U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., are debating whether and how to regulate artificial intelligence. Some AI experts are sounding the alarm about how quickly the technology is advancing, calling for more guardrails. UW-Madison's new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence says its mission is to create powerful technology that best serves the people who use it. At Morgridge Hall, nearly every table is filled with people working on computers or phones. It's fitting for a building dedicated to innovation. Remi Arpaci-Dusseau is the founding dean of the college. He says the rise of AI is one reason the college was created.
Sunday, September 27, 2026
At Georgetown University dialogue, future of artificial intelligence seen as ‘something we have to tackle together’ - Mark Zimmermann, Catholic Standard
In a week when tech leaders said the artificial intelligence industry needs to slow its race to an uncertain future that some warn may be apocalyptic, Georgetown University hosted a Sept. 9 discussion on “AI, Catholic Social Teaching, and Pope Leo’s Invitation to Dialogue with the World.” The dialogue, sponsored by Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, drew upon Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s May 2026 encyclical letter that was subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Speakers emphasized that the pope’s letter offered a clarion call for moral guidance and reflection among all stakeholders, including community members, on the best way to move forward with AI.
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Graduating in AI Era Is Like ‘Large Recession’ For Starting Pay - Michael Sasso, Bloomberg
The rise of artificial intelligence has coincided with a significant decline in both initial earnings and employment among graduates with the most-exposed college majors, a worrisome trend that could shape career outcomes for years afterward, according to a new study. Economists at the US Census Bureau examined data covering roughly 29% of US bachelor’s degrees issued between 2016 and 2024, finding notable effects on new graduates after ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022.
An M.I.T. Report Warns A.I. Is Causing ‘Cognitive Surrender.’ Universities Are in a Bind. - Mark ArsenaultDana GoldsteinAlan Blinder and Sarah Mervosh; NY Times
As A.I. leaders warn about the dangers of their own technology, the dissonance between the optimism of university leaders and the fears of many students and professors may increase. Professors and students are often in a bind about what they should do: Use more A.I. to stay relevant, or dial back to preserve learning and thinking? While some politicians and A.I. leaders are warning about possible doomsday scenarios for humanity as A.I. models advance, many campus leaders are focused on the existential threat the technology poses to universities.
Friday, September 25, 2026
AI Agents Are Quietly Finishing Entire College Degrees - Julia McCoy, YouTube
Julia McCoy highlights how students are handing credentials to autonomous AI agents to complete entire courses—from watching lectures to submitting quizzes, writing papers, and replying to discussion threads [00:08]. She argues that if a machine can finish an entire course load, higher education has largely been measuring mechanical "output" [00:21], which machines now produce effortlessly. Because AI can draft text but cannot exercise true critical judgment [00:28]—something rarely formalized on a syllabus—she contends that the real challenge facing universities isn't whether institutions can stop AI tools, but reconsidering what students are actually there to learn [00:35]. [summary provided in part by Gemini Flash]
We're not about to awaken an evil digital god — AI is far more likely to end in a great disappointment - Andrew Rogoyski, Live Science
Artificial intelligence (AI) terrifies us partly because it is new and partly because it is disturbingly familiar. We have invented machines that converse, flatter, argue and improvise with uncanny fluency. Confronted by this synthetic reflection, we behave like early humans seeing a mirror for the first time: We project consciousness behind the glass, then populate it with our expected behaviors, emotions, hopes and nightmares. In other words, we scare ourselves. Today's frontier models are impressively good at writing, coding and math. Yet they still fail at ingredients of useful artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system that matches or surpasses human capabilities such as consistent reasoning, long-term planning, factual consistency and reliable performance outside their "experience" (the data they were trained on).
Thursday, September 24, 2026
The state of open source AI.- Mozilla
Te reo Māori has no commercial market to speak of. A broadcaster in the far north of New Zealand has been building speech models for it anyway, under a licence written so the recordings stay with the communities that gave them. Farmers in East Africa point a phone at a cassava leaf and get a diagnosis back with no signal at all, from a model small enough to sit on the handset. In Switzerland, a public consortium trained a national model on public supercomputers and released all of it: weights, data, training code. None of them asked permission, and none of them could have rented this. They own it, and that is the whole idea. Read what follows as a map: where open AI is winning, where some numbers surprised even us, and where it is exposed. A case that hides its weak points is an advertisement. In the six weeks since our first draft, a major US lab returned to open weights and Washington debated a ban and declined it. The map moved while we drew it. We have been here before. Mozilla exists because one company tried to own the front door to the web, and an open community made sure it never could.
