The Future of Work

November 30, 2023 marks one year into the ChatGPT era and one of the most pressing concerns we hear from all quarters is: How will this affect the future of work and what the implications are for my job, and the jobs around me? John Behrens ‘83, the director of the Technology and Digital Studies Program and the director of digital strategy for the College of Arts & Letters, and Yong Lee, assistant professor of Technology, Economy, and Global Affairs at Keough School of Global Affairs, explore and examine just what the future may hold.

Meet the Faculty: Yong Lee

Yong Suk Lee is assistant professor of technology, economy, and global affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He is a faculty affiliate of the Keough School’s McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business and a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Pulte Institute for Global Development, and Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

Lee’s research focuses on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics in relation to labor economics, entrepreneurship, and urban economics. His current projects explore on how artificial intelligence and robotics affect labor, and the governance and ethical issues related to these new technologies. Lee also studies the application of machine learning to examine socioeconomic questions such as bias, urban inequality and change, and the demand for skill. In addition, he examines aspects of technology education and entrepreneurship, e.g., education and mobility, and entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Lee is a faculty affiliate of the Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center (ND TEC). Prior to coming to Notre Dame, he was a faculty member at Stanford University as the SK Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Prior to Stanford, he was assistant professor of economics at Williams College. He earned his PhD in economics from Brown University, a master’s degree in public policy from Duke University, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Seoul National University. Lee also worked as a real estate development consultant and architecture designer as he transitioned from architecture to economics.

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Thursday, December 14, 2023 12:00 pm

The New AI is sponsored on ThinkND by the Technology and Digital Studies Program in the College of Arts & Letters. This program collaborates with the Computer Science and Engineering Department and other departments around the University to offer the Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, the Minor in Data Science, and the Idzik Computing & Digital Technologies Minor.

Featured Speakers:

Yong Lee is assistant professor of technology, economy, and global affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He is a faculty affiliate of the Keough School’s McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business and a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Pulte Institute for Global Development, and Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
John Behrens ‘83 is a Professor of the Practice of Technology & Digital Studies and Concurrent Professor of the Practice in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He serves as Director of the Office of Digital Strategy in the College of Arts & Letters and Director of the Technologies & Digital Studies Program.

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What is Generative AI?

Text Generation:

In a nutshell, the fundamental function of text generators is to predict the next word in a given phrase. They do not “know” things in the way that humans know things, but rather make predictions based on all of the information that they have been trained on. For example, ChatGPT may look as though it “knows” the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but in reality, it produces the phrase “Four score and seven years ago” because that is the most likely string of words that is associatied with Lincoln’s famous speech. Text generation tools, like ChatGPT, Google Bard, Claude, and others receive data from all across the Internet, make probability-based predictions from that data, and then take in user feedback to continue improving.

Because many of our readers have never seen ChatGPT in action, here we provide a short video of some of the things you can do with it including writing press releases, translation, automatic rewriting for specific audiences and automatic analysis of survey data with the results going into a PowerPoint presentation.

Below are two videos introducing the background to Large Language Models. The first is more introductory, the second is more advanced.

In this (hour long!) video, Sebastien Bubeck from Microsoft research gives an overview of the research they conducted in 2022 to try to get ChatGPT to act more and more intelligent. Systems have evolved dramatically since then but there are many interesting lessons in the video.

Image Generation:

Text generators are not the only Generative AI tools available. There are also image generators that can take in prompts and create brand-new, never before seen images. There are several similarities between the way that image generators and text generators work. Like their text counterparts, image generators, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, must take in training data and provide prediction-based outputs to a user. The difference is that instead of learning word association and providing sentences when given a text prompt, the statistical model relates words to themes inside images and uses those to create new images from scratch when given a text prompt.

Below is a video that explores whether AI has creativity and imagination.

Each of the following resources provide an overview into the current state of General Artificial Intelligence:

For more information, please visit Technology & Digital Studies Programs website.

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