Social Issues

CFR President Richard Haass, author of the New York Times best seller The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, discusses how to reenvision citizenship if American democracy is to thrive or even survive. His guide is particularly relevant for religion leaders, given its emphasis on civility, compromise, nonviolence, and promoting the common good. Thomas J. Reese, senior analyst at Religion News Service, moderates. Learn more about CFR's Religion and Foreign Policy Program.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. This series convenes religion and faith-based leaders in cross-denominational dialogue on the intersection between religion and international relations. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. As a reminder, this webinar is on the record, the video and transcript will be available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and on the Apple Podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Father Reese with us in conversation with CFR President Richard Haass. Dr. Haass founded CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program in 2006, and throughout his tenure, has been a dedicated proponent of CFR serving as a resource for the religion community and deepening the understanding of global issues. Father Reese is a Jesuit priest, and senior analyst at Religion News Service. Previously, he was a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter and editor in chief at America Magazine. Father Reese is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, where he authored three books. And He currently serves on CFR’s Religion Advisory Committee. So I’m now going to turn it over to Father Reese to take the conversation away. Thank you. REESE: Thank you, Irina. I’m delighted to be here with and with Dr. Haass. Everybody—I think, almost everybody on this webinar knows Richard Haass. He has been the president of the Council on Foreign Relations for twenty years now. In fact, he has been a prominent and authoritative spokesperson on foreign policy issues. He’s worked in the State Department, in the Defense Department, in the White House, under four presidents, both Democrat and Republican. Even as a younger man, he worked on Capitol Hill. He has a wide experience of foreign policy issues, and the way in which foreign policy is made. I mentioned that he’s been at the Council now for twenty years. And we are honored that this is actually his last official event for the Council. And I think this shows how seriously he takes the whole question of religion and foreign policy. Because this program was one that he himself started. So maybe I could just begin by asking you, Richard, why did you start this program on religion and foreign policy? Why did you think that that this was important? And what is the role of religion in foreign policy? HAASS: Well, thank you, Tom. Listening to the introduction, I learned something we had in common which is maybe not obvious. But you’re at, is it, the Woodstock Theological Seminary? REESE: Yes, uh-huh. HAASS: And in 1969, I was at Woodstock. (Laughter.) It’s amazing our paths have not crossed. So why did I do this? A couple of reasons. Look, I’ve always been interested in religion both personally but also academically. When I went to college, I went to Oberlin, which used to have a great theological seminary, by the way. And when I got there, I asked people: Who’s the best professor on campus? And people said, “oh, it’s Professor Tom Frank.” And I said, “OK, what does Professor Frank teach?” And they said, “New Testament.” And I said, “well, that’s interesting. We never got around to reading that one in my house, but I’m game.” So I took it. And, as is always the case, a great teacher can make a subject come alive. Professor Frank did that. One thing led to another. I was a religion major. Ultimately, it morphed into Middle Eastern studies. That’s when I first studied, though, Christianity, Islam, I had a background in Judaism. So I’ve been interested in religion. And then when I became something of a Middle East expert, you can’t work in the Middle East and not understand the impact of religion on politics. And actually, I thought so many people coming out of a narrow political science background didn’t often have a feel. One of the rules I made in one of my books, I think it was Intervention—or, maybe it was War of Necessity, War of Choice, that before the United States invades another county, it ought to understand it. And one of the elements of understanding, is to understand the role of religion and its impact on the culture, the society, the politics. So one reason I wanted to do this is I think knowledge of religion is so central if you want to be in the foreign policy or the diplomacy business. But also, you all—the people on this call—have enormous influence and reach. After getting to CFR a few years afterwards, I remember reading somewhere the statistic as to how many Americans once a week went to either a mosque, a church, a synagogue, a temple, what have you. And the number was extraordinary. It was well over 100 million people. Now the poll, I should be honest, did not say how many of them stayed awake for the entire sermon, but they did get exposed to sermons. And I said, wow, these individuals, these men and women, are a powerful force in American society. One of the things we’ve tried to do here is be a resource for groups of individual who, what I call, are “multipliers.” That these individuals reach many. Teachers, obviously, check that box. Journalists check that box. Business leaders do. And congregational and religious leaders do. So I thought it was a major opportunity for us to learn from them about the impact of religion on politics in this country and other societies, and at the same time for us to be a resource for you all. And hopefully some of that would influence what it was people talked about. So that’s how it all came about. REESE: That’s fascinating. It reminds me of Madeline Albright once saying that when she was a young student of foreign policy, they ignored economics. Economics was not something that foreign policy people were worried about. And then she said, today religion was something that foreign policy people didn’t worry about. And— HAASS: You’re right. One of my favorite—Tom, one of—sorry to interrupt. One of my favorite sayings is, “universities have departments, the world doesn’t.” So much of the intellectual preparation is siloed—economics, politics, whatever, religion. There’s very little cross-fertilization or interdisciplinary work. And as soon as you do work at the White House, or the State Department, whatever, just you want to write history or anything, you’ve got to work across silos, across disciplines. So I just think it’s essential. REESE: Let’s talk a little bit about your book, which I think is absolutely fascinating. I just read it this week and was very impressed by it. Your new book is entitled The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. And it’s already become a bestseller. So why did you decide to write this book? You’re a foreign policy expert. You could have written about Ukraine, you could have written about refugees, you could have written about global warming, a hundred different topics. Why did you pick this one for your book? HAASS: Well, I mean, I have written about all the subjects you mentioned, and I continue to. They’re obviously important. It’s not either/or. But what led me to write this book is that, funnily enough, it’s almost a version of our conversation now. Where I give a talk about Ukraine, or Russia, or terrorism, or climate change, or China, or what have you. And then hands would go up at the end of the talk and people would say: What’s your biggest concern? What keeps you up at night? Is it any one of those things? And I’d say, look, those all worry me, obviously. But what worries me most is us. So I decided to write a book about us. And the intellectual connection was I was worried that if we were at odds with ourselves, or worse at war with ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to set an example that anybody else in the world would want to emulate. We wouldn’t be a partner that anybody wanted to depend on, such as our allies. We wouldn’t have the bandwidth, or the unity, or the resources to be a force for good in the world. And the lesson of history is that good things just don’t happen in the world. Over the last seventy-five years, I’m prepared to argue, a lot of good things happen. And in no small part because of the significant role of the United States. So what led me to write this book is a genuine concern that the foundation, almost the prerequisite of a successful American role in the world of foreign policy, which is a functioning American democracy, was increasingly at risk. My motive, in a sense, was to say: We’ve got to think about ourselves on democracy as a national security issue. And that we’ve got to take it seriously, and we’ve got to understand that it’s in some vulnerability. The good news is things can be addressed, the ship can be righted. The bad news is, good things don’t just happen by themselves. So I wanted to start a national conversation about how to rethink, almost to reimagine citizenship in a contemporary democracy. And that’s what led to this book. REESE: Yeah. You play off the Bill of Rights, the first “ten amendments” of the U.S. Constitution. And you point out how at least since the civil rights movement the question of rights has been an important motivating and just an important intellectual driver in the United States, in our politics. