Dartmouth College opened its “AI at 70” conference on Oct. 29, marking 70 years since the 1956 workshop where the term “artificial intelligence” was coined, and stressed that human judgment must remain central as AI advances.
President Sian Leah Beilock highlighted the recent resignation of Provost Santiago Schnell after a review found he used AI without disclosure, saying the episode underscores the need for leaders who model transparency and human judgment.
Beilock explained that AI literacy now involves teaching students when to use AI tools and when to set them aside, and that every student should gain hands‑on experience with the technology through varied instructional approaches.
Mira Murati, a Dartmouth alumna and chief executive of Thinking Machines Lab, described her company’s open‑weight models that let customers train AI on their own data, arguing that true ownership of intelligence is essential to avoid concentration of power and loss of intellectual diversity.
She warned that the alignment problem—ensuring AI systems act as intended—and the risk of a few firms dominating powerful models require broader public attention to what human worth means in an age of machines.
Murati advised students to focus on deep, sustained study of a subject rather than trying to predict which jobs AI will eliminate, emphasizing that deep knowledge shapes experience and worldview.
Beilock shared a personal story of learning to code in Lisp by hand‑searching for a missing parenthesis, noting that the problem‑solving skill she gained remains valuable despite modern tools, and Murati concluded that judgment is developed by actually doing the work.
Source: www.nhbr.com
