[inaudible conversations] good evening. Welcome. Good evening. Im glad youre all having a great time, happy to see you all. Welcome, alumni and friends to the mit alumni fall forum event featuring northeastern president joseph aoun. Thank you for tech review and press partnering with the Alumni Association to bring this event to come to pass and also a special welcome to members of president aouns senior team from northeastern to make sure we treat him well on this side of the river. Im from the Alumni Association and particularly glad to say a first hello to this batch of alumni and well see more of one another. Its my pleasure to bring the program. A few details, please remember it silence your cell phones, your phones may be use today submit questions, if you type in or visit alum. Mit. Edu qa, you can do that. Were filming the event. And during the q a your face or voice could be live on air if you choose to participate. A fun note, please join us after the forum for conversation and coffee and dessert in the reception area you were in previously. So, given that we gather together to celebrate the mit community and the celebration after new book, its fitting that president aouns publisher and another alum, amy brand, ph. D. From the class of 1989 to help kick it off. Amy became editor of the mit and she is an editor and bradder experience in the publishing world and academia. I could share the full cv, but trust me, she knows a good book when she sees one. She has focused on the press on print and digital strategies, launching a partnership with the internet archive to scan, preserve and enable libraries to lend hundreds of mit books, and elevating the presence in the bo of the area with a shiny new store front complete with its own event series and im sure she hopes to see you there in the future. And amy will properly introduce our speaker, i cant offer up the microphone without a warm welcome to president aoun. [applause] we are proud to have you with us here this evening. We are eager to hear your perspective. The mit community, alumni included is known for its intellect and near universal desire to make things and fix things, to make things better. Your leadership at northeastern, as well as this book of important thinking about the distinctive capabilities of the human mind and even as we witness the ascendency of robots shows an mit trained human mind at work to make the world better and we thank you and appreciate your presence tonight. With that, amy, will et let me hand you the microphone. [applause] so, thank you to whitney. Im delighted to be here to open up the program and to introduce joseph aoun more formally. In its 55th year of publishing some of the worlds most prominent authors from science and technology to art and architecture and importantly for this evening for Higher Education and linguistics, the mit process is committed to nothing less than reimagining what a University Press can and should be. This spirit is alive and well. And to my featured speaker, joseph aoun and his thus published book robot proof, in his book, he challenges models of the university and literacy passed on rote learning and memory are increasingly the purview of machines. His book makes us rethink of purpose of Higher Education in confronting the worlds problems. The robot proof education trains creators not laborers. And some of the book proposals are dry academic stuff, let me say i was impressed with the content of the book, but with its many beautifully crafted sentences. I mentioned to a mutual friend, jay keiser, Professor Emeritus of linguistics of mit, that i had the honor of introducing joseph tonight, and jay replied, quote, i could never understand how he could bring himself to choose the presidency of northeastern over being associate editor of linguistic inquiry. Theres no accounting for taste. And he was also my student and perhaps thats where he went wrong. For those of you who knew him, thats quintessential jay. And joseph 1982, the first teaching assistant during here. Hes a native of lebanon and studied in paris before coming to mit. Then he joined the usc College Letters and sciences, the older of the anna h bings chair. And northeastern named aoun its president in 2006. He is an expert on global and experienceal education. And he has Work Opportunities around the world, and he shares many successes of the successes of the coop program in the book. Today northeastern students have work, conducted research in 131 countries and all seven continents. In 2011 aoun received the robert a mew award from mit which honors mit graduates from significant achievements in humanities, arts and social sciences field. Hes one of seven University President s honored by the Carnegie Association with a Leadership Award of 500,000 to advance his educational initiatives. Which is remarkable and typical of his commitment. He pledged a matching grant to take this award further. After president aoun opens with his own remarks on his book. David rotman will take the helm and start a conversations to steer us through the works and questions. And we hope the audience will join in the discussion as well. David is editor of technology review, a science and business journalist, written extensively on chemistry, environment and ai, first help me welcome joseph aoun, president of northeastern university. [applause] thank you, good evening. Its good to be back at my alma mater and to see some friends and colleagues and some of my teacher, actually sylvan is here and amy and i graduated from the Linguistics Program so, you know, shes very biased in her introduction, dont believe anything she said. So, you know, im going to tell you a little about about the book. Essentially, something you all know, smart machines are getting smarter and are displacing us in on many levels. Many jobs are becoming obsolete. As a matter of fact, various studies have shown, indicated, projected that over the next 20 years, close to 50 of