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement. All of these founded on a concern about rights. And yet, you’re now telling us we ought to be worried about obligations. What’s going on here? HAASS: Funny you should ask. Just so there’s no misconception, I’m not against rights. Rights are obviously at the core of the American democratic experiment. The Constitution, which was, if you will, the second Constitution. The Articles of Confederation proved to be really feckless. The Constitution, which did create a strong central government with a strong executive, that was only ratified by the states with guarantees or assurances about rights. And that’s the first ten amendments. That was the requirement if you were going to get ratification. Several states made that clear. One prism through which to view American history then is the struggle for rights. The Civil War is obviously the most intense moment. The right to be free, not to be a slave. But other rights as well. Again discrimination, whether based on gender, race, religion, sexual preference or identity, what have you. And that is, to use Mr. Lincoln’s phrase, that was or is our “unfinished work.” There’s still a gap between what we proclaim in the Declaration of Independence and the reality. It’s a permanent struggle, I would argue, to make sure that rights are respected. My point in writing the book is that even if somehow you, or I, or anyone on this call had a magic wand and could eliminate the gap between our principles and our practices, essentially to finish Abraham Lincoln’s work, my view is that American democracy would still be in danger. And that’s because rights inevitably collide. Take an issue that, shall we say, is central to the politics and religion of your faith, which is abortion. The rights of the unborn versus the rights of the mother. How does a democracy navigate that debate? Or on guns, the rights of individuals pursuant to an interpretation of the Second Amendment, versus the rights of others to public safety? Or we went through lots of struggles during the pandemic. This person’s right not to wear a mask or not to get vaccinated, versus someone else’s right of public health. And, as Justice Breyer said when he was on the court, Steve Breyer, that the most difficult cases are not right versus wrong but right versus right. And when we have this situation they collide. And collisions could lead to gridlock, because we can’t agree. Nothing can get done. Or, worse yet, it spills over into violence. And my view is that somewhere along the way we lost sight of the fact of our obligations, the other side of the citizenship coin, the obligations the two of us have to one another and the obligations all of us have this country of ours, to government and to the country. So this is not a book that’s in any way against rights. Let me make that clear. But it’s a book that says, that’s not enough. As we always used to say in academia, rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a democracy to thrive or even survive. So what I wanted to do was start a conversation about what are those obligations, why they’re necessary, what it takes, and why it’s in our collective self-interests. And that’s what I’ve been—it’s been five months or so since the book came out. I’ve been traveling around the country talking about it in front of all sorts of groups and audiences, from college campuses, to high schools, to religious groups, to just town halls of citizens. REESE: Obligations is something that churches are very familiar with. We preach obligation all the time. (Laughter.) We don’t tend to preach rights. We tend to preach obligations. Because of your interest in religion and this very program, I was a little bit surprised that religion is not mentioned very much in the book. If I could talk you into writing an addendum to the book, what would you tell religious leaders about their role here in American politics? I mean, religion can be very divisive also. So I was wondering you could preach to the preachers. (Laughs.) HAASS: Oh, I love this. Turnabout is fair play. It’s what every member of a congregation is desperate to do, is to preach to the preacher. Well, look, I do actually write a little—I mean I draw from my own religious experience in the book. The first idea in the book, and originally I was going to begin it there and then I moved it later in the book, was from the Jewish holiday of Passover. And for much of their history, Jews were denied access to their holy places, to their synagogues or temples, or often persecuted. And what’s so interesting about Passover, it’s the story where Jews tell the story of—it’s a holiday where we tell the story of the exodus of Egypt. It’s central to Jewish identity. And it’s so interesting, because the story is told not in synagogues but in homes. It’s a decentralized holiday. It’s a mobile holiday. It’s Judaism dispersed, often out of necessity. And you have a generational obligation to tell the story, to teach. It’s a teaching holiday. And literally you have this traditional meal. Every food is symbolic. It’s done in a certain order. Indeed, the word for the meal is Seder, which is the Hebrew word for “order.” And the book that informs the meal is called the Haggadah, which is Hebrew for “the telling.” It’s the telling of the story. And that’s what you do. And for me, that’s very similar. We in America have—we fail to tell our story. Which is why I’m so insistent on civics being a staple of education in middle schools, and high schools, and colleges. This is a country founded on ideas. We should not take for granted that these ideas are understood, much less transmitted. So I think we do a terrible job at that. But getting to your question, now that I’ve digressed, I think religious authorities have a big role in at least four of the obligations. And you also have the opportunity to do something about it. Most basically is probably the opposition to violence. I don’t care what your political views are, none of them justifies violence against others. And indeed, let me just make a larger point, none of the obligations involves a political point of view. I’m not taking policy positions on guns, or abortion, or mass, or Ukraine, or anything else. This is—in that sense, I don’t know if it transcends politics or what, but one is to preach the importance of nonviolence. Second of all, the importance of civility—to treat people, in a sense, the way you’d want to be treated. Which, by the way, is just practical. One tends not to be more persuasive if one acts badly. Thirdly, to be open to compromise. Doesn’t mean you have to accept it, but at least consider it. And, fourthly, to look out for one another, to be one’s brother or sister’s keeper. Those seem to me, those four obligations in this secular book, are totally consistent, I would think, with what you and everybody on this call, one way or another, tries to impart to one’s congregants. And so I would argue that people who are in a position to preach have, if you will, an obligation to preach. And so that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this call, in speaking with Irina, is you’re all in such a position of potential influence that I wanted to give this message. And, by the way, I’ve talked to business leaders about their special obligations. I’ve talked to journalists about theirs. I’ve talked to educators about theirs. I’ve talked to parents about theirs. So I think different groups in American society have special obligations based upon their positions and their roles. But I would think that in at least four of the ten obligations, people who have congregations have an enormous opportunity—though, again, I would prefer to use the word “obligation” as well—to make a difference. REESE: As a former civics teacher, I was really happy to see your second to the last obligation, about supporting the teaching of civics. But what we teach in school has become a battlefield in and of itself. There doesn’t seem to be much consensus there. I mean, all fight over what we teach about race, et cetera. How do we deal with these kinds of conflicts that, before we can even fulfill your obligation of supporting civics, we’ve got to get some agreement about what we’re going to teach. HAASS: You’re right, 100 percent. Because people could agree in principle but may not be able to agree in practice. And, as you said, education’s gotten politicized, or even weaponized. So I get it. I’m not naïve. I spent time as the U.S. envoy in Northern Ireland. Three years as the U.S. envoy. Then I went back for a second tour, for my sins. And I was brought in by the local parties to try to broker a common understanding of the past—which in Northern Ireland, as you know better than anybody, was rather painful and divided. And I tried to get them to support what I called the Museum of the History of the Troubles. For those on the call who are not familiar with the Troubles, these were three decades from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, in which there was an enormous amount of friction that often spilled over into violence between and among various paramilitary groups, some of the Catholic tradition, some of the Protestant, as well as between either of the groups and British police and military. Somewhere in the order of, what, between three (thousand) and four thousand individuals lost their lives. Because I think history can, to some extent, repeat itself, if not exactly, I wanted there to be a museum that was built that would teach people about the Troubles. And in part I figured that it would make them more wary of descending into—or, adopting certain positions, because violence could happen again. I did not succeed, but I learned a lot in the process about how to structure an education that takes into account exactly what you’re getting at. My view is that when it comes to American civics, we can’t impose a single interpretation of history. That would be a nonstarter. But I think we can suggest certain documents be read. The Declaration of Independence, for one. The Constitution, for another. I would love people to have some access to the great literature—The Federalist Papers, de Tocqueville, what have you—to major presidential speeches, to major Supreme Court decisions and