Towson University 0:00 You're listening to a Towson University podcast. President Mark Ginsberg 0:08 Welcome to on the mark, where we have candid conversations about meaningful and consequential work happening here at Towson University. I'm Mark Ginsburg, president of TU located in Towson, Maryland, and on this podcast, we're introducing you to members of our university community who are engaged in high impact teaching, research and Student Success practices. This is our inaugural episode, and I'm very excited to start sharing the great things we're doing here at TU. Since I joined our university in october 2023, I've been so incredibly inspired by our faculty and our staff, by their passion for their commitment to the public good. And so I wanted to start this series to showcase their efforts and highlight the many ways that higher education makes a difference in our communities, here in the Baltimore region, throughout our state, throughout our region, and, in fact, throughout the nation. Today, I'm pleased to talk to a colleague, Dr. Samuel Collins . Dr Collins is a prolific researcher and a distinguished professor in our Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice here at Towson University. He's currently pioneering TU's efforts around AI, education, artificial intelligence education, and he's working to advanced AI literacy, interdisciplinary research opportunities and cutting edge teaching practices. He's been at TU for more than 25 years. His doctoral degrees are from American University. His Master's and Doctoral degrees actually from American University. And I know Sam too that you've also been in Korea, had a couple of Fulbright opportunities in Korea. We may talk about that. And by training, he's a cultural anthropologist interested in the information society, globalization and how it's interacts with life, both here in the United States and abroad, with a particular expertise in Korea. So Sam, welcome and thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Samuel Collins 2:00 Yeah, thank you. I'm so happy to be here, and it's great to be the first person. President Mark Ginsberg 2:04 The first, I hope not the only, hopefully it's just the first. But we're delighted you're here. Dr. Samuel Collins 2:10 You know, students who who go first always get extra points and presentations. So I hope that's extended to me here. President Mark Ginsberg 2:16 That's right, we'll give you a little bit of extra credit. I may need some extra credit also given it's our first. Well, let me start off by asking you a little bit about your background. You've been interested in cultural studies for a long time. You've studied it, you've researched it, you've written about it. I've written several books on it. In fact, your a 2008 book All Tomorrow's Culture Anthropological Engagement with the Future has been critically reviewed and highly respected around the country. Let's just off. Tell me a little bit about how you got interested in cultural studies and how it became the focus of your career. Dr. Samuel Collins 2:46 Sure,yeah, I grew up in the Midwest, in Iowa, and there's a lot of good memories about that, but in high school, I moved to South Texas, about about a mile and a half from the border to Mexico. President Mark Ginsberg 3:05 Ah, no kidding. Interesting. Dr. Samuel Collins 3:07 And, in one sense, it wasn't that much different. It was from one small town to another small town, but it was very different in like many ways. So the high school that I attended was about 95% bilingual, and indeed, we spent many, most of our weekends in Mexico, and at that time, the border was a good deal more fluid than than it is today. So that sort of really launched my interest in in other peoples and other cultures, and seeing stuff that that at least on the outside, look familiar, but once you get a little more familiar, you realize there are some real differences there. And I took that into my college career at Rice University and then and then beyond into grad school. President Mark Ginsberg 3:56 I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the areas that you study is the future, looking at the future and how the past maybe predicts, or in some ways, doesn't predict the future. But one of the things about that, that I found interesting, I think you've written about too, is, are we moving towards greater sameness or greater difference? And you were beginning to talk about that. Talk a little more about it. Dr. Samuel Collins 4:17 Sure. So, my take greater difference, and why? Because, as as people encounter each other and ideas, they are differentiated through a whole number of ways. I mean, there are global inequalities, of course, that are highlighted a lot of things that we we believe and transport through global media to other places, are rejected by other people. Differences is a way of people to understand sort of in group versus out group. And you know, despite the Homogeneity of some institutions. So, for example, the internet. President Mark Ginsberg 5:04 Sure Dr. Samuel Collins 5:06 Media President Mark Ginsberg 5:06 Right Dr. Samuel Collins 5:06 Media platforms. You know, some kind of corporations that have a global reach. Despite all of these factors, what we what we see are an increasing differentiation of a population that globally has grown right? 