"The ways the Covid pandemic drove the university to change will pale into insignificance when we see the changes that will emerge because of AI."

It is a real honour to be President of an Irish university. The role is rewarding, demanding, hugely varied and never dull. Teaching and research have always been my passion but, as a young academic, I never imagined myself in this role and, every day, I pinch myself to confirm it is real. This might come across as a bit over-the-top but leading an institution like Trinity, brimming with wonderful students and staff, and awash with a constant flow of new ideas, is indeed a privilege. It gives me a huge sense of purpose in life.

I will be in the role two years in August and I have to say it has been a time of huge change, and from everything I see and read, ‘change’ will continue to be the name of the game. What this means is that everything we plan, has to be planned with change in mind.

I began the role during the Covid pandemic and, just as we were coming out of that, the war in Ukraine began. The impact of both of these on the people directly affected by illness and conflict and the impact on the wider world continues to be felt and documented. And while we continue to work our way through these impacts, more change is on the horizon due to the rapidly evolving world of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I had been planning to talk about research for this short article but feel that anything we discuss now has to acknowledge the AI landscape. I would go as far as saying that the ways the Covid pandemic drove the university to change will pale into insignificance when we see the changes that will emerge because of AI. Almost every day I hear about some new development that will impact how we do our teaching and research, not to mention fundamentally change the world for which we are educating future generations.

The early conversations about AI in universities have focused on how we as a sector cope with cheating – how we cope when students use highly sophisticated tools to create material that is impossible to detect as plagiarised. Initially, this seemed like a big issue to me but, the more I understand AI, the more it seems like this will be among the least important of the issues we face. There will be a whole redefining of the knowledge economy. AI platforms are already proposed as substitutes for teachers. We can see huge use of AI as a tool to increase productivity in sectors such as the software industry and many more. There are also numerous examples of how AI platforms can speed up research, right from the brainstorming phase to the actual carrying out of the research. And it seems likely that more jobs will become more automated sooner than expected. McKinsey released a report recently entitled ‘The Economic Power of Generative AI’ and while there is no doubt that there is some hype across the generative AI industry (and perhaps reasons to keep that hype going), McKinsey estimates that half of today’s work activities could be automated between 2030 and 2060. We know too that the use of generative AI platforms brings big issues for IP and copyright, challenges our understanding of what it means to be an artist, a creative and perform original work, has huge privacy issues and raises many questions around data ownership. There are many issues not yet getting full attention, not least of which is the energy cost of AI queries. Estimates suggest that a query using an AI generative platform costs 10-100 times more energy than a typical search engine query. The implications for our planet are concerning.

My hope for education and research in that knowledge economy is based on two hypotheses. The first is that graduates of the future will have to be even greater experts in their field in order to get the most out of these AI tools. The second is that the use of generative AI platforms could lead to the development of stronger critical thinking skills among workers. These may be very optimistic hypotheses but to make them true I have to find a way for our university to fully engage with this space, to become skilled enough to use and challenge these tools, to have the levels of cybersecurity needed to be resilient in a world in which they are widespread, and all of this needs significant resources and courage to explore. I know that we have the talent and drive in Trinity to take on this challenge.

At the start of this article I mentioned the sense of privilege I feel in my role in Trinity but with privilege comes responsibility and, I feel that addressing generative AI is a responsibility that needs to be addressed head on, for our students, for our staff and for this country’s sake.