dissents, and understanding of the basic history. And then you could expose people to various interpretations of this. You say, this is what happened. Here’s the two or three contending schools of thought. And then you could have debates and classroom conversations about it. I think there are ways you can do it. And, look, I’m not naïve. There’d be massive, intense debates over what to include and what to exclude. This ain’t beanball. This ain’t easy. OK. But I’ll give you another Jewish reference. On Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, there’s a prayer where everyone asks for—goes for forgiveness about the various acts of commission. And there’s a long list because we all sin a lot, as you know on your side. And then the last of the sins is you beg forgiveness for when you should have done something and you didn’t. It’s the act of omission, when you should have acted in the face of something that required action. And that’s how I feel about this. We can persuade ourselves it’s impossible, but in that case then what we have now stands. Either not teaching it, or teaching it terribly. So my view is take a run at it. And, again, look, I’m stepping down from here. I’m not retiring. Despite the rumors, I’m not going to go to Saudi Arabia and joining the LIV golf tour. What I am going to do, among other things, is stay active in this conversation and debate. I’ve already spoken to several governors, several university presidents. And I’m going to devote a chunk of my time to working at this. And I’ll be speaking about it and writing about it. And there are various individuals and groups out there. So I have no illusions, but I’m going to take a run at it. REESE: Terrific. I’m having a lot of fun asking you questions, but I also want to open it up to all the other people. So let me just ask you one last question before we open it up. And anybody who wants to ask a question, use that little hand thing on the Zoom call. In the title of our webinar, we use the term “common good.” And that is also used in your book, where you say “we should promote the common good.” What is the common good? And how do we promote it? And, of course, my particular interest, how can religion promote the common good? HAASS: I’ve thought about it a lot. Not as much as you have, but I’ve thought about it a lot. And there’s different ideas about—and the fact that you had ask the question is revealing, because there is not a single or consensus definition of, quote/unquote, “the common good,” or what is the promotion of it. One is behaviors that avoid harm to others. And that’s where you get at things like—and there’s Supreme Court decisions about it—about the need to be vaccinated if you’re carrying certain types of disease that you could transmit to others. So that’s the way you look out for others. Obviously, controversial in the age of COVID, I understand. But with smallpox and others, that was a decision that was reached by an earlier generation of Americans. And we require all sorts of vaccinations with kids when they go to school, both for their own good, but also for the good of others. We have all sorts of rules in moral society. Some things are for our own good, a seatbelt rule. But other things are for the common good. We have speed limits, traffic lights, and stop signs. Those are for the common good. In all sorts of areas, we have debates about where to draw the lines between, again, individual rights and common goods. And we can do that. So that’s one sort of thing. That’s the rights, if you would. Individual rights versus collective rights, is one way to think about it. Another thing about common good, some would say, common good needs a social floor or safety net. And there’s a lot of conversation about that. Guaranteed incomes. And we have that to some extent in our society. We have unemployment insurance; we have Medicaid, Social Security for elderly things, different food programs, and so forth. The whole idea is we have social floor, economic floor. And that’s a form of common—debates about where it should be pegged, how conditional it should be, work requirements. Again, but there is a sense that no American should live a life—no citizen in this society—below a certain level. I’m big also on the idea of common good means making equal opportunity a reality, that that’s something we owe one another. That means everything from there should be no discrimination. And I’m radical on this. There should be no negative discrimination, traditional use of the word, but I’m also against certain types of positive discrimination. I’m against legacy admissions. That’s a form of positive, if you will, discrimination in favor of some. I think that perpetuates certain types of unequal opportunities. It means certain people can be born, if you will, on third base. I think that’s unfair for those who aren’t. It also, by the way, lights under me a real fire to make things like public education better than it is. Because that’s one of the ways to make equal opportunity real, rather than simply a slogan. So there’s not a common, if you will, or universal definition of common good. Again, I don’t pretend to have a universal answer. But I want that to be into people’s consciousness, because it gets, some way a little bit—I think this country is, at times, too taken with this notion of rugged individualism, that we only have to worry about ourselves. And the answer is, we may be all born equal in principle under the law, but we’re not born equal in practice in terms of health, or in terms of wealth, or in terms of opportunity. And I just think we need to have an honest conversation about that in this society. REESE: That’s terrific. Thank you. And now I’ll pass it onto get questions from the other people on the webinar. OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question will come from Charles Strohmer from the Wisdom Project. STROHMER: Thank you both for being here. I really appreciate it a lot. I’ve followed you for a long time, Dr. Haass. My question is simply: Do you or Father Reese see any ways in which principles in the Sermon on the Mount can help us be better at fulfilling what I call our duties, or what you’re calling our obligations, that we have toward one another, both as human beings who are also American citizens? Thank you. HAASS: Tom, I’m going to defer to you on that one. That’s your text more than mine. And so I’m going to defer to you. REESE: (Laughs.) Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear to anybody who reads the gospels that Jesus has an emphasis on the fact that we are all brothers and sisters, with the same god as father. And of course, we as Christians inherit that from our Jewish brothers and sisters. And I think Jesus really emphasized that. He emphasized it in the Sermon on the Mount, and the parable about the Good Samaritan. Jesus was always concerned about the sick, about the poor, about the hungry—all of these kinds of things, and these people, and it was very personal. And yet, he was also very nonviolent. He was not leading a revolution. In fact, people were upset with him because he wasn’t leading an armed revolution. And so I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from the gospels about our obligation as citizens to be supportive of the common good, as Richard said, and to treat one another as brothers and sisters. And, frankly, not just our neighbors here in the United States, but seeing everyone in the world as our brothers and sisters, whether they’re migrants that are drowning in the Mediterranean, people at our borders. It doesn’t tell us what policy we should enact, but it does tell us that this has got to be a concern. We’re not going to get a plan of action out of the scriptures, but we are going to get an orientation, as Richard said, of our obligations, of our values. And I think those need to guide us as we try and figure out where we go in terms of domestic and foreign policy. HAASS: Can I just add to that? Agree with that totally. Part of what I remember studying that, there’s a lot of norms in there. A lot of the teachings in that are not things you have to do, but they’re things you ought to do, that you should do. And that’s really what a norm is. And religion is filled with laws, but religion is also filled with norms. Not everything can be specifically and narrowly proscribed. So I think a lot of the teachings in any of the faiths are such things. And Sermon on the Mount’s a perfect example of it. Our doing things and asking that others do them as well, because they’re right. I think that’s a powerful thing. And then, again, I think people who were preaching, it’s not a big step from there to talking about the norms in the political space, about how you treat a political opponent or something like that. That there’s something larger in this than your own narrow political ambitions. And I think, again, people who have standing in churches, or synagogues, or mosques have tremendous authority to address these subjects without—again, without getting into you’ve got to support this or that policy. That there’s no—indeed, I think it would be a mistake to politicize these issues. I want to have them be one step removed from policy. REESE: A great example of that was when Pope John Paul II came to New York and preached at Yankee Stadium. He was using the Jesus story about the rich man and Lazarus. And of course, the rich man had walked—just stepped over Lazarus, who was at his front door, poor, hungry, starving, and just ignored him. He didn’t kick him. He just ignored him. And John Paul looked out over the audience, at the congregation at Yankee Stadium and said: You are the rich man, and the third world is Lazarus. Whew! I mean, talk about hitting you right between the eyes. Now, he didn’t say what to do. But he said, you’ve got to do something. Anyway, next question. OPERATOR: We have a written question from Noel Rubinton, who writes: First, kudos to Richard for all he