AI and The Demise of Universities

There are many reasons why the modern university is slowly decaying away, but AI will certainly number among them. According to Britannica, the first true university in the West was Bologna (1088 AD). Universities have spent over 10 centuries producing highly trained explorers in increasingly esoteric fields. One such field is how to efficiently determine protein folding. 

Universities have spent the last 60 years producing people highly trained in just this particular field.

In those 60 years, we discovered how to fold 150,000 proteins. In 2020, over the course of six months, AI not only discovered how to fold EVERY protein that exists (over 200 million), but it can also now outperform millions of years of evolution itself, creating new proteins with specifically tuned functionality. That's two years before the release of ChatGPT. Why does this matter?

 Think of the evolution of the airplane. We spent centuries trying to figure out how to make powered flight work. In 1903, someone finally assembled the pieces correctly. Look what happened:

• 1903 - Wright brothers' first flight (12 seconds, 120 ft).
• 1911 - first planes in combat
• 1914 - first commercial passenger service
• 1915 - first monoplane.
• 1919 - first transatlantic flight
• 1927 - first solo non-stop transatlantic flight
• 1936 - Douglas DC-3
• 1939 - first jet
• 1952 - first passenger jet
• 1957 - first spacecraft

It took roughly 16 years to transition from a 12-second, 120-foot flight to crossing the Atlantic, and another 12 years to do it non-stop, solo. Because we have a much higher population, and a better-educated population, tech moves faster now than it did in 1903. There are more people working tech now than there were in 1903.

 We've been thinking about AI for millennia, working on it directly for about a century, but we have only managed to put the pieces together correctly in the last three years. We're at about 1908 on the airplane chart.

With the advent of the automobile, people don't learn how to take care of horses any more. It is possible that with the advent of AI, people won't need "educators" any more. Not only are universities losing relevance as dropping TFR removes students from their classrooms, AI removes the need for highly trained people. We can afford to be more ignorant than ever, without any real loss of functionality.