The great dreams of AGI imagine its oracular powers: curing diseases, ending world hunger, stopping climate change, bringing an era of peace, love, and understanding to the world.

Meanwhile, there’s the AI of good enough. Good enough for what? Most of the things a professor does, let alone a poor bastard department chair: send emails, complete forms, read emails, submit forms, respond to emails, write a whole range of genres, analyze institutional data, schedule courses, review student work, review faculty work, answer questions for students and faculty who don’t understand how to use google, and so on. None of that stuff really requires any thinking, just experience. Maybe we don’t quite have the AI of good enough yet, of satisfactory AI, but it’s really about meeting in the middle, right? About satsificing? Sure, AI may make mistakes, but so do the humans.

I mean, when it comes to all that stuff, I’ll take my chances. Let the AI do it instead of me. The whole naturalcultural AI world runs at this point of satisficing. We are in the realm of game theory here with Nash equilibria and Pareto optimals, at least when it comes to user marketplaces. It just has to be good enough.

How is this higher ed’s dilemma? In so many ways and with no lack of publications to describe them.

In the end though, even without AGI, even with only imagining steady development of the AI we have now, without it becoming conscious or whatever… even then, AI will transform written and media communication at every scale. If it happens on a screen, AI will participate in it. It already shapes, has long shaped, what we see online. Now it will more directly shape our content.

What’s it going to be like to live and work in this environment where instead of getting routinized, good enough communications from other humans we get them instead from machines? And what if “we” don’t get them, but our personal AI assistants do, and those machines just go back and forth until they hit that equilibrium.

And we all live to satisfice and be satisficed another day. And maybe that all becomes the fertilizer for something better. And sure, that’s snarky, but in all honesty there are plenty of things I do that I can imagine a machine being able to do in a satisfactory way. Then there are other tasks where I would suggest that my conscious thinking brings some value.

The simple task for higher education is to help students develop capacities as people, citizens, and knowledge workers to make valuable contributions and think critically about the natureculture of value itself. That’s not new. What is new/changing and what is shifting quickly are the spaces, opportunities, and means by which those capacities might be realized.

We just need to be there and part of that conversation. Not just preparing students as if we are sous chefs, but engaged, along with the rest of humanity, regarding this notion of satisficing and what we are actually willing to put up with.