has done for this Religion and Foreign Policy program. My question: In your book, you raise many ideas, more than ten, about citizenship. But if you could get people to take just one action to increase their citizenship, what would it be? HAASS: Well, thank you, Noel. I appreciate it. It’s always a hard question to answer. It’s sort of like asking which one of my children do I love most. (Laughs.) It’s a tough one. Look, at a minimum, I’d say get informed and vote, the first two obligations. It’s no coincidence that the first obligation is to get informed, and the second one is to be involved. Democracy can’t be a spectator sport. It requires informed, involved citizens. So that’s the basic. Probably the one, though, that’s nearest and dearest to my heart is what we’ve talked about a little bit, is civics. It’s where I began this journey that led to this book. And I just think there’s something very wrong that we, quote/unquote, “educate” young Americans, and the great preponderance of our schools, whether they’re high schools or universities, allow students to leave the campus or the building without any exposure to civics. And we’re about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in three years. I want to make sure we can celebrate the 350th and the 450th. We’d better start teaching civics in a serious way, though I respect Tom’s point before. But we just can’t assume this democracy is somehow permanent. History suggests not. History suggests that just the opposite. So if I could just do one thing, I’d like to kick off something of a civics movement in the United States. That would be my own personal preference. REESE: Great. Next question. OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Ani Zonneveld from Muslims for Progressive Values. ZONNFEVELD: Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you, Richard, for all that you’ve done for CFR and religion. Ani Zonneveld from Muslims for Progressive Values. You had a quote there that I’d like for you to repeat that is just fantastic about the world not having departments. That’s number one. And then, number two, you spoke about the Jewish prayer seeking forgiveness for not acting against injustice. And I was just wondering, once you step away from CFR, if you will be using this particular faith/moral compass to poke the politicians and policymakers—(laughs)—towards a more just policy? Thank you. HAASS: First of all, thank you. Yeah, the first quote was just that “universities have departments. The world doesn’t.” That’s actually original. Just something I noticed along the way. But feel free to use it. You can claim it as your own. (Laughs.) I don’t get royalties for it. Look, I’ll be honest, I’m not afraid of poking. I’m a serial poker. And I’m more than comfortable challenging the conventional wisdom, or the powers that be, or the status quo. And whether it’s questions—whether it’s injustice or just things that I think are unwise. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, most of my focus on foreign policy over the decades has been on issues that I think are unwise. That I think are when we do things that are just against what’s in the national interest. I was a very sharp critic of the Iraq War, for example, not so much on the basis—it wasn’t based on injustice. I just thought it was a terrible idea based on my own analysis. And I argued against it from the inside. I continued to argue against it after I left government. I’m a little bit more hesitant to fight against, quote/unquote, “injustice” in other countries because I’m sensitive to several things. One is, we often have a range of interests at stake. We don’t have often the luxury of just focusing on injustice. Second of all, we’ve got to be mindful of our—it’s not enough to posture yourself to say the right things. You have to be confident that by doing so you’ll have the desired effect. And that’s not always the case. So I’m just careful about that sort of involvement in other societies. I’m more comfortable about speaking out on these issues here at home. One, I understand them somewhat better, and you have a certain standing as an American to speak out about American society that you don’t have if you’re not a member of another society. Your words may not be welcome, but they’re seen somehow as a little bit more legitimate, I guess is the word I use. So, yeah, I’ll continue to speak out particularly here at home. And you got a sense of some of the things I feel strongest about. If I had to choose one, again, it’s that we do not have equal access to equal quality education in this country. And that is dangerous for American democracy because education—public education is the ladder—L-A-D-D-E-R—of American mobility. It’s how over these decades and longer people have been able to improve their lives. And what worries me, if that ladder is lifted up then what becomes of us? It’s a very, very different society if the American dream, if the idea of improvement is just a dream and is no longer an achievable reality for a meaningful number of Americans. I worry about that. So, yeah, I’ll continue to speak out on that, trust me. REESE: Next question. OPERATOR: We have a written question from Erik Owens, a professor of theology at Boston College. Who writes: Your list of obligations is excellent and well-advised. But they all seem to require a baseline of social trust that is in short supply these days in American society. People mistrust their government, scientific experts, academic experts, lawyers, politicians, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think we must first rebuild social trust in order to enhance the commitment to these obligations? Or are social trust and a sense of civic obligation really the same thing? HAASS: It’s an interesting question. You’re right, we have a social trust deficit in this country. I think it’s a fair, and good, and important insight. One of the ways we build social trust, in my experience, is by people doing things together. When Tom Brokaw and others would write about the Greatest Generation, the fact that so many Americans from wildly different backgrounds, geographies, you name it, went into the military and fought in World War II, that became a great generator of social trust. I think one of the problems now is we have fewer and fewer experiences which Americans have in common. And indeed, because of modern technologies, we’re going the other way. Increasingly, we’re getting separated so we tune into our own social media site, or this or that, cable channel, or radio station. People stare at their devices all day long, and so forth. It’s one of the reasons I’m such a supporter of a public service, is I want to bring some people together to do things that are inherently good things and valuable things for the community, but also gets people to work together who normally would never have the experience. One of the reasons I’m working with lots of universities on what’s called “freshman year experience.” When people come to campus, I want to start building some social trust. Have them talk about some of the issues we’re talking here today. They don’t have to always agree, but I want them to hear what other people have to say, and so forth. One of the reasons I like debates, it exposes you to different points of view and it has certain norms and rules associated with it. But I don’t have any magic wand for building social trust. But, again, I think people on this call can help also. There’s things that happen within your congregations, various activities you can—the kind of conversations you have. And that when somebody shouts somebody down, or acts really uncivilly, or whatever, I think there’s ways in which you can structure a conversation. Just bringing people together can build social trust. So I’m not sure what’s the sequencing, but I think it goes hand-in-hand with a lot of what we’re talking about here. REESE: Great. Next question. OPERATOR: Our next question is from Galen Carey from the National Association of Evangelicals. CAREY: Thank you, Richard. You talk about civics education. Our civic system doesn’t seem to be very good at encouraging long-term thinking, whether it’s thinking about our budget deficit and the debt we’re passing on, or our stewardship in the environment. What could we do, what could faith leaders in particular do, to help foster more courage, political courage, for thinking about long-term issues when we have short-term elections? HAASS: I wish I could disagree with your premise, but I cannot. We’re short termers in how we think. And part of looking out for your fellow citizen, being your brother and your sister’s keeper, is one has an intergenerational responsibility. It’s not just for people of your own generation. We have a responsibility to one another. And I think older people have a responsibility and obligation to—and I’m leaving this institution after running it for twenty years—or, leading it for twenty years. One of the things I saw my obligation was to leave the institution considerably better off than I found it. Not a criticism of my predecessor, and I hope my successor can say the same thing. I think we’re stewards. I think you all have a particular potential on environmental issues, on climate change. Last I checked, one of the things God did in the beginning was to create the heavens and the Earth. OK. Well, He created them. We’re the stewards. We’re not doing such a hot job. So I’m surprised actually there has not been more involvement of religious leadership in this country on behalf of protecting, if you will, the commons here. I think that’s—I’m surprised that people who would say we agree in the gospel, we read about this in the Bible, the creation and so forth. OK. Well, creation is the beginning. Then we want to see the continuity. We want to see the protection, the stewardship, the custodianship. So I believe that religious leaders should take a larger role in that. I think it could make a real