(Photo by: Baptiste Raffin)

Since last fall, English professor Danny Alexander has been teaching a seminar on AI and the future of work, for the JCCC Honors program. The seminar is focused on the students researching AI, and the work they hope to be doing beyond college.

We met with Alexander to learn more about the seminar, and get some of his thoughts on AI.

The idea for this seminar came from Alexander’s own background in music.

“My writing jobs have very often been music journalism,” Alexander said. “And for years and going back decades, there’s been concern. In fact there was huge concern back in the 80’s about there being too good quality tape, that the record companies used to fight tape being brought in the United States. So just saying from that vantage point, this fear of what technology might do to the jobs and the income was something we were really sensitive to in the music writing. And watching the music industry all these years, how are they going to react to it? And then of course, you know, in the past couple of years, especially last year, I think that the idea that AI could take musicians’ voices and just make records without them [is interesting]. So it kind of grew naturally out of that.”

But it was also inspired by his teaching career.

“The familiarity of how much digital technology was going to change everything probably since I started teaching, and it comes up as an issue periodically. But I thought ‘well this would be great for this research class’ because this is something that everybody’s careers can be impacted by,” Alexander said. “We don’t talk enough about it, you know, and it might help arm students, in essence for what might be down the pipe in their careers” 

The seminar is not really lecture-based. Alexander encourages students to participate.

“I really kind of try to let the students lead a lot,” Alexander said. “So they pick research topics within their fields of interest. It could be anything, you know, if they’re into animé or whatever it is they’re into, like music. My hope is that they all kind of go off and do their own research, in what they’re interested in, and then we bring it back to the class, and everybody’s learning from each other’s research. So it’s kind of even though everyone has their individual job, it’s a collaborative project to expand what we all know about it.”

Alexander told us how it is important to understand how to deal with AI. 

“It was very clear that we just need to talk about it. It’s just part of the new reality and, to what extent it’s going to be useful in all our fields, and to what extent it can be a problem,” Alexander said. “I had some really good stories from students working and one working in an ER, talking about when AI was telling him that somebody was having a heart attack, and the cardiologist came by and said ‘No, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about,’ because he could see contextual reasons why that wasn’t always happening. And so, you know, if you don’t have a person there to check it, you’ll start treating the wrong thing. That can be a life or death thing.”

The complexities of AI is one of the many reasons why he thinks that it makes for the perfect Honors seminar. 

“It’s amazing the things [AI] can do,” Alexander said. “That’s part of what I think makes it a really good topic for higher level scholarship and study, because it’s not an easy thing. It’s going to be everywhere doing everything, and its potential is sort of limitless. So the question is, where do people fit usually? And that’s part of what, you know, I’m hoping that having discussions about it, it’s going to be helpful to people in terms of thinking about how to make a space for themselves.” 

Alexander will teach the seminar again next Fall and Spring, and it is open to JCCC Honors students.