9 billion of us now. So, we're not all the same. President Mark Ginsberg 5:26 We're not all the same. And even though there's a push in some sectors to more homogeneity, it seems as a culture is a big part of that, that our cultures are so distinct, despite the fact of walking into any mall in any part of the world, you're seeing a lot of the same stores. And of course, the study of anthropology is really the study of culture and the study of what makes people tick, who are people and what makes them who they are Dr. Samuel Collins 5:50 Yea. Where have we been? Where are we and where are we going? Those are the questions for Anthropology. President Mark Ginsberg 5:55 Yeah, yeah. But there also seems to be on the flip side of that, a bit of a, I don't know how to describe it, but a catalytic moment where, where, where, despite the differences we have, people are coming towards kind of a common a common place in some ways. You know, traveling around the world as often as I have over the last couple of decades. You know, 50 years ago, you'd go to a different country, and there really would be differences. Now, you go to a different country, and there are differences, but there's also some sameness. Dr. Samuel Collins 6:28 Yeah, it was a there's an anthropologist named Clyde Klucken who said that in some ways we're different than all other people. In some ways we're kind of like other people. And in some ways, we're like every other person. And I think what's happened is that the travel that's been enabled through flying times have decreased, and transportation is cheaper and easier. The kind of media escapes that we share that include, you know, movies and television and plenty of international choices. If you're on streaming services like Netflix, you can see dramas from all over the world. All this stuff shows us that, you know, there are cultural differences, but culture itself is heterogeneous, not everybody. You know, if we say U.S. culture, ask anyone, no one's going to say, well, that that does not mean that everybody does the same thing. President Mark Ginsberg 7:28 Right. Dr. Samuel Collins 7:29 So, we implicitly know that about ourselves. And of course, that's true of anyone in the world. I always say that that students in my in my career class that I'm teaching this semester that they have, in many ways, much more in common with their counterparts, college students in South Korea than they do with me, because they share all the same concerns President Mark Ginsberg 7:51 right. Dr. Samuel Collins 7:52 Generationally, they are the same in terms of of their own exposure to media and technology, and I'm the person who's in that situation on the outside. President Mark Ginsberg 8:05 You mentioned Korea. Tell me a little bit about your experiences in Korea and how that helped to inform your understanding about some of these issues. Dr. Samuel Collins 8:12 Sure. Yeah. So, I was first in Korea as a visiting professor as I was just finishing up my PhD, and that was for a couple years, and I think total, I've lived there for about five years. President Mark Ginsberg 8:26 Fascinating. Dr. Samuel Collins 8:27 You know, when you go to a Korean apartment, and I'm sure that you've had that experience, and,you know, it's someone's home, and in many ways, it looks very similar to homes in the US President Mark Ginsberg 8:42 yeah Dr. Samuel Collins 8:42 you know, there's the same kind of kind of sofa that's arranged typically in front of a television set, and there's bedrooms and apartments have gotten a lot larger over the years in South Korea and now are certainly comparable in size to many houses in the US, even though they're in high-rise apartments. But that's where resemblances begin to fray. President Mark Ginsberg 9:09 I wanted to get into this topic too, as a cultural anthropologist, talk a little bit about what the changes in technology are bringing, because Korea is a pretty good case example of what it's meant. Dr. Samuel Collins 9:19 Yeah. So there, there really is no place in Korea, especially in cities where you're offline, yeah, ever and, and, you know, I mean, obviously now people are more or less networked in through, through their phones. But you know, Wi-Fi is also ubiquitous in Korea, and it's a wired society. People are online all the time, and what are the effects of that? Well, here's like one just top of my head right now, is one thing that I was privileged to witness when I was in Seoul, were protests against President Yoon Suk Yeol's government. President Mark Ginsberg 10:05 Yes. Dr. Samuel Collins 10:06 They were big. Couple 100,000 people. 250,000 people. And people who maybe haven't, haven't looked at a lot of this stuff. Don't know that demonstrations in Korea, especially in recent times, resemble much more of a festival than anything else. They're They're fun, they have music, there is free food, they're really nice. Actually, those demonstrations are all enabled and structured by social media. People belong to little groups through, typically through an app like Kalka talk and they organize themselves. They show up with these meetings. They coordinate. It's highly choreographed President Mark Ginsberg 10:55 But it does show the power of technology. And of course, one of the newest things, not so new, but becoming ever more present and ever more important that technology is the use of artificial intelligence. And Korea being maybe a good example of how technology changed the culture. My answer is that artificial intelligence now is going to be changing culture even more. Let me read a quote to you and see two quotes get your reaction to one is by Mark Cuban, of course, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, the