difference. I’ve spoken to Evangelicals leaders about doing it. I think they could have a real impact. Budget deficit is more complicated because everybody can agree the deficit is bad, or the debt. We now have a $34 trillion debt. That is a bad, bad thing. And we can agree in principle that it’s a very bad thing. We cannot, however, agree on what to do about it and whether the answer is this on discretionary spending, this on defense, this on taxes, this on entitlements. So very quickly you get into fundamental policy debates indeed at the heart of some of the divides within and between the major political parties. So even if one preaches, if you will, responsibility on the debt, I’m not sure that takes you very far because very quickly you get into policy prescription. And I’m not sure that’s the comparative advantage of the people on this call. I’m not sure whose comparative advantage it is, because nobody seems successful at moving us on that. We’re on a terrible trajectory. The consequences of a larger debt, particularly with high interest rates, it just crowds out all sorts of other forms of useful spending. So we’re on a terrible trajectory. We’re not investing in our own future. But I’m not sure, again, how you translate agreement in principle to agreement on policy. REESE: Yeah. I’m really glad you brought this up, Galen. I mean, frankly, one of the things that gives me pride as a Catholic is Pope Francis’s leadership on the global warming issue, with his encyclical Laudato Si’. The sad thing is I don’t see a lot of bishops in the United States making this a priority in their preaching or in their work in their diocese. For me, it’s the issue of the twenty-first century. It’s going to determine what kind of Earth we leave to our grandchildren and great grandchildren, and whether we have a civilization to leave to them. So I’m glad you brought that up, the importance of the long-term vision. Next question. OPERATOR: Our next question is from Hays Rockwell, a retired Episcopal bishop of Missouri. HAASS: You probably want to unmute yourself. ROCKWELL: Hi. I just want to say about thirty-five years ago, at a weekend meeting in the summer, to which I attended a number over the years after we left the city, stimulating always. But this particular one I stood up at the end and said: It’s wonderful to have these brilliant discussions, but one factor of human experience has been left out. And I mentioned religion—no mention of religion and its effect and importance to foreign policy in a variety of ways, both for good and ill. Well, I don’t think that Richard was there to hear that observation of mine, but very shortly thereafter he took hold of it and it became a significant part of the life of the Council on Foreign Relations. And I just want to thank him for that with all my heart. HAASS: Well that’s very generous. Thank you. I feel very fortunate that early on I was a religion major in college. I actually think it did infinitely more for me as I went through my life, either as a practitioner in government or as an academic, in my foreign policy-centered life, than any amount of theory would have done. I actually see the theory that we teach our international relations studies, and I think it’s mostly a colossal waste of time. And, by the way, I would say that if this were a call of international relations professors. I’d lose them all, but I can live with that. I actually think religion turns out to be not just a useful, but an essential component, I think, in preparing people for public life, be it in this country or in my field of foreign policy. And I always thought it gave me a great advantage when we were sitting around the State Department or the White House talking about this or that effort to transform this society in the Middle East, or some other part of the world, or going to war in this or that society. I just thought I had a massive leg-up, because I actually not only had studied it and had some appreciation of the culture. And, by the way, what it usually did was make me—it kind of added—it’s not my most natural default position, but it made me a little bit more humble, a little bit more careful about what I thought we could do. It turns out religion is so intimately connected to culture that it becomes a really powerful force. And for those of us who want to transform other societies, and we preach universalism on certain things, I just think we also have to be mindful of local realities and differences. REESE: Yeah. Thank you, Bishop. Next question. OPERATOR: We will take our final question from Father Rafael Capó from the St. Thomas School of Theology and Ministry in Florida. CAPÓ: Well, good afternoon and thank you for your leadership, Dr. Haass. It’s been amazing what you have done throughout the years in supporting our contributions from the religious academia and pastoral ministries with our collaboration with the Council on Foreign Relations. So thank you. My question is, how do you see peacebuilding efforts on the part of the religious community—specifically, the role of religious diplomacy to contribute to conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts in regions marked by war? HAASS: First of all, thank you for what you said. There’s this old line that war is too important to be left to the generals. I think there’s an argument that peacemaking or peacebuilding is too important to be left just to the diplomats. I think religious authorities can have tremendous impact, because they have tremendous influence on people and on civil society, just society across the board. I spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland. I spent a lot of time with religious leaders in Northern Ireland. I knew that they had to be partners in what I did. If we were going to get rid of violence, get rid of guns, if we were going to have some possibility of normalization between the principal religious traditions of Northern Ireland, it would only happen if it were supported by religious leaders. Northern Ireland is a perfect example of, if you will, a post-conflict society. It’s been twenty-five years now since the Good Friday Agreement. And where it still has a long way to go, in part because certain religious leaders haven’t done as much as they could or should. So it turns out religious leaders have an enormous role to play. Where it is played, it makes a positive difference. Where we’ve seen it not play, then we see the potential for backsliding much, much, much greater. I see religious leaders as essentially partners in the peace enterprise, whether it’s in the pre-negotiating phase, the negotiating phase, or the post-negotiating phase. Religious leaders just have tremendous actual and potential voice and influence. REESE: Well, I want to thank all of our participants, especially those that gave questions. Really contributed to the discussion, and excellent questions. And especially, I want to thank Richard. I mean, your work here for the Council and especially for this Religion and Foreign Policy program is really, really—we are all very, very grateful to you for all the wonderful work you have done. Thank you. I really appreciate being able to moderate this last event that you are doing for the Council. I’ll now hand it over to Irina. FASKIANOS: Thank you both again. Richard is going to continue to be very prolific. You can follow him on Twitter at @richardhaass and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, Home and Away. It’s published on Substack. You can get it at richardhaass.substack.com. You can follow Father Tom at @thomasreesesj. Thank you all for your questions. We also encourage you to follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy program on Twitter at @CFR_religion. You can write to us at [email protected] with suggestions or questions. We appreciate your joining us. Richard, do you want to say one last word? HAASS: Yeah, I just want to thank you all for your participation. You’re all busy. I appreciate your time. And may you all be well and go in peace. FASKIANOS: Thank you.

Pablo Molina, associate vice president of information technology and chief information security officer at Drexel University and adjunct professor at Georgetown University, leads the conversation on the implications of artificial intelligence in higher education.   FASKIANOS: Welcome to CFR’s Higher Education Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Thank you for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Pablo Molina with us to discuss implications of artificial intelligence in higher education. Dr. Molina is chief information security officer and associate vice president at Drexel University. