to me we should invest more in such teaching, and find ways, institutionally, to assess and incentivize it better. This may change the personalities who are drawn to academia as well as its culture, but it seems necessary to preserve the goods we need universities to foster and protect and could independently be for the better.