There are so many AI related trends which are going to hit higher education over the next few years:
– The investment bubble bursting and ensuing enshittifcation
– The move to token-based pricing and its implications for access
– The rapid growth of the AI wearables market
– The declining role of prompting in interacting with chatbots
– The uptake of coding agents by students
– The increase of unhealthy attachment behaviours to AI
I think we’re going to see more change in the next three years than we saw in the last three years. Each of these would be challenging in its own right but in combination these developments are unpredictable and complex. How do we negotiate the short-term challenges (under financially constrained circumstances) while still preparing for the wider changes?
I’m increasingly convinced that part of this has to involve building infrastructure for horizon scanning to ensure we don’t get locked into reactive modes of engaging with these issues. Can we plausibly do this within individual institutions? Or would it need to be sector wide to be feasible and sustainable?