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Dr. Molina is the founder and executive director of the International Applies Ethics in Technology Association, which aims to raise awareness on ethical issues in technology. He regularly comments on stories about privacy, the ethics of tech companies, and laws related to technology and information management. And he’s received numerous awards relating to technology and serves on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for AI and Digital Policy. So Dr. P, welcome. Thank you very much for being with us today. Obviously, AI is on the top of everyone’s mind, with ChatGPT coming out and being in the news, and so many other stories about what AI is going to—how it’s going to change the world. So I thought you could focus in specifically on how artificial intelligence will change and is influencing higher education, and what you’re seeing, the trends in your community. MOLINA: Irina, thank you very much for the opportunity, to the Council on Foreign Relations, to be here and express my views. Thank you, everybody, for taking time out of your busy schedules to listen to this. And hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to learn much from your questions and answer some of them to the best of my ability. Well, since I’m a professor too, I like to start by giving you homework. And the homework is this: I do not know how much people know about artificial intelligence. In my opinion, anybody who has ever used ChatGPT considers herself or himself an expert. To some extent, you are, because you have used one of the first publicly available artificial intelligence tools out there and you know more than those who haven’t. So if you have used ChatGPT, or Google Bard, or other services, you already have a leg up to understand at least one aspect of artificial intelligence, known as generative artificial intelligence. Now, if you want to learn more about this, there’s a big textbook about this big. I’m not endorsing it. All I’m saying, for those people who are very curious, there are two great academics, Russell and Norvig. They’re in their fourth edition of a wonderful book that covers every aspect of—technical aspect of artificial intelligence, called Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. And if you’re really interested in how artificial intelligence can impact higher education, I recommend a report by the U.S. Department of Education that was released earlier this year in Washington, DC from the Office of Education Technology. It’s called Artificial Intelligence and Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations. So if you do all these things and you read all these things, you will hopefully transition from being whatever expert you were before—to a pandemic and Ukrainian war expert—to an artificial intelligence expert. So how do I think that all these wonderful things are going to affect artificial intelligence? Well, as human beings, we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and really underestimate the impact of technology in the long run. And I believe this is also the case with artificial intelligence. We’re in a moment where there’s a lot of hype about artificial intelligence. It will solve every problem under the sky. But it will also create the most catastrophic future and dystopia that we can imagine. And possibly neither one of these two are true, particularly if we regulate and use these technologies and develop them following some standard guidelines that we have followed in the past, for better or worse. So how is artificial intelligence affecting higher education? Well, number one, there is a great lack of regulation and legislation. So if you know, for example around this, OpenAI released ChatGPT. People started trying it. And all of a sudden there were people like here, where I’m speaking to you from, in Italy. I’m in Rome on vacation right now. And Italian data protection agency said: Listen, we’re concerned about the privacy of this tool for citizens of Italy. So the company agreed to establish some rules, some guidelines and guardrails on the tool. And then it reopened to the Italian public, after being closed for a while. The same thing happened with the Canadian data protection authorities. In the United States, well, not much has happened, except that one of the organizations on which board I serve, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy, earlier this year in March of 2023 filed a sixty-four-page complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. Which is basically we’re asking the Federal Trade Commission: You do have the authority to investigate how these tools can affect the U.S. consumers. Please do so, because this is your purview, and this is your responsibility. And we’re still waiting on the agency to declare what the next steps are going to be. If you look at other bodies of legislation or regulation on artificial intelligence that can help us guide artificial intelligence, well, you can certainly pay attention to the U.S. Congress. And what is the U.S. Congress doing? Yeah, pretty much that, not much, to be honest. They listen to Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, who recently testified before Congress, urging Congress to regulate artificial intelligence. Which is quite clever on his part. So it was on May 17 that he testified that we could be facing catastrophic damage ahead if artificial intelligence technology is not regulated in time. He also sounded the alarm about counterfeit humans, meaning that these machines could replace what we think a person is, at least virtually. And also warned about the end of factual evidence, because with artificial intelligence anything can be fabricated. Not only that, but he pointed out that artificial intelligence could start wars and destroy democracy. Certainly very, very grim predictions. And before this, many of the companies were self-regulating for artificial intelligence. If you look at Google, Microsoft, Facebook now Meta. All of them have their own artificial intelligence self-guiding principles. Most of them were very aspirational. Those could help us in higher education because, at the very least, it can help us create our own policies and guidelines for our community members—faculty, staff, students, researchers, administrators, partners, vendors, alumni—anybody who happens to interact with our institutions of higher learning. Now, what else is happening out there? Well, we have tons, tons of laws that have to do with the technology and regulations. Things like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Sarbanes-Oxley. Federal regulations like FISMA, and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, Payment Card Industry, there is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, there is the Budapest Convention where cybersecurity insurance providers will tells us what to do and what not to do about technology. We have state laws and many privacy laws. But, to be honest, very few artificial intelligence laws. And it’s groundbreaking in Europe that the European parliamentarians have agreed to discuss the Artificial Intelligence Act, which could be the first one really to be passed at this level in the world, after some efforts by China and other countries. And, if adopted, could be a landmark change in the adoption of artificial intelligence. In the United States, even though Congress is not doing much, what the White House is trying to position itself in the realm of artificial intelligence. So there’s an executive order in February of 2023—that many of us in higher education read because, once again, we’re trying to find inspiration for our own rules and regulations—that tells federal agencies that they have to root out bias in the design and use of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, because they have to protect the public from algorithm discrimination. And we all believe this. In higher education, we believe in being fair and transparent and accountable. I would be surprised if any of us is not concerned about making sure that our technology use, our artificial technology use, does not follow these particular principles as proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and many other bodies of ethics and expertise. Now, the White House also announced new centers—research and development centers with some new national artificial intelligence research institutes. Many of us will collaborate with those in our research projects. A call for public assessments of existing generative artificial intelligence systems, like ChatGPT. And also is trying to enact or is enacting policies to ensure that U.S. government—the U.S. government, the executive branch, is leading by example when mitigating artificial intelligence risks and harnessing artificial intelligence opportunities. Because, in spite of all the concerns about this, it’s all about the opportunities that we hope to achieve with artificial intelligence. And when we look at how specifically can we benefit from artificial intelligence in higher education, well, certainly we can start with new and modified academic offerings. I would be surprised if most of us will not have degrees—certainly, we already have degrees—graduate degrees on artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and many others. But I would be surprised if we don’t even add some bachelor’s degrees in this field, or we don’t modify significantly some of our existing academic offerings to incorporate artificial intelligence in various specialties, our courses, or components of the courses that we teach our students. We’re looking at amazing research opportunities, things that we’ll be able to do with artificial intelligence that we couldn’t even think about before, that are going to expand our ability to generate new knowledge to contribute to society, with federal funding, with private funding. We’re looking at improved knowledge management, something that librarians are always very concerned about, the preservation and distribution of knowledge. The idea would be that artificial intelligence will help us find better the things that we’re looking for, the things that we need in order to conduct our academic work. We’re certainly looking at new and modified pedagogical approaches, new ways of learning and teaching, including the promise of adaptive learning, something that really can tell students: Hey, you’re not getting this particular concept. Why don’t you go back and study it in a different way with a different virtual avatar, using simulations or virtual assistance? In almost every discipline and academic endeavor. We’re looking very concerned, because we’re concerned about offering, you know, a good value for the money when it comes to education. So we’re hoping to achieve extreme efficiencies, better ways to run admissions, better ways to guide students through their academic careers, better way to coach them into professional opportunities. And many of this will be possible thanks to artificial intelligence. And also, let’s not forget this, but we still have many underserved students, and they’re underserved because they either cannot afford education or maybe they have physical or cognitive disabilities. And artificial intelligence can really help us reach to those students and offer them new opportunities to advance their education and fulfill their academic and professional goals. And I think this is a good introduction. And I’d love to talk about all the things that can go wrong. I’d love to talk about all the things that we should be doing so that things don’t go as wrong as predicted. But I think this is a good way to set the stage for the discussion. