Maree Conway was a university administrator who then became a foresight practitioner who now looks for clients who want to collaborate with her. In the interview she discusses the hopes and fears arising from Artificial Intelligence, her book - Foresight Infused Strategy and her PhD on The Future for the University and the three 'contested' futures that will decide what the university becomes.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Maree
Contact Maree: maree.conway@thinkingfutures.net
Maree’s website: http://thinkingfutures.net
Maree’s book: http://thinkingfutures.net/book
Free downloads: https://thinkingfutures.net/my-downloads/
Maree’s presentations: http://slideshare.net/mkconway
Maree’s publications: https://thinkingfutures.net/publications-1/
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward
Welcome to FuturePod I'm Peter Hayward. The futures and foresight community comprises a remarkable and diverse group of individuals who span academic, commercial and social interests. At future pod. We seek to honor and learn from the wisdom of those who have established and developed our field to connect and support the practice of those who work in this space, and most importantly, to give pathways and inspirations to those who wish to join us in creating humane and better futures for ourselves and those who come after us. Today, our guest is Maree Conway, who is a strategic foresight practitioner and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia, Maree worked as a tertiary education leader for many years in policy planning and strategy roles. Maree studied foresight at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and in 2007. She established thinking futures and has operated as a consultant. Since then, she works with people to support them having collaborated and curated conversations about possible futures, to inform their strategic decision making. Maree has published extensively on the use of foresight in practice. In 2016, she published her first book called foresight infused strategy, a how to guide for using foresight in practice. Maree is currently completing her PhD studies. Welcome to future pod, Maree.
Maree Conway
Thank you, Peter.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, thanks for coming. Our first question that we like to ask our guest is for you to tell your story of how you got into the futures and foresight field.
Maree Conway
I remember this very clearly. I was called into the Vice-Chancellor's office at Swinburne to talk about my job. And he said, we're restructuring and you don't have a job. I thought, I think I'm okay. He said, but we want you to lead the planning department knowing Well, that's fine. And then he said, and we'd like you to do for us. And I didn't know what foresight was I knew what the word meant. But in terms of strategy, and I had no idea. So I went back to my office and googled it and thought, Oh, yeah, I can do that. Thinking that it would be just another step in the strategy, process, whatever. But it turned out to be something that changed my career, and changed my life really. So I started to use foresight at Swinburne with Joe Voros. And we did that for about five years, when a new Vice-Chancellor arrived who wasn't interested at all in foresight. So I left Swinburne to go somewhere else to another university where they were they didn't know what foresight was, they told me but they said it sounded interesting. So I worked there for a few years. And then I decided, really what I wanted to do was to use foresight to work with people to use foresight to help them think differently about the future. So that's when I set up my business. It's been evolving and changing and shifting and it still is, depending on what's happening at the time and what I'm learning and how I'm developing as well as a practitioner.
Peter Hayward
Yeah, at the time I think when you were asked to head up the foresight and planning unit, I think Richard came to Swinburne to establish the foresight Institute.
Maree Conway
Yes, yeah. And when I was setting setting up the foresight function, I kept looking for people who knew what foresight was, and who had used it in practice. I can't remember now who it was I was speaking to, but they said, but Richard Slaughter is coming to Swinburne, and like I was so happy. I thought, Oh, my God. There'll be somebody at Swinburne who knows what foresight is. And I don't have to explain it. And I don't have to try and convince people. And yeah, it was great. So that's when I met Richard and we, he helped me, advise me when I needed I needed help. And then I started to do the course, thought I'd only do the first subject but kept going. Because once I was in the first subject, I thought, oh my god, this is so good. I just had to finish the course.
Peter Hayward
And also you, you have had a very long association with the Association of Professional Futurists. How were they part of the journey to for you getting into the field.
Maree Conway
I am. I've always been a fan of professional associations because they help you meet people in the field when you're new to the field, and you build your profile and you get professional development. So I applied to be a member and was accepted. Then I offered to, I asked how I could be involved, because I think that's the other way you, you learn about the field is to be involved with people who are working in the field. But I ended up being co chair for a little while, but then withdrew from that and became the membership administrator. So I did that for a long time. And that was really useful. I mean, it's an ordinary job, in some respect for professional association, an essential job, and it puts you in contact with the members, and you find out what people are doing. You meet a lot of people, it's, yeah, it was great. And I think that association has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years. It is only about 12 years old, or 15 years old. But in that time, it's gone from being kind of a small group of people in the US to now a global organization, full of people who, for the most part, are very happy to share their information. And if you have a question or an issue or a problem, they're very generous in helping you and helping people, you know, from a student through through the wise the wise elders of the tribe. So, you know, it's a professional association. involvement is what you put into what you get out of it, what you put into it. So it's been very useful.
