Forbes China recently invited UIC Provost Prof Patrick Chau for a live broadcast to discuss information systems, artificial intelligence, talent cultivation and UIC's educational philosophy.
Click to watch Forbes China's interview with UIC Provost Patrick Chau
During the interview, Prof Chau began by talking about the definition and development of information systems. He said that with the advancement of the Internet and AI, their influence had gone beyond the boundaries of business use and into our society. When coming to the impact of AI, Prof Chau shared his insights with a focus on independent thinking and privacy. He illustrated his views with the example of one of his experiments on AI-assisted brainstorming.
In this experiment, he found a negative correlation between people's activity in brainstorming and the AI's performance. "That's the dark side of it," he said. He added that as the application of AI and big data became popular, it became so easy to collect one's data through their mobile phones, which intrigued people's concerns about invasion of privacy.
However, Prof Chau was still positive about the balance of the impact of AI, as he believed that the real-life applications of AI were still limited, despite the presence of impressive products such as ChatGPT, and the public was aware of this issue at an early stage.
"Now we know about or try to pay more attention to the dark side of AI, and we can come to all kinds of policies, strategies, and plans to see how we can deal with that kind of dark side of AI."
Prof Chau pointed out that for the healthy development of information systems and AI, it's crucial to know more about human behaviour and thinking, in which interdisciplinary studies will play an indispensable role. He said that UIC is a university that upholds liberal arts education and cultivates open-minded and well-rounded talents with an international outlook, bridging the gap not only between disciplines, but also between the global and the local.
Prof Chau considered universities to be places where talents could grow and fully develop. As the impact of AI gradually infiltrated the field of education, education in the future will have to focus more on developing students' questioning skills and critical thinking.
"Instead of learning facts, learning of knowledge, you need to know how to check the knowledge that you have absorbed," he said. "You have to learn to check whether the knowledge is real."
For students who would like to work in information systems, Prof Chau said that information systems nowadays are more than techniques and need to be explored from a broader cultural, psychological and human perspective. He advised them always to be people-oriented, and to know their users from various perspectives. "At the end of the day, you come up with a system that will be used by somebody," he said.
From MPRO
Reporter: Cecilia Yu
Editor: Deen He