guy who's on what is that show where they do the pitches, Shark Tank, yeah. And you know, popular figure today, Mark Cuban wrote recently that artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, whatever you're doing, however you're using it, if you don't understand it, if you don't learn it, you auto because otherwise you're going to be a dinosaur within three years. And one more quote, two more. Curious to get your take on these, because they're kind of in a bundle. Andrew Nigg, the inventor, recently said that artificial intelligence is the new electricity. Artificial intelligence to electricity. Sundar Pichai wrote, AI is the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or even fire. Pretty hyperbolic. So, as an anthropologist, as we think about culture, as we think about the changes going on in our society and the world, and we think about, as you said earlier, the both the dichotomy between sameness and difference, how does AI fit into all this? Dr. Samuel Collins 12:34 Those are all great questions. Let me approach that through a couple of different routes. I mean, on the one hand, I can look at it in anthropology, on the other hand, as an educator, and you know, I work with FACET, with our, you know, our Center for Excellence here on campus. And when ChatGPT, this is, of course, generative AI, not all of AI. But when chatgpt became widely available in 2022 it precipitated a big crisis in higher education, which is pretty obvious to us, but may not be as much to other people. And a lot of the questions that people had in 2022 are ones that we still get a lot of today over at facet. How. How can I teach a class when students can generate their their responses or their work instantly using generative AI and that part, I mean, I don't have an easy answer for when, when people ask those questions. There, there really is a kind of diluvial moment there. We cannot teach college, nor high school or middle school or whatever else, unless we consider the context of AI. And I would say fire is probably, maybe it would not be the comparison I would reach for, but I would certainly President Mark Ginsberg 14:05 It makes the point though. Dr. Samuel Collins 14:06 Yeah, I would certainly say that the a comparison to the internet would be absolutely apt. It's, you know when, when President Mark Ginsberg 14:16 Something really profound that's got to be catalytic Dr. Samuel Collins 14:19 but you think, like by the late President Mark Ginsberg 14:20 transformative Dr. Samuel Collins 14:21 By the late 1990s, the ubiquity of internet resources that transformed the way that we teach in class to take it in a more anthropological way, though. President Mark Ginsberg 14:33 Yeah. Dr. Samuel Collins 14:34 We have to remember that technology by itself is not deterministic. AI, doesn't cause us to do something, or it doesn't function as a kind of agency that precipitates change by itself. This is human change we're talking about, and AI comes out of humans, and it's used by humans to affect humans. President Mark Ginsberg 14:59 Yeah. Dr. Samuel Collins 15:00 So, you know what we're talking about in anthropology and in other fields too. I should, you know, credit to my colleagues in sociology and so on. We look at technology as a socio technical system. It's not coming out of nowhere. And it didn't have to be. I mean, we oftentimes think of technology is kind of inescapable, like, like, well, you know, we had books and then we got the internet. Like, that was the next thing. And of course, it's not. The reason why technologies develop the way they do has a lot to do with the our history, with the institutions in which we live. And, of course, the intent that people have with those technologies. President Mark Ginsberg 15:42 I played a little game yesterday. I was preparing for our conversation today, and so I, I got on to ChatGPT last night, and I asked ChatGPT: tell me a challenge. Tell me a major challenge with AI or some question like that. You can, you can ask chat GPT. Here's, here's what the machine came back with: AI will not just change the way we work and live. It will redefine what it means to be human. The challenge is ensuring that AI aligns with human values and enriches rather than diminishes our cultural fabric. It's what ChatGPT came back with yesterday. I bring it up because I thought it was pretty insightful and kind of interesting is the machine. Now, the machine doesn't do this by itself, but these machines are beginning to have, if not emotion artificial intelligence, how artificial is it really? So I was curious, particularly when I came back with the cultural fabric being an issue, what you thought of that ChatGPT response. Dr. Samuel Collins 15:46 So artificial intelligence, of course, is about simulating human intelligence, and what we're seeing with generative AI is this gradual capacity to do a better job in simulating that intelligence. So, I would say, I mean, what we're seeing, if we want to kind of back up and look at the way that people have been describing AI, not only in terms of their hopes, but also their fears about what AI could be, we can see kind of two strands. On the one hand, there's this sense, strangely promoted by a lot of leaders in AI that that were barreling towards artificial general intelligence, and that that AGI is in danger of taking over and and making us less human, right? So that's that would be the kind of fear stuff, but sort of, in a backhanded way, is also a