Peter Hayward
Who are the people who have supported you, you know, through the journey?
Maree Conway
Well, you have varying points in time in different sorts of roles. Most recently is my PhD supervisor, always kind of making me think a little more. Joe has always been there, Joe, for us. And I still enjoy telling people that I was his boss. That's always good fun. I think Cindy Frewin has always been a great support, just in terms of having a, you know, a shoulder to cry on, or some or a brain to pick at different times. everyone you meet when you go to a gathering, or you go to some sort of futures function is willing to have a conversation with you? and answer questions or to just just listen, but they're the ones that spring to mind, I can hear there's names going around in my head. But yeah, that's enough, I could go on for a long time.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, is there a tool that is a favorite for you, for helping people explore possible futures.
Maree Conway
The two tools are used the most scenario development and environmental scanning or horizon scanning as it's called in some countries, but scanning I guess, is the one that I consider to be the core of futures work. Because if you don't have good information about change, whatever you do after that will be less than it could be. early on. In my practice, I decided that I would run webinars. And so I did a series of webinars on scanning, among other things, and I wrote a guide to do scanning. So I got quite into scanning. Because it is the first step, it's the first step in gathering the information about change that you need to understand what change matters for your organization, and then how that change might evolve over time. And that second part is one of the things that people often miss. There's a lot of publications out there today about change today. And what it's like, and most of them are pretty good. But they sprinkle the future, the term the future through their reports, but they don't actually explore how change evolves over time. So with the way I do scanning, and the way I train people to do scanning, is to start with identifying what depends on the context, sometimes you start with an issue, a strategic issue, or a strategic decision that you want to make, or that your organization needs to make. And you use that as what I call the anchor for your scanning. Because when you do your scanning on the internet, and that's, that's with 99% of scanning will happen now. There's so much information out there that you can get overwhelmed. And when people first start doing scanning, the overwhelmed feeling is normal, and usual, because it's well, there's always information about an issue. How do I filter it? And part of becoming a good scanner is developing those filters personally in your brain, so that you will be able to understand what matters for you and the issue that you're interested in. What you need to put aside for now, what might be interesting in the future. And I always say you should never dismiss anything that you're scanning around and you find something and you think, well, that's not interesting. That's a bit silly. That's rubbish. And I always say, well, no stop. When that happens, you have to stop and say, Well, why do I think that? And what can I find that would support me? And what will I What? What can I find that would prove me wrong? So then you go off and scan around that scanning. I always tell people to people will say, I don't have time to scan. So the thing I hear the most, and so I so 15 minutes, yeah, if you can't do 15 minutes a day, do 15 minutes a week. And I said, block it out in your diary and make it non negotiable, you know, tell people at work. That's my scanning time and don't put anything else in there. People kind of look at me as though I've been bit crazy. And they said, Well, what do you do, and I say, well, I do about an hour, every morning, reading stuf,f scanning. I have I use Feedly, which is a news news aggregator run through that, the more you do scanning, the quicker that process becomes. And I run through that every morning. And I save things I need to save, I share them on social media, if I think it's information that would be useful in my work, and I put them in another folder somewhere else, otherwise, I just leave them in Feedly tagged, so I can always go back and find them. I also put them, the ones that I decide are important. The ones I share on social media, usually I put on a site called Shaping Tomorrow, which is a really good site as a database. It's all there, it's free, you don't have to do anything, you just click a button, and it does it for you. They're using artificial intelligence now as well. So you can put in your sources, the sources that you found that it useful, and they will do the scanning for you. So there's lots of ways to get the raw material, which is good, because that used to be the time consuming part. But once you've got the raw material, then you have to work out what to do with it. So there's, you have to categorize it, you have to be able to retrieve it somehow. So I tagged things, but other people will use STEEP categories, social, technological, economic, environmental, and political, or variations thereof. Because there are many variations, they'll use those categories as a top level category, it doesn't really matter. As long as you've got them categorized, you've got them stored somewhere, and they're accessible to you and to other people in the organization as well. Because there's no point keeping scanning information secret, if you're doing this work across the organization, then you have to have open access to the information. It's one of the things with strategy in the old days is that all the information about change was kept in the executive suite. And then people in the organization didn't know anything about it. So they were just given the future and told to go forth and make it happen. Whereas if you give people all the information about change, then everyone's got the same baseline of knowledge. They'll know why, why decisions are being made. And they're involved in that strategic thinking process, which is really what foresight is all about trying to democratize strategic thinking the way that what I do anyway is about democratizing strategic thinking in organizations. So then you when you've categorized it, you can do lots of things with it, you know, there's lots of different ways to, to to sort that out. And it depends on what you want to do with the information that you found. I was in I was in a session with you, I think, an executive education session. I remember, I remember somebody said, you know, we've done all this scanning, we've got heaps information. What do we do now? I don't know. It's like, well, what what were you planning to do with it? before you started to do it? Well, we just did the scanning. We don't know what to do with it now. And that's a common problem as well. You have to know what you're going to do with it, where you're going to use it in your existing strategy process. Before you start. You can write reports, you can send out emails, you can have workshops, there's a whole range of ways you can actually use the information that you found, but use it regularly. So don't keep it secret, and get it out there and communicate often about it.
