Stevens has announced that it will be offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in Artificial Intelligence starting in Fall 2026. Given current financial and research interests in AI, it makes perfect sense that SIT would want to add AI to its portfolio of programs. After all, it’s looking like generative AI and language learning models are the future. Why, then, should we oppose this addition to the catalogue of majors?
Artificial Intelligence is, undoubtedly, a hot-button item. Every major technology company is rushing to create its own LLM. You can’t Google something without the Gemini’s opinion being the first result on the page. I had to get a new laptop recently, and it came equipped, curiously, with a Copilot button. Tech all-stars, like Microsoft and Meta, have poured trillions of dollars into the development of this technology.
AI is impossible to ignore because of its rapid proliferation in the digital world and in the news. But with further investigation, the robustness of the technology’s future is called into question. For example, OpenAI, darling of headlines and investors, is currently the most valuable privately owned company in the world. But it has operated at a loss for every year of its existence, with its projected operating costs increasing significantly through the end of this decade. This pattern exists in other companies, none of which have a clear path forward to making AI profitable in comparison to its soaring operating cost. Some financial experts have compared the AI hype to the dot-com bubble of the late nineties and early aughts.
With this context, it makes the AI-ification of everything a little more dubious. Why should I trust Gemini to summarize the results of a Google search, when the source for its information is right beneath it? Why do I need a dedicated Copilot button, when the program is already pinned in the task ribbon of every Windows computer? It seems to me that these companies are pushing AI as a means of justifying their investment. They’re insisting to us that AI is the future. It appears they’ve forgotten we’ve been just fine without it.
What I mean is that we don’t know what the future holds for AI. It obviously isn’t going away, and it has certainly proved its value in certain applications, but we don’t know the financial future of this technology. For this reason, I think the addition of a dedicated AI major is a little shortsighted and overzealous. From the administration’s perspective, if students want to major in it, and AI research makes Stevens look more prestigious, it doesn’t matter if some people think AI won’t be as exciting in ten years. I, however, take moral issue with encouraging 18-year-olds to take on massive student loan debt to pursue a highly specialized degree, for an industry that may or may not be dead in the water by 2035.
There are a few other issues that I wish to mention. The environmental problem is, succinctly, difficult to ignore. AI is extremely resource-intensive, and data centers are being built rapidly to support the increasing interest in the technology. These data centers consume a lot of power, put stress on the grid, increase carbon emissions, and use a lot of fresh water. I think that
Stevens, which conducts a great deal of climate change and sustainability research, has an intellectual responsibility to consider these impacts before going all-in on AI.
AI is attractive to the ruling-investor class because its end goal is to be a budget replacement for human workers. If you’ve tried to call a customer service line or been to a drive-thru recently, you know that AI is already replacing human jobs.The writing on the wall, whether it’s in human handwriting, or littered with em-dashes and bullet points, is that companies will use AI to hire less people the moment they can justify it—that means engineers, computer scientists, and other white-collar professionals. This should give pause to just about anybody obtaining a degree here, and is another reason I reject AI as a profession. AI is anti-profession. I would be lying if I said I’ve never used AI, and I see its value in specific applications. But, I think that a dedicated AI major is contradictory to the university’s future-forward approach. I believe a much more austere, reasonable capitulation to the market would be to stick with the AI minor, and add a concentration in the CS program. It’s impossible to do away with it entirely, and it is, truthfully, a very powerful tool. But I refuse any future that insists it’s the only way forward.
