Hillsdale College’s artificial intelligence club had its inaugural meeting in Lane Hall, featuring Associate Professor of Economics Charles Steele, an advocate for more AI involvement at the college.  

According to president and senior Olivia Leathers, the club seeks to enlighten the student body on the applications of AI and to act as a forum on how Hillsdale can apply the college’s mission in the modern world. 

“Our mission of the club is to enhance the mind and get creative with different workplace applications,” Leathers said.

Steele said the college should consider AI as the next step in the world’s technological advancement, likening AI development to the advent of writing.

“Think about what happened when human beings developed writing,” Steele said. “It was a disaster. It was a crisis, because it used to be, if you wanted to know the ‘Odyssey’ or the ‘Iliad,’ you memorized it. Memorization went to hell once we started writing stuff down. You don’t have to memorize stuff anymore. We lost something, but we gained something, too. We adapted to this.”

Steele said the college once hosted a department of telegraphy, putting Hillsdale at the forefront of innovation in telegraph communication.

“It was incredible,” Steele said. “You could contact somebody on the same day and they’re on the other coast. Hillsdale was on the cutting edge of that, because you had to know that, and that’s where we should be with respect to artificial intelligence.”

Hillsdale’s mission is to provide an outstanding education to everyone, regardless of race and sex, and the mission cannot be accomplished without using AI, according to Steele.

“Learning AI and learning to use it properly would have to be a part of that,” Steele said. “Otherwise, you’re not doing something that’s outstanding, you’re falling behind the rest of the world. And we should be cutting edge, and that’s what we will be, and that’s what I hope you guys do with this club.”

Gary Wolfram, professor of political economy, said he agreed with Steele’s point on AI with some reservations. Wolfram stated that AI is a tool, but it can make mistakes. He said that students should critically analyze its responses.

“I think if you use it to develop, just like the encyclopedia, as he pointed out, it can go off and give you a strange bibliography, and things like that,” Wolfram said. “It can always do that, but you can investigate what you know if you put something and use AI to figure something out.” 

After discussing the importance of AI to Hillsdale College’s mission, Steele discussed the applications of AI with regards to fishing and space mining.

The world’s lakes and oceans are overfished, and it would be more efficient and environmentally friendly to limit the amount of fishing. According to Steele, governments can stop overfishing with licensing, and they can enforce fishing mandates using machine learning.

Steele said that the Japanese have been on the forefront in using AI to detect illegal fishing, and he described their results.

“They were able to identify different types of vessels and methods. And they could tell it within a pixel, whether there was a vessel or no vessel, whether it was fishing or not, and if it was fishing, what kind of fishing it was doing,” Steele said.

Steele said AI could also solve problems in space mining. Space is full of valuable minerals, but humans are unable to survive long periods of time in space.

“The solution is autonomous, artificial intelligence driven mining robots, something like that. And the potential for this is enormous,” Steele said. 

He went on to mention that the world has all the necessary technology to start mining operations off planet earth.

Leathers said the inspiration for starting the AI club came from a seminar on artificial intelligence

“I got in an AI class that was seminar style, where there were just seven people,” Leathers said. “During one of the classes, I stuck up an AI appreciation club notice on the door. So that’s how it started.”

After taking interest polls in the various classes, she expected around seven people to attend the meetings, but the actual number surprised her.

“So far, it’s already exceeding my expectations,” Leathers said. “We had 40 at the last meeting, fill around. So that was crazy. And then this last meeting, yesterday, we had 20 new people.”

Leathers expressed her club’s mission is not to promote the replacement of art and writing with machine learning, but to show how AI can be used as a tool in the fields of applied mathematics.

“My hope in the club is to actually promote the entire different aspects of AI,” Leather said. “This is why we go into the medical field or economics field, not the literary field or the art field. It is a very interesting conscious choice, because we want to focus on what AI can change about how we’re living right now and how it can make it better.”