On the Brown University campus, Michael Littman is easy to spot. He’s probably the only member of the faculty who scoots everywhere on an electronic unicycle.
“I was the president of my college mime troupe,” he explained. “The person who was president before me went on to Barnum and Bailey Clown College.”
Littman’s career followed a different path. He went on to become a computer sciences professor and did a stint at the National Science Foundation as its head of Artificial Intelligence.
Littman recently returned to Brown as the university’s first-ever Associate Provost of AI. His remit includes not only AI research and teaching but also how AI is implemented across campus.
He spoke with Ocean State Media’s David Wright.
Watch the full interview here.
How does he see his job?
It’s really about navigating the moment. What can we be doing to be more efficient, to be more effective and to take advantage of the technology that’s now available?
I have long been interested in the empowerment that comes from computing. What computers let us do is take a thing that we want to have happen and do it on our behalf.
And yet it’s been a very high barrier of entry for most people, because the way to tell a computer what to do is in a programming language, and programming languages are exacting. It is a difficult process for people to learn how to converse with a computer in that form.
What these chatbot tools let us do is now express ideas and tasks to machines, without necessarily having to have all that technical background.
What role does he see for Brown?
A lot of the foundational work that has created this AI moment came out of universities. It’s absolutely the case that the technology itself, as well as most of the people who are doing the development of that technology, cut their teeth in a university setting. And so that makes us extremely relevant, because we actually sort of know what’s going on in the core technology.
Universities also have always had this responsibility to ask the question, not just: How do we make a new thing, but what impact is it going to have on the rest of the world?
A university like Brown has this really interesting opportunity. When we’re trying to figure out how to deploy and use AI on campus, we are like a little microcosm of a town.
We’ve got restaurants, essentially, like the dining halls. We’ve got a police force. We’ve got booksellers, so we have commerce happening. We have health services. So all the things that you think of as being the services that a town provides, universities have a little micro version of that. And so when we can figure out what seems to be working well, we might have things that we can say to the rest of the world like, “No, no, no, no, we tried that. It didn’t work.”
So I think I’m trying to plant the seeds across the university to try to say, “Okay, what can we be doing to actually take new lessons on board and then share them with the rest of the world?” You talked about the role the universities have to play in terms of kind of steering an ethical course through all this, reminding people of the values and morals and stakes.
How does Littman himself use AI?
One of the things that I find most useful with chatbots, anyway, is there’s always like this word that’s right on the tip of my tongue, and I can’t remember what it is, but it has to do with this. And it’s really hard to look things up in the dictionary like that.
But these chatbots are actually really good at it. You can just describe, “Oh, I’m thinking — I’m trying to think of a word. I think it maybe starts with this letter and it’s used in this context.” And then it comes back, “Oh, you’re probably thinking of the word ‘ambition.’”
Definitely, my phone wants to know what my face looks like. That’s a little creepy, but I’m accepting of that. I use that technology.
I very rarely will take the AI suggestions when I’m typing, and it’s sort of like trying to finish my sentences for me. If it’s exactly what I was going to say, I will accept it. But if it’s at all different, I’m like, “No, I’m going to use my version.”