kind of deterministic view of technology. On the other hand, the other strand is this idea of AI as an assistant, as something that that's going to help us to be more human. President Mark Ginsberg 17:54 to augment who we are Dr. Samuel Collins 17:55 And augment who we are, right. And we can see both these strands battling together, even in the same advertisement for, you know, open AI, or for, you know, Copilot, or for whatever else, and which one's going to win out? Well, a lot of it's going to depend on what uses people put AI to. President Mark Ginsberg 18:16 You know, I was reading recently, a few months ago, a column by David Brooks, the noted New York Times columnist, and who I enjoy reading. And in this column, he was talking about, he wrote about AI, and he said that AI gives us something perhaps we have not had. It gives us a perspective on an issue maybe we had not thought of. But what it doesn't provide, and I'm paraphrasing this, this column, he wrote. What it misses is emotion. What it misses is the human touch. Not just the human awareness, but the human touch was how he described it. I was intrigued by that, but I'm curious what you think just hearing that for the first time. Dr. Samuel Collins 18:57 Yeah, sure. I mean. In a sense, it is giving us the human touch. Because, you know, generative AI is, of course, this transformer of a large language model. You give it a prompt, and it gives you, it generates a response, whether that be a text or an image or audio or whatever. But that response is, of course, drawn from training data. So, it's ultimately going back to the work of humans, but it's not, you know, doing it with, with any kind of emotion. Any efforts that people have made to anthropomorphize generative AI I think should be, should be corrected. I mean, this is not a human that's, you know, doing something. The more apt metaphor is auto complete. President Mark Ginsberg 19:52 So briefly, to that kind of question is, where's it going? Because what we've seen is this explosion in the technology itself. You're also a futurist. What do we see? Dr. Samuel Collins 20:05 Where's it going? I mean, well, a couple things. First off, in a sense, generative AI looks like it's the elephant in the room, and in some ways it is. We just talked about the college classroom and how it's been transformed, but we shouldn't lose sight of the AI that's all around us and that it's very profoundly transforming our lives without, perhaps even us really appreciating that. President Mark Ginsberg 20:34 We probably don't even know, but if it�s doing things. Dr. Samuel Collins 20:36 Yeah, so I mean, think about things like this. You know you, you put in an application for an apartment, and it's rejected, President Mark Ginsberg 20:47 Who's it rejected by? Dr. Samuel Collins 20:49 It's oftentimes President Mark Ginsberg 20:50 By machine Dr. Samuel Collins 20:51 It's rejected by machine and it's based on risk assessment that's been automated. You apply for a job. You're granted an interview, but it's not an interview with a person. It's an AI interview. So, you talk in front of a camera, and an AI scores your interview based on whatever standards the platform and the employer have come up with, and you get to the next stage of the process, or you don't on the basis of that AI. You never even saw a person at all. So, these are just some of the ways that I think are extremely profound, and they're not as visible, nor are they. Are they quite as flashy as generative. But those things, I mean, if our lives are more and more hemmed by expert systems. And not just expert systems, but expert systems which we do not necessarily understand. President Mark Ginsberg 21:48 Yeah, you're kind of raising another interesting question that people are writing about too, and that's the ethics the ethics question. And actually talking to a cultural anthropologist about this, you're probably the right guy to talk with. How do you view that? How can we ensure that that the use of AI is done ethically? And for me, that even raises the question, as I asked the question of, what, what is ethics as it comes to AI, what are some of the ethical issues? Dr. Samuel Collins 22:15 You know, ethics is a broad world in itself, but we're talking about, you know, what goes into training AI. You know, that's a question of bias. Back in the earlier days of the text to image applications like stable diffusion and so on. If you, and I did this with classes and with my colleagues in FACET. If you, if you said, you know, give me a picture of a professor teaching students. And say, sure, what would it look like? Well, it would be a white guy with a tweed jacket teaching some students, right? And you could try to argue with it and get it to give you something else. But that kind of default suggested a question of bias. So training data is like a very big deal. President Mark Ginsberg 23:10 Well, it's an interesting question. As an educator, both of us are educators by field. Let's talk a little bit about AI and education with entering a new phase. We've just gone through COVID, where virtual education became ubiquitous. It was an outlier. Now it's a standard practice. AI began by machine learning. Learning is the basis of education. How can we take some of the lessons we've learned with AI and some of the practicalities and assets of AI and build it into our educational enterprise, particularly at a university like ours? Dr. Samuel Collins 23:44 This is one of the really big questions that