Every institution wrestling with AI right now is caught between two anxieties: the fear of moving too slowly and being left behind, and the fear of moving too quickly and getting it wrong. Neither fear is irrational. Both, taken alone, are paralyzing.
Professor Abdi Aidid will argue that the answer is not a compromise between speed and caution, but a more demanding posture: moving quickly, but not too quickly; carefully, but not unnecessarily carefully. This is a lesson that information-intensive professions across society are now being forced to learn, often the hard way, and higher education is no exception.
This keynote is about how to hold that balance honestly. How do we take seriously our responsibilities to students, to colleagues, to the public trust, and to the values that make the university worth defending, while also recognizing that excessive caution is itself a choice with consequences? How do we distinguish the risks worth slowing down for from the ones we have invented to avoid the discomfort of change? And how do we build the institutional muscles to keep making that judgment, day after day, as the technology keeps moving?