the jobs we know will disappear. In equality we know today is going to increase even further. At the same time, when we look at the marketplace, when we look at society, and we ask ourselves what you know, and we can people, ceos, employers, institutions, what kind of talent are you looking for . They are looking for the creative talent, entrepreneurial talent, talent that can work with people, that can be culturally agile, that can be global, that can think in a systematic way and this is something that is needed and this is something that everybody wants to have. Given the challenges of jobs being redefined and what people and what society is asking for, Higher Education must change in order to make people robotproof. So in my book, what i am presenting is a blueprint for how Higher Education can change to make people robot proof. Im thinking three things. One, we need to rethink our curriculum, second, we need to integra integrate experienceal as what we do and we need to move life long learning as part of our coalition. Let me start by the curriculum im calling on humanics. What humanics, its three, tech understanding machines and how they work and how to interact with these machines. The second is date a literacy. Meaning the understand of the enormous amount of information that machines are producing and how we can navigate this information, make sense of it and be on top of it. And the third is what i call human literacy, namely, the focus on cultivating what is unique to human beings that machines will have difficulty duplicating. What are these attributes . Creativity, entrepreneurship, systems thinking, the ability to interact with people, to be empathetic, the ability to be culturally agile, the ability to be global, and the ability to function in teams. How do we achieve that . We dont teach creativity. We dont teach entrepreneurship. We have to practice it. We have to live it. And thats the second component, Experiential Education. Experiential education is essentially the integration of the classroom experience with the world experience. Now, i believe that the most powerful form of Experiential Education is based on the work practice or longterm internships or coops, as amy said. What are these . Longterm internships that allow the learners to test what she has learned in the classroom, to refine it, to understand what shes good at, to understand how work with other people. To understand her limitations and her potential, and then to be a leader, to be a creator. And then to integrate the two together. Thats the power of experimental education and i see it happening on a daily basis. The third aspect is Lifelong Learning. Machines are smart and also getting smarter. No jobs are going to disappear and new jobs are going to be created. We are going to be obsolete, each one of us, unless we educate ourselves. Lifelong learning is a necessity. Now, Lifelong Learning and Higher Education has always been viewed as a second class operation ancillary, to what we do. It has to move to the fore. It has to become part of our comission. People need to educate themselv themselves in order to remain robot proof. But its not going to be easy to integrate Lifelong Learning as part of our core mission because it will lead us till we think our curricula, who owns them, are we the sole owners of this curricula, are the learners, the providers, society, have they a role to play in shaping them . Its going to lead us till we think the notion of delivery. Its going to also lead us until we think how were going to bring the learners to us. They dont have the time. They dont have the ability. We have to go to them. The university has to go to learners. Its going to lead us also till we think our notions of degrees, credentialing. We need to meet these challeng challenges. Society is changing, the world is changing. Higher Education Needs to change and i believe that Higher Education has the responsibility and the opportunity to make every lerner robot proof. Thats what my book an all about. Thank you. [applause]. [applause]. Thank you, my name is david rotman, editor of technology review. A great honor to be able to participate in this conversation with you. This book is terrific. Thank you. If people havent read it, they should. I think, it does many things well, but two of them is, it provides a Historical Context and a current context of why ai and robots are changing jobs and how technologies in the past have changed jobs and how this time its different in many ways. And its a nice discussion of whats happening and secondly, as we just heard, not just offers a problem but it provides a really, i think, strong argument for why Education Needs to help people adapt to these changes. So, terrific book. Thank you. Im going to ask a few questions and then really open it up and hopefully have a discussion. And i wanted to start by asking you when did you start thinking about ai and robots and their effect on work and how they may why division might change and then as sort of a followup, as you began writing the book, as you wrote the book, how did your thinking change . You know, you know that there is seminal work that has been done by two faculty here at the sloan School Second age. And this work was called into action because they raised the implications of what ai is going to do to society to work. So you know, if you want thats one of the first books that i read, obviously, i had been reading a lot of books on ai, trying to learn about it. But that was one of the turning points for me, and then, you know, in Higher Education we dont like to think too much about work. We want. [laughter] we want to educate our students, but we dont care whether there is any implication for work or not. You know, i belong to an institution at northeastern where this has been part of the core mission of the institution is to think about the work not only of today, but the work of the future. So, you know, this led me to start thinking