From Search to Strategy: What Student AI Use Means for the Future of Academic Libraries - EDUCAUSE
While many academic librarians worry that artificial intelligence (AI) may reduce student engagement, research suggests a different story: students are integrating AI into their research workflows while continuing to rely on libraries for trusted sources and deeper scholarly inquiry. This interview features: Amy Deschenes, Interim Director of UX and Discovery, Harvard University and Meg McMahon, User Experience Researcher, Harvard University.
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Can AI Help Colleges Reach Struggling Students Earlier? - Joshua Bay, Inside Higher Ed
Austin Community College is using artificial intelligence and real-time data to identify students who need help and connect them with support before problems escalate. Students often leave clues that they’re struggling before they stop attending classes or exit college altogether. But those warning signs can be scattered across different offices and data systems, making it difficult for college staff to see the full picture or intervene before a student reaches a crisis point. As colleges increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, some are exploring whether the technology can help connect those dots and make student support more proactive. Austin Community College, for one, is testing a new initiative designed to identify student needs earlier.
Classroom practices that encourage intelligent AI behaviours - Nada Kakabadse, University World News
Whatever assessment policies say, the unsupervised take-home essay as a test of unaided student writing is gone. The institutional response has been retreating. The universities of Melbourne and Toronto are phasing out unsupervised take-home essays. The University of Cape Town’s AI working group wants 40% of assessments invigilated by 2027. At Durham University, a professor of philosophy stood down as chair of his board of examiners, citing a marking crisis. But retreat is only one of three institutional responses now visible worldwide, and comparing them is instructive. The second response, arguably the least defensible, is detection-led enforcement: running submissions through AI detectors and prosecuting the flagged. This approach is quietly collapsing.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
The new bargaining frontier: AI and academic labour - James Yoonil Auh, University World News
What happens when AI begins to perform work that universities have historically employed people to do? At that point, AI ceases to be merely an educational technology and becomes a labour technology.
Once AI enters the employment relationship, questions arise that an information technology office alone cannot resolve. Who decides whether AI may perform work previously assigned to faculty? Can AI change staffing requirements? Who owns academic materials used to develop AI systems? Can algorithmic analysis influence faculty evaluations? If AI makes academic work faster, who benefits from the time saved? If supervising AI creates new work, where does that labour appear in workload calculations? These questions are no longer hypothetical. They are increasingly appearing in collective agreements, memoranda of understanding and union policies.
Anthropic C.E.O. Calls for A.I. Slowdown - Mike Isaac, NY Times
The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick a pace for researchers to continue safely. “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei said. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Monday, September 21, 2026
USF president shares student successes and plans for AI college during fall address - Emma Brisko, WUSF
USF reached a record-breaking $750 million in research funding in fiscal 2025. Some of that money is being invested in the planned Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing. Limayem shared new renderings of the building, which will be located near the entrance of the Tampa campus, at Leroy Collins Boulevard and USF Alumni Drive. No construction date has been set, but $35 million in state money has been committed to the project. “This is an important piece of USF's future,” Limayem said. “We envision a place designed for students, faculty, research and collaboration in fields that are reshaping nearly every part of our lives – and protecting our digital spaces.”
Are Colleges Ready To Support the AI Workforce? - Grace Alexis, EdTech
For decades, colleges prepared students for a predictable workforce. Students chose a major, learned a defined set of skills and entered a career path that changed slowly over time. Artificial intelligence has ended that arrangement. Every few weeks, another report warns that AI will eliminate jobs. A recent Graduate Management Admission Council survey of more than 600 corporate recruiters found that one-third of employers are already replacing some entry-level roles with AI. In technology, that number rises to 40%. Yet the same survey named proficiency with AI tools the single most valuable skill employers expect to prize five years from now — and one of the skills graduates are least prepared to demonstrate. That gap is an education problem, and it belongs to us.
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