Peter Hayward
A question for you one thing, I've both been a scanner, and I've run scanning teams, what's your view of individual scanning and then groups or teams of people scanning?
Maree Conway
I think you have to do it individually. First, because you get a diversity of perspective, then not everybody will find the same thing about the same topic. Everybody will have. For example, if everybody's got a particular strategic issue, and they're trying to find out what's important, then somebody will find a technological hit, because that's what they're interested in. Somebody will find a social one. It's so I think it's really important. Sort of at the foundation of a scanning team is that people scan individually all time. They put it into Shaping Tomorrow or a database, a common database. And then people as the team come together to look at what people have found, and then they decide what to do with it as a group. But I think scanning, ultimately, is an individual activity or in Shaping Tomorrow's cases, they're very proud to say, you know, it's an artificial intelligence informed activity now. So you know, they've got a robot that does their scanning for them. I still think, I think that's probably fine. To a certain degree, but there's a human element in understanding what really matters for your issues. And where the gaps are. That kind of thing is human interpretation of data that's always important.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, what are you seeing happening? And now? How are you sensemaking? What's going on? And what? What emerging futures interest to you? Now?
Maree Conway
I always say, I hate this question. Because it's my view of the world. Everyone has their own view of the world. What is of most interest at the moment, apart from my PhD, which is top of mind now trying to write it is, is artificial intelligence. And what's going to happen with that, because that has the potential to, to change a lot of things. Not just technology, but how we live and work and play and communication. Any I mean, I don't really understand the technology itself, I know that we are at this stage of artificial intelligence narrow. So you know that our iPhones can do one thing really well. Uber, call a taxi, get some food. And then the next stage is where it's, it's a smart develops to be as smart as a human brain, which is pretty scary. A single human brain. But that's mean, I think Ray Kurzweil thinks that's going to happen in 2025. Perhaps, but then the the kind of super intelligence that that all the movies are about. I was reading something recently, they said, We just don't have the knowledge for that to happen in the timeframe that a lot of people are just
Peter Hayward
going it's not going to happen in by 2025.
Maree Conway
Well, I kind of hope not. So I think you know, that the the full impact of artificial intelligence will probably be beyond my lifetime. But I can, it what I started watching it and seeing it, five, six years ago, I went to a conference in Singapore a few years ago, and it was global, higher education leaders. And one person in a concurrent session mentioned the term artificial intelligence, but nobody else did. And I'm thinking that's really interesting when you work in the futures field, because that was an example for me of how I was seeing something and thinking that it was quite important for education. And nobody in the room was was even talking about. It's kind of interesting. So they had an online question and answer session, I kept asking questions about artificial intelligence. And they never got asked, and I kept going, Whoa, what's happening here with universities? You know, do they not get what's going to happen with artificial intelligence? I went to another conference in Australia a couple of years later, and they were talking about it, but they still didn't understand. They still didn't talk like they understood what the potential impact of it. Like, they didn't really understand that. It was like, well, how do we use it now in its current form? So that's that. I just, I think that's one of those mega trends, you know, as horrible a term as that is,that that could change change the world.
Peter Hayward
It's interesting, because I'm like you I pay a lot of attention to what's being said about artificial intelligence and what strikes memory is the amount of people what I think of as intelligent people are very scared of this and they are scared about something that hasn't happened. tells me that there's a that there's a deep fear associated with this. I'd love to hear your views on that.
