Soumitra Dutta Explained the New Era of AI Education: Beyond the Matrix

Nowadays, making a discourse on Artificial Intelligence, one is likely to hear two sides of the debate: some individuals express their concern about the potential Matrix-style takeover, while others are already rushing to cash in on the opportunity. But for Professor Soumitra Dutta, the former Dean of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and the lifetime researcher of AI, the truth is much more complicated, and much more thrilling.

AI is not only a trending topic, but it is the fabric of the future we are spinning at the moment. With an AI doctorate that he received long before this became a household name, he is not terrified at the current technological explosion but is instead experiencing the glee of a scientist who has been waiting a long time to see this hypothesis finally come to pass.

The End of "Business as Usual" "Your job may be done with AI, though this is not a depressing statement; this is the truth, that Soumitra Dutta says. The world is changing exponentially. To illustrate this, Dutta frequently draws on the analogy of Lake Michigan: assuming you increase the volume of water in a lake in an 18-month time, it will take decades to realize that the lake has made virtually no progress. And then, all of a sudden, the lake is half-filled, and, with only one more step, it is overflowing.

It is no longer only about writers or coders, even the work of lawyers, doctors, and lecturers is being reinvented. AI is now able to think, develop, and even develop emotional attachments.

Reducing the 900-Year-Old University But should a machine be able to think more intelligently and quickly than a human being does what would become of the university? This is what Soumitra Dutta is thinking of in the future. He says that the standard form of education whereby you attend school and work thirty years is officially dead.

The new model? Lifelong Learning

A 30-Year Product: Universities should offer a 30-year product instead of a one-time degree that will assist a professional in their whole career.

The Global Footprint: Technology enables high-end institutions such as Oxford to become global. Soumitra Dutta envisages an Oxford Online that goes beyond the traditional physical corridors to access thousands of students in the emerging markets in India, Africa and so on.

AI as a Personal Tutor: The vision of each student having an AI tutor with a 24/7 presence with an individual learning rate; this is what Dutta considers to be the jump of hyper-personalization.

The Human Element: Soumitra Dutta is a strong supporter of a people-focused strategy even though he has a technical background. With the cognitive functions draining AI, the business degree becomes no longer about what you know but instead how you judge.

He underlines that we should pay attention to high quality machines which are not able to produce such moral qualities as ethical judgment, empathy, and human dignity. When AI replaces the work, human beings should be assisted in getting an alternative sense of satisfaction.

In his opinion, business schools need to become laboratories of this social shift, where they can experiment with the ways they can train students to be not only competing with machines, but also collaborating with them.

The saga of Creating a Future We Cannot Predict Professor Dutta, who has travelled to India and Berkeley, INSEAD, Cornell and later Oxford are all about making crossings. He is now going past the final line of demarcation; the one between human intelligence and artificial systems.

Soumitra Dutta tells both teachers and learners the same thing: There is no use in getting scared. The rate of transformation is so quick that only radical agility may help not to get left behind. We need to take risks, and apply these potent tools to build a better version of the reality that we are going to live in.