we've taken on over at FACET. This is something that we're hoping to sort of bring to the university through a kind of Ai. yeah, talk about that AI you're developing Sure so, you know, without a doubt, Towson will institutionalize AI research at probably at multiple levels. I think that's something that's happening right now. But one thing that we really wanted to do is to bring together the whole campus around questions of AI, because it is this diluvial moment. Like I said, there's no teaching now without considering AI. And if we want to be honest, there's no research anymore without considering AI. It doesn't matter what research you're doing. It touches you in some way. So when we look around the campus, you know, Towson has we're abig faculty, we're diverse faculty, a lot of research interests. There are people in every college and every department who are working on AI-related material. And we hope something like an AI hub could bring us together. Not that we're all going to be doing the same thing, but that we can use our differences to network together and come up with, not only solutions for the classroom, but also for our research, new projects, new grant applications, and really take advantage of this sort of universality of AI's impact on our world. President Mark Ginsberg 25:20 Well, it's an important piece about how we can embed a AI in everything we do and also, what's our responsibility, which is the other piece of the equation, I think, to our students. Dr. Samuel Collins 25:30 that's right. President Mark Ginsberg 25:31 So if Mark Cuban is right, if you're not proficient of the use of AI in the field or domain of your practice and your scholarship, but for our students for their career, we may not be doing them a service as an educator. Dr. Samuel Collins 25:44 That's right. I mean, we live in an AI world now. And that's the world that we have to educate our students about. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to all be sort of Pollyannaish about AI. We can be critical, and we should be critical. We should understand where AI is coming from, how it's trained. What are the problems? What are the ethics? What are the environmental factors? And also, of course, we should help students to understand ways that they can and should use AI, the ways they may be called upon to use AI in the workforce. It's a tall order, but that's what college is about. President Mark Ginsberg 26:25 Yeah Dr. Samuel Collins 26:26 So yeah, that's also very much part of our AI hub as well, this idea that we need to educate students into our shared AI world. President Mark Ginsberg 26:37 Yeah, one more quote I'll read for you. We're beginning to run out of time. But I wanted to say the late Steve Jobs once wrote that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts married with the humanities that yields us the results that make our hearts sing. And sometimes I think when we think of AI, we think of it from an engineering space, from the nuts and bolts, the technology. But what you're telling me, I think, is that that's its root, but that's not the tree that blossoms from the roots. There's something much more to it. Dr. Samuel Collins 27:11 Right, well said. President Mark Ginsberg 27:12 Yeah, something much more to it. Well, let me thank you for for joining us and taking time out of your busy schedule to discuss this really important topic. The issue of how culture and technology blend, the issue of how culture and technology interact. We've talked a little bit about the sameness and difference and how heterogeneity is an important thing to respect and maximize during a time when homogeneity is being thought of maybe a little differently as a gold standard. It's been a fascinating conversation. I know that the work you're doing with the AI hub here at Towson University, that the work you're doing to try to embed an understanding of culture and marry that with our usage and applications of technology will be sure to make the hearts of our students sing, to quote Steve Jobs. But also to create an opportunity for our students to come to Towson to learn what they're seeking, to acquire knowledge, but to do it in a way that's really contemporized. Thanks so much for being with us. Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on On the Mark. We look forward to seeing you next time. This is Mark Ginsburg, president of Towson University, with Dr Sam Collins the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice here at TU. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, if you've been listening, for joining us as well. We look forward to seeing you next time. President Mark Ginsburg Outro 28:34 Thank you for listening to on the mark. If you like what you've heard, please give us a follow or leave a review. It helps to ensure that we can keep bringing you more candid conversations about the consequential work of higher education. If you have feedback about our podcast, I'd welcome hearing from you. Please feel free to send me a message at onthemark@towson.edu Towson University Outro 29:04 Founded in 1866, Towson University is a top-ranked comprehensive public research university. Recognized as Maryland's number one public institution by The Wall Street Journal as greater Baltimore's largest university, TU proudly serves as an engine of opportunity for nearly 20,000 students, the state of Maryland and beyond. Explore more than 190 top ranked undergraduate and graduate degree programs and make our momentum yours at towson.edu.