Maree Conway
It's interesting. It's always a two sided coin, isn't it? There's always hope and fear. The fear comes from lack of control. I think this technology has the has the potential to run away. I mean, if if everything that people write about it comes true, then you know self learning, self replicating It could be very scary in terms of the human race, which is why it's really important. And that's and that's being recognized that now at this stage, that we make sure that the human element is maintained in, in that process of development for artificial intelligence. So people have to remain at the core of, of how it develops. I think the fear thing comes because it's, it's people see it as having the potential to up in their life, to change their life completely, which it will, I think, you know, when when we have the super intelligence, I'm glad to be around when that happens, I think. And I think the more work you do on futures, and you learn to think differently about the future, the less fear you have. Because, you know, artificial intelligence is about one thing. And I always say that to people who are scanning, you can't project a future from a single trend. And a trend is about the present, not the future. So you have to explore how that might happen, evolve over time, but you need to look at the system of trends. So artificial intelligence is one thing, but you know, there's social trends going on, doing all sorts of strange things. The geopolitical scene is very strange at the moment, compared to the past. So how will that develop? You know, you can't say well out of it, well, you can say that artificial intelligence will change the world. But it will change the world in different ways, depending on what else happens around it.
Peter Hayward
I was gonna ask you to, because I think artificial intelligence is a good example of what are called bifurcated thinking. In other words, people tend to see it in black and white, even though it is anything but black and white, if you got sort of some advice, or how people listening can understand that, how do you listen and make sense of an issue that people are seeing as either or?
Maree Conway
That's a good question. I think that it's part of this ability to not sure the right words, but to be open to the future. So and to understand that the worldview or the sense making tools that we use, now, I find for now, but that we must always adapt them and change them. And I think people don't like to do that. Yeah, this is my worldview. This is how I see the world. And, and you can't make me change it. So the fear comes from from that, because it's threatening their worldview, threatening their sense making of reality as they see it. I don't think you can say it's a bit like climate change in some ways. You can't tell people that they need to change their thinking. They have to work it out for themselves. And so it's, that's where foresight processes and things like that strategic thinking processes are quite useful. And it's kind of stretching people's thinking. So that they can recognize that there are alternative ways to view the future out there. And that some of them are good. And there will be there will be negative features. But if you if you don't like that future, we always say that if you don't like that future, then you need to act today to mitigate its impact. You can't just let it happen. When people say now, well, that was a surprise. We didn't see that coming. And I say, well, you weren't looking. And and so I think when people think think of things in black and white, then it's it's safe. It's an it's people's Yeah, I think that's normal. People like to be safe.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, what do you say to the responsibility of futures practitioners to actually be that way? While it might be normal to want to see things in black and white, that we have to actually deliberately seek out the areas that even we're not comfortable to think about?
Maree Conway
Yes, I think that's, that's one of the primary tasks of doing this kind of work is that you need to look for diversity of perspectives. And when you do that, not all them will be your perspective. So finding the the one that you don't like, or the opposite to you, or the one that's different to you, is really important, and exploring what that means. I mean, I was thinking, as I was saying that I thought it's like talking to my oldest sister. She never listens to this. You know, she and I have, we have different perspectives on a whole lot of things. Since when we were growing up, we fought a lot. And we as we grew up, we fought a lot. But since I've been doing this work, I'm able to just step back And listen to her, I still don't agree with her on a whole lot of things. But that ability to to take in new information or different information, and just sit with it is part of what we do. Because I think we're not in the business of rejecting things or rejecting ideas about the future. It's we need diversity of perspectives about the issues that are around today, and how they're shaping the future.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, how do you describe foresight, and explain what it is you do to someone who doesn't really understand what foresight is or what a futurist does?