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you so much. So we’re going to go all of you now for your questions and comments, share best practices. (Gives queuing instructions.) All right. So I’m going first to Gabriel Doncel has a written question, adjunct faculty at the University of Delaware: How do we incentivize students to approach generative AI tools like ChatGPT for text in ways that emphasize critical thinking and analysis? MOLINA: I always like to start with a difficult question, so I very much, Gabriel Doncel, for that particular question. And, as you know, there are several approaches to adopting tools like ChatGPT on campus by students. One of them is to say: No, over my dead body. If you use ChatGPT, you’re cheating. Even if you cite ChatGPT, we can consider you to be cheating. And not only that, but some institutions have invested in tools that can detect whether or something was written with ChatGPT or similar rules. There are other faculty members and other academic institutions that are realizing these tools will be available when these students join the workforce. So our job is to help them do the best that they can by using these particular tools, to make sure they avoid some of the mishaps that have already happened. There are a number of lawyers who have used ChatGPT to file legal briefs. And when the judges received those briefs, and read through them, and looked at the citations they realized that some of the citations were completely made up, were not real cases. Hence, the lawyers faced professional disciplinary action because they used the tool without the professional review that is required. So hopefully we’re going to educate our students and we’re going to set policy and guideline boundaries for them to use these, as well as sometimes the necessary technical controls for those students who may not be that ethically inclined to follow our guidelines and policies. But I think that to hide our heads in the sand and pretend that these tools are not out there for students to use would be—it’s a disserve to our institutions, to our students, and the mission that we have of training the next generation of knowledge workers. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Meena Bose, who has a raised hand. Meena, if you can unmute yourself and identify yourself. Q: Thank you, Irina. Thank you for this very important talk. And my question is a little—(laughs)—it’s formative, but really—I have been thinking about what you were saying about the role of AI in academic life. And I don’t—particularly for undergraduates, for admissions, advisement, guidance on curriculum. And I don’t want to have my head in the sand about this, as you just said—(laughs)—but it seems to me that any kind of meaningful interaction with students, particularly students who have not had any exposure to college before, depends upon kind of multiple feedback with faculty members, development of mentors, to excel in college and to consider opportunities after. So I’m struggling a little bit to see how AI can be instructive for that part of college life, beyond kind of providing information, I guess. But I guess the web does that already. So welcome your thoughts. Thank you. FASKIANOS: And Meena’s at Hofstra University. MOLINA: Thank you. You know, it’s a great question. And the idea that everybody is proposing right here is we are not—artificial intelligence companies, at least at first. We’ll see in the future because, you know, it depends on how it’s regulated. But they’re not trying, or so they claim, to replace doctors, or architects, or professors, or mentors, or administrators. They’re trying to help those—precisely those people in those professions, and the people they served gain access to more information. And you’re right in a sense that that information is already on the web. But we’ve aways had a problem finding that information regularly on the web. And you may remember that when Google came along, I mean, it swept through every other search engine out there AltaVista, Yahoo, and many others, because, you know, it had a very good search algorithm. And now we’re going to the next level. The next level is where you ask ChatGPT in human-natural language. You’re not trying to combine the three words that say, OK, is the economics class required? No, no, you’re telling ChatGPT, hey, listen, I’m in the master’s in business administration at Drexel University and I’m trying to take more economic classes. What recommendations do you have for me? And this is where you can have a preliminary one, and also a caveat there, as most of these search engine—generative AI engines already have, that tell you: We’re not here to replace the experts. Make sure you discuss your questions with the experts. We will not give you medical advice. We will not give you educational advice. We’re just here, to some extent, for guiding purposes and, even now, for experimental and entertainment purposes. So I think you are absolutely right that we have to be very judicious about how we use these tools to support the students. Now, that said, I had the privilege of working for public universities in the state of Connecticut when I was the CIO. I also had the opportunity early in my career to attend public university in Europe, in Spain, where we were hundreds of students in class. We couldn’t get any attention from the faculty. There were no mentors, there were no counselors, or anybody else. Is it better to have nobody to help you or is it better to have at least some technology guidance that can help you find the information that otherwise is spread throughout many different systems that are like ivory towers—emissions on one side, economics on the other, academics advising on the other, and everything else. So thank you for a wonderful question and reflection. FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question written from Dr. Russell Thomas, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations and Diplomatic Studies at Cavendish University in Uganda: What are the skills and competencies that higher education students and faculty need to develop to think in an AI-driven world? MOLINA: So we could argue here that something very similar has happened already with many information technologies and communication technologies. It is the understanding at first faculty members did not want to use email, or the web, or many other tools because they were too busy with their disciplines. And rightly so. They were brilliant economists, or philosophers, or biologists. They didn’t have enough time to learn all these new technologies to interact with the students. But eventually they did learn, because they realized that it was the only way to meet the students where they were and to communicate with them in efficient ways. Now, I have to be honest; when it comes to the use of technology—and we’ll unpack the numbers—it was part of my doctoral dissertation, when I expanded the adoption of technology models, that tells you about early adopters, and mainstream adopters, and late adopters, and laggards. But I uncovered a new category for some of the institutions where I worked called the over-my-dead-body adopters. And these were some of the faculty members who say: I will never switch word processors. I will never use this technology. It’s only forty years until I retire, probably eighty more until I die. I don’t have to do this. And, to be honest, we have a responsibility to understand that those artificial intelligence tools are out there, and to guide the students as to what is the acceptable use of those technologies within the disciplines and the courses that we teach them in. Because they will find those available in a very competitive work market, in a competitive labor market, because they can derive some benefit from them. But also, we don’t want to shortchange their educational attainment just because they go behind our backs to copy and paste from ChatGPT, learning nothing. Going back to the question by Gabriel Doncel, not learning to exercise the critical thinking, using citations and material that is unverified, that was borrowed from the internet without any authority, without any attention to the different points of view. I mean, if you’ve used ChatGPT for a while—and I have personally, even to prepare some basic thank-you speeches, which are all very formal, even to contest a traffic ticket in Washington, DC, when I was speeding but I don’t want to pay the ticket anyway. Even for just research purposes, you could realize that most of the writing from ChatGPT has a very, very common style. Which is, oh, on the one hand people say this, on the other hand people say that. Well, the critical thinking will tell you, sure, there are two different opinions, but this is what I think myself, and this is why I think about this. And these are some of the skills, the critical thinking skills, that we must continue to teach the students and not to, you know, put blinds around their eyes to say, oh, continue focusing only on the textbook and the website. No, no. Look at the other tools but use them judiciously. