Degrees of Change

Chapter 9Faculty Visions of Academic Futures with Generative AI

—R. Benjamin Shapiro, Jaemarie Solyst, and Amy J. Ko, University of Washington, Seattle

We interviewed eighteen leading researchers, creatives, and educators in higher education to find out how they want their disciplines to change in the future, what implications they see for how those changes should affect teaching and learning in higher education, and what roles they see for generative AI (GenAI) technologies in achieving those visions.

Through this qualitative research, we heard passionate aspirations for futures of work that are more transdisciplinary than they are today and where principled perspectives about what aims we should pursue are supported by new technologies. The strongest optimism about how GenAI could support these transformations was expressed by scholars and practitioners whose work most centrally involves—or impacts—people outside of their disciplines. One designer, for example, compared GenAI to the “mopeds” of their youth, enabling them to visit distant places, but at some risk. Optimists tended to tie together hopes for disciplinary futures with hopes for teaching and learning. Participants expressed uncertainty about what exactly GenAI tools would allow them to do differently. While participants widely recognized the potential for GenAI to increase efficiency within today's work, none could articulate concrete visions for what tomorrow's work with GenAI might be.

Nearly universally, participants ...