Maree Conway
There's two, two different types of audiences. for that question. One is, people who've come to me and said, I'm interested in foresight, I don't know what it is. And there's other people who you're trying to explain who have no idea what it is, the first, the first category is much, is a much easier discussion to be had. Because you can explain that, you know, foresight is a cognitive capacity, it's innate, it helps us make sense of reality, how we plan for the future. And if we surface it overtly, through the use of foresight, methods and tools, then it can become a collective capacity in an organization. So it can build a culture of being futures, futures, facing and can strengthen strategy development. I mean, that's kind of a spin, for people, for people who are interested or people who don't know anything about it and come across it. I think that's the audience I really wrote my book for. Because when I started my business, I made a commitment to myself to share, to share information about foresight, because I figured there was no point me talking about it all the time, that with a, you know, a particular group of people at a particular time. But if we really wanted to get this foresight approach and his way of thinking out there into the into society, then you had to share information about it in a different in a range of ways. So I started to do the webinars, I wrote reference guides, gave them all away for free. And then, a few years ago, I thought, you know, I've got all this information, I could write a book. And instead of people having to come and, you know, download this and download that one, listen to that, and watch that webinar, I can put everything that I'd done since 2007. together in a book, and the focus of it would be, how do you do this in practice? And it would be for people who were just starting out who, who were interested, who knew a little bit maybe, you know, how do I actually use this in my work in my in my organization in my strategy process? What do I need to know about? So the book was designed to give people a grounding in what foresight was, where it where you could fit it or slotted into the strategy development process. And then, you know, my toolbox, I talked about my my foresight toolbox, gave examples of other methods that you could use as well. And then some lessons from the field. So you know, don't do this. I did this. And I learned the hard way, don't you do it! So I think that I've always said to that, to know what foresight is really, you know, in your head, you have to experience the process. And that lesson, I learned very early on at Swinburne, when we were doing a pilot exercise, a pilot scenarios exercise. And the senior managers weren't interested for a whole lot of reasons. And they came to the workshop at the end of the process. And the people in the workshop reported back, and they were less than impressed. And one of the senior dvcs made a negative comment and some one of the participants stood up and said, We don't expect you to understand how good this process was and the value that we've got out of this process because you weren't in it. So that's okay. And I thought, well, you know, I was a novice, you know, a greenhorn, and it was like, wow, this stuff really works. So I think that if someone, you can explain some foresight to somebody, but until they've actually been through a process, I don't think they get it. Well, I didn't get it until I'd been through a process. It's what I call the foresight switch. Suddenly, this switch in your brain gets turned on and you can't turn it off.
Peter Hayward
In terms of your, your practice itself. I know your practice. Went through its own change, I'd like you to talk to the listeners around how your prose how your actual practice evolved.
Maree Conway
When I started in 2007, I read a lot of books, I like reading books. And there's kind of a rulebook when you're starting your own business as a consultant. Bit of a formula there across all these sorts of books you can read. And so I thought, yes, I can do that, I can do that. That's fine. You know, did everything I had to do set everything up that I thought I had to set up, was all was all very nice. It was exciting. Stay my business. And then I accepted, I accepted work. Now. It's like, this is great. You know, all these people are coming to me for work to give me work. So I said, Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes. So I was doing, people would ring up and say, Can you help us write our strategic plan? And I would say, Yes, of course I can. But you have to do this futures work first. Nobody said no. So I just kept, kept doing that, that was fine. And that that initial work that I set up, then is still with me now. But it's it's in a much more developed state than it was then. But I would do speaking, I would facilitate planning workshops. Whatever anybody wanted me to do, I would do. And it was a bit silly really. I realized, yeah, after one particularly bad engagement, I thought this is a bit silly, you know, it's not right. It's not good for the clients, not good for me, I have to rethink what I'm doing, and how I do it. And so I moved away from kind of the traditional conventional consulting model. Don't call myself a consultant, except when I write it on the departure cards from Australia. So I thought, what is it that I'm good at? What is it that I can do best? And I started to focus around working with people on projects, rather than being the expert at the front of the room, which I hate. So I work, I now look for projects where I can work with people over a period of time, build up a relationship, and actually help them use foresight, not just talk about using it, but actually help them use it in in their practice on a day to day basis. They're very few and far between. But but I know how to say no now. And I stopped doing keynote speaking. I hate, it's not me, it doesn't suit me. I'm not a good speaker. And that's okay, that's fine. There's lots of other really good speakers out there. But I do other things better. I am now at a position where I think I'm adding more value than I was in the earlier days by doing a narrower set of things.
Peter Hayward
To some extent that I'm hearing, Maree, that You almost had to try and do everything, to have enough experience to understand what it was you really do well, and you want to do more of?
Maree Conway
Yes, that's probably true. Yeah. I think it comes with getting older, too, I think. You kind of realize that you have, you know, there's, you can do things. It's a bit like busy work, you know, you do them because you can do them, and somebody asks you to do it. But is it really? Are you getting anything out of it? Am I getting anything out of it? And are they really getting a good experience as well. And I think where I was uncomfortable in that professional sense. It wasn't good for them. It wasn't good for me. But now the work I do, I'm much more comfortable. But you're right, I think, I think when you start out yes, yeah, I hadn't thought about it like that before. But I think you're right when you start out, you probably need to experiment and see and see where you fit. And I think Richard Slaughter talked about working out where you fit in the in the futures conversation. And that's, and that's probably the process that you need to go through to be able to work that out.
