Since April, we’ve been working on our Kummer College Strategic Plan: a plan that will posit goals for us to pursue for a decade and will specify tactics with measures to be assessed over the next five years.
I want to thank all the faculty, staff, students, advisors and alumni who have contributed to this project so far. We aim for emergent themes that we can rally around. However, we all have concerns and objections about such an ambitious and nebulous task.
As one faculty member critiqued: “How can we plan for 10 years when the 2024 Nobel prize-winner Demis Hassabis thinks there is a 50% chance that we will reach true Artificial general intelligence (AGI) in just five years?”
One example of the complex challenges we face is figuring out how to research, teach and apply finance — like currency, the time value of money and investing — while dealing with changing regulations and different global value systems.
According to Carlos Perez, founder of Intuition Machine, AGI may come to serve as a “mediator between currently incompatible value systems.” Today’s method of setting rules and taxes for products might be replaced by more complex systems based on values that go beyond our current idea of money.
How do we incorporate the potential for such dramatic change into the plans for our college? My hope is that by continuing to attract brilliant faculty and recruit outstanding students, we will evolve S&T and Kummer College to be an academic leader as AGI becomes part of our DNA.