about the implications of the ai revolution, the second machine age on work, on society and, frankly, on Higher Education. What has changed over when i was writing a book the book is that the acceleration happened, namely, people when people started talking about ai, people thought that this was remote, this was not going to happen and suddenly, you know, we are seeing it around us. You know, jobs disappearing, jobs being redefined, and at the same time, you know, we are seeing also that some many politicians are denying that. You know . We have politicians here, you know, saying this is not a problem, that we should be concerned with. And, you know, therefore, other people are scared. We need to regulate that. We need to tax it. We need to do x, y and z. So what has happened is that something that started being a kind of almost an academic discussion became central to many discussions in society and thats why i had to adapt and integrate elements i didnt think about before. Yes, i think both the pace of the development of the technology has been much faster than i think many have anticipated and i think its become more evident that were unprepared for these changes, policy makers and society at large. Absolutely, absolutely. And if you i was mentioning to david that if you look across different countries, europe is much more sensitive to that and much more worried about that. And you know, and its happening at the government level, whereas here, the government is saying, look, this is not an issue we need to be concerned with. So, its interesting, and there are, for instance, england is now the u. K. Is looking at the possibilities of asking each company to put a fraction, a small fraction of its margin in order to focus on educating and reeducating their workers, their executives, you know, and the future employees. You touched on this a bit, but i was struck at one point in your book, you said really, you called it one of the most powerful skills that we have as people versus machines or versus robots is creativity. And creativity is still an advantage that a person has over and will always, maybe always have. I was wondering if maybe you could expand on, i think, you mean creativity in a very general sense, in a very broad sense. Maybe expand on why what gives people that advantage over machines, over robots. I mean, in look, here at mit, you know, the creativity is everywhere. But in society, lets go beyond Higher Education, you know, an entrepreneur is a creator, an entrepreneur is looking at the problem and looking at the opportunity and seeing it in a different way. Similarly, somebody who is launching a not for profit in, you know, either in roxbury or in africa, is a creator. Is a creator and is shaping something new. People who are working in various industries, are rethinking this industry. So its not only, you know, the research, the fundamental research that is by definition, you know, creative, its everything we do. The way we look at the world. The way we look the a the problem. The way we rethink the issue is based on creativity. And you know, this is something that has been the purview of human beings or the human species and its very difficult for i havent seen yet a robot that is going to see the new the exin new opportunity, to create the you know, an apple, have a new theory, whatever it is. So, thats why i think we have to focus on these aspects that are specific to human beings. And recognize, as ai and robots, theres many things that will get more and more powerful, but i certainly believe as you just outlined that the creativity is something that will be elusive at least for the forseeable future for ai. And hopefully other aspects, too. The ability to look you in the eye and understand, you know, whether youre happy with what im saying or unhappy. The ability to read your body language. The ability to interact with you, to empathize with you when youre happy or when youre sad. The ability to work with you and you know, be led by you or, you know, all of these aspects are fundamental to who we are as human beings. And this is something that we need to continue to cultivate and focus on. One thing i wanted to ask and you touched about it a bit on the book is we hear a lot these days about skill gaps. Skill gap, in terms of theres not enough people to hire for jobs, or and then i know you point out in the book, many economists do not believe thats true and its a complex issue, but i wanted to ask you, your take on a skill gap. How we address it, how we make sure people are sort of prepared and how companies, perhaps work with universities to make sure that were training people for the right skills, the right jobs. You know, for instance, now, if you survey what is needed in society now, and actually, those surveys happen, you know, the business and Education Forum did that, the chamber of commerce did that. Counsel of competitiveness did that. You see that, for instance, they are saying that we need Cyber Security and big data. You know . This is not a surprise. And that theres a enormous demand for cyber, big data, et cetera. Now, you know, clearly others you can add, you can add design thinking, you can add various other aspects, but you know, you asked me how society and how we can look into that. There are two types of learners that i am discussing in my book. Those that i call short on experience, long on time, and those are the undergraduates that you teach. And the others, the learners who are long on experience, but short on time. And those are us. So you know, there will be new demands constantly for new jobs, et cetera. What has happened, for instance, is that and thats Lifelong Learning, namely for the second group. Long on experience, short on time. What has happened is that society has answered because, in fact, Higher Education has not answered that. We havent answered that by creating forprofits. By creating boot camps, but in order to meet the needs. The number