Peter Hayward
So Maree, tell us about your PhD.
Maree Conway
My PhD has been a journey. I started doing it in the late 90s at the University of Melbourne, on one topic about the relationship between academics and administrators, which was a long standing issue for me, having been a manager in universities for almost 28 years - talk about two different worldviews. Although when I started in universities, that was one, I eventually withdrew from that for a whole lot of reasons. And I started again at Swinburne in 2012 with the same topic and similarly, similar to what we were just talking about in terms of finding your way in when you become a futures practitioner, that's what happened with my PhD as well. I started with one topic, it turned, it was that relationship between academics, administrators, it turned into the future of management in university management, then it turned into the future of the university, the future for the university, which is where I am now. But the one thread through the whole thing was about worldviews, was about how the worldview of an academic and the worldview of a manager now are conflicting. And at the moment, my my topic is, how contested ideas of the University are enabling and constraining possible futures, the emergence of possible futures. I don't have the right word, I have decided that there's actually three contested ideas of the university now. And one of them is the traditional idea of the university, which is the one we all know and love. The ivory tower, the the University of Melbourne type university, there's the managerial idea, which is the university we have now bureaucratized, managed, measured, controlled, university, emerging outside the university on the managerial idea came from outside the university, but we came into the university where the traditional idea lives in the university, from outside the university, now we have what I'm calling the social idea, which is in two parts. One is from within the university, and it's, it's a group across the world, really, it's starting to pop up everywhere, where academics aren't going to play the neoliberal game anymore. And they're saying, this is where we are, it's probably our fault, that we didn't react soon enough, but we don't have to stay here. So different types of universities are being established, they're still being called a university, they're still being set up within a legal system, but it's pulling away, you know, it's creating alternatives. Then, the other side of this social idea is, is a group of people from outside the university who don't really care about the university, like people who work in them care about them, they see the university as too expensive, it's a waste of money, we don't need it anymore. We can get knowledge however we want, whenever we want, when we want it, you don't need to exist. So that's a weak signal. But it's sitting there, and it's getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And for me, that's like, Whoa, now, that's frightening, because I care about the university, I want the university to have a future. But it might not. So that's what I'm exploring in the PhD and I'm using the literature is my data, and analyzing that using three horizons and causal layered analysis, and then doing some scenarios. And then trying, my aim is to develop a, an integrally informed framework for thinking about the future of the university, to hopefully broaden and deepen the discourse that's going on at the moment about the university, which is so dominated by this fight between the people who are resisting the neoliberal idea, and the people who own the neoliberal idea, who just assume it to be true, right and proper, and that the university will continue, forever. And I think that's one of the things that really surprised me at this conference in Singapore, but also in the research in the literature, is that there is such a strong belief across all those ideas, except the one from outside the university where they don't care about the university, that the university will always be.
Peter Hayward
And following on from your earlier point around artificial intelligence, I wonder what artificial intelligence does to as you said, the three worldviews artificial intelligence is clearly a challenge the people who want the old university to be the old University, they might, they might be a group of people might not actually embrace artificial intelligence as a way to create the university that we need. Yeah.
Maree Conway
Well, there is already, it's already here. There's already people who are using artificial intelligence, the Minerva project in San Francisco is based on that. But again, it's kind of its narrow. It's not the you know, the scary type. It's not the overwhelming type. Yeah, it's here. It's a weak signal. They've been around for a while now. And there's other, there's lots of online systems platforms now. for for for learning. I think the people outside who don't want the university or don't think the university is necessary. Every one will be quite happy with artificial intelligence because it will make their life easier in terms of getting access to what they need to know when they need to know it. The people who hold the traditional idea, at the core of that idea is the university's social and public role. So, I don't know what artificial intelligence would do to that. That's interesting. I have to think about that. But the the managerial one? Well, you know, it's it's kind of it's like, it's in this little bubble of the time, you know, thinks it's wonderful. Government, it's just, it's so dominant, I was really surprised. And I think they're the group that aren't really treating it seriously, artificial Intelligence seriously. They're the the group that, you know, talk about it, but don't really understand yet, haven't let their minds open up enough to lead in the full potential impact. So it's still quite I think, for education, and universities. It's there, people are using it. You know, Newton is in a few universities, but it's still sort of hovering around the edges for most.
Peter Hayward
Thank you, Maree. for being part of a FuturePod. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the FuturePod community.
Maree Conway
Thank you for the invitation. It's been great.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from FuturePod. FuturePod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.