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Clemente Abrokwaa. Raised hand, if you can identify yourself, please. Q: Hi. Thanks so much for your talk. It’s something that has been—I’m from Penn State University. And this is a very important topic, I think. And some of the earlier speakers have already asked the questions I was going to ask. (Laughs.) But one thing that I would like to say that, as you said, we cannot bury our heads in the sand. No matter what we think, the technology is already here. So we cannot avoid it. My question, though, is what do you think about the artificial intelligence, the use of that in, say, for example, graduate students using it to write dissertations? You did mention about the lawyers that use it to write their briefs, and they were caught. But in dissertations and also in class—for example, you have students—you have about forty students. You give a written assignment. You make—when you start grading, you have grading fatigue. And so at some point you lose interest of actually checking. And so I’m kind of concerned about that how it will affect the students’ desire to actually go and research without resorting to the use of AI. MOLINA: Well, Clemente, fellow colleague from the state of Pennsylvania, thank you for that, once again, both a question and a reflection here. Listen, many of us wrote our doctoral dissertations—mine at Georgetown. At one point of time, I was so tired of writing about the same topics, following the wonderful advice, but also the whims of my dissertation committee, that I was this close from outsourcing my thesis to China. I didn’t, but I thought about it. And now graduate students are thinking, OK, why am I going through the difficulties of writing this when ChatGPT can do it for me and the deadline is tomorrow? Well, this is what will distinguish the good students and the good professionals from the other ones. And the interesting part is, as you know, when we teach graduate students we’re teaching them critical thinking skills, but also teaching them now to express themselves, you know, either orally or in writing. And writing effectively is fundamental in the professions, but also absolutely critical in academic settings. And anybody who’s just copying and pasting from ChatGPT to these documents cannot do that level of writing. But you’re absolutely right. Let’s say that we have an adjunct faculty member who’s teaching a hundred students. Will that person go through every single essay to find out whether students were cheating with ChatGPT? Probably not. And this is why there are also enterprising people who are using artificial intelligence to find out and tell you whether a paper was written using artificial intelligence. So it’s a little bit like this fighting of different sources and business opportunities for all of them. And we’ve done this. We’ve used antiplagiarism tools in the past because we knew that students were copying and pasting using Google Scholar and many other sources. And now oftentimes we run antiplagiarism tools. We didn’t write them ourselves. Or we tell the students, you run it yourself and you give it to me. And make sure you are not accidentally not citing things that could end up jeopardizing your ability to get a graduate degree because your work was not up to snuff with the requirements of our stringent academic programs. So I would argue that this antiplagiarism tools that we’re using will more often than not, and sooner than expected, incorporate the detection of artificial intelligence writeups. And also the interesting part is to tell the students, well, if you do choose to use any of these tools, what are the rules of engagement? Can you ask it to write a paragraph and then you cite it, and you mention that ChatGPT wrote it? Not to mention, in addition to that, all the issues about artificial intelligence, which the courts are deciding now, regarding the intellectual property of those productions. If a song, a poem, a book is written by an artificial intelligence entity, who owns the intellectual property for those works produced by an artificial intelligence machine? FASKIANOS: Good question. We have a lot of written questions. And I’m sure you don’t want to just listen to my voice, so please do raise your hands. But we do have a question from one of your colleagues, Pablo, Pepe Barcega, who’s the IT director at Drexel: Considering the potential biases and limitations of AI models, like ChatGPT, do you think relying on such technology in the educational domain can perpetuate existing inequalities and reinforce systemic biases, particularly in terms of access, representation, and fair evaluation of students? And Pepe’s question got seven upvotes, we advanced it to the top of the line. MOLINA: All right, well, first I have to wonder whether he used ChatGPT to write the question. But I’m going to leave it that. Thank you. (Laughter.) It’s a wonderful question. One of the greatest concerns we have had, those of us who have been working on artificial intelligence digital policy for years—not this year when ChatGPT was released, but for years we’ve been thinking about this. And even before artificial intelligence, in general with algorithm transparency. And the idea is the following: That two things are happening here. One is that we’re programming the algorithms using instructions, instructions created by programmers, with all their biases, and their misunderstandings, and their shortcomings, and their lack of context, and everything else. But with artificial intelligence we’re doing something even more concerning than that, which is we have some basic algorithms but then we’re feeling a lot of information, a corpus of information, to those algorithms. And the algorithms are fine-tuning the rules based on those. So it’s very, very difficult for experts to explain how an artificial intelligence system actually makes decisions, because we know the engine and we know the data that we fed to the engine, but we don’t know the real outcome how those decisions are being made through neural networks, through all of the different systems that we have and methods that we have for artificial intelligence. Very, very few people understand how those work. And those are so busy they don’t have time to explain how the algorithm works for others, including the regulators. Let’s remember some of the failed cases. Amazon tried this early. And they tried this for selecting employees for Amazon. And they fed all the resumes. And guess what? It turned out that most of the recommendations were to hire young white people who had gone to Ivy League schools. Why? Because their first employees were feeding those descriptions, and they had done extremely well at Amazon. Hence, by feeding that information of past successful employees only those were there. And so that puts away the diversity that we need for different academic institutions, large and small, public and private, from different countries, from different genders, from different ages, from different ethnicities. All those things went away because the algorithm was promoting one particular one. Recently I had the opportunity to moderate a panel in Washington, DC, and we had representatives from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And they told us how they investigated a hiring algorithm from a company that was disproportionately recommending that they hired people whose first name was Brian and had played lacrosse in high school because, once again, a disproportionate number of people in that company had done that. And the algorithm realized, oh, this must be important characteristics to hire people for this company. Let’s not forget, for example, with the artificial facial recognition and artificial intelligence by Amazon Rekog, you know, the facial recognition software, that the American Civil Liberties Union, decided, OK, I’m going to submit the pictures of all the congressmen to this particular facial recognition engine. And it turned out that it misidentified many of them, particularly African Americans, as felons who had been convicted. So all these artificial—all these biases could have really, really bad consequences. Imagine that you’re using this to decide who you admit to your universities, and the algorithm is wrong. You know, you are making really biased decisions that will affect the livelihood of many people, but also will transform society, possibly for the worse, if we don’t address this. So this is why the OECD, the European Union, even the White House, everybody is saying: We want this technology. We want to derive the benefits of this technology, while curtailing the abuses. And it’s fundamental we achieve transparency. We are sure that these algorithms are not biased against the people who use them. FASKIANOS: Thank you. So I’m going to go next to Emily Edmonds-Poli, who is a professor at the University of San Diego: We hear a lot about providing clear guidelines for students, but for those of us who have not had a lot of experience using ChatGPT it is difficult to know what clear guidelines look like. Can you recommend some sources we might consult as a starting point, or where we might find some sample language? MOLINA: Hmm. Well, certainly this is what we do in higher education. We compete for the best students and the best faculty members. And we sometimes compete a little bit to be first to win groundbreaking research. But we tend to collaborate with everything else, particularly when it comes to policy, and guidance, and rules. So there are many institutions, like mine, who have already assembled—I’m sure that yours has done the same—assembled committees, because assembling committees and subcommittees is something we do very well in higher education, with faculty members, with administrators, even with the student representation to figure out, OK, what should we do about the use of artificial intelligence on our campus? I mentioned before taking a look at the big aspirational declarations by Meta, and Google, and IBM, and Microsoft could be helpful for these communities to look at this. But also, I’m a very active member of an organization known as EDUCAUSE. And EDUCAUSE is for educators—predominantly higher education educators. Administrators, staff members, faculty members, to think about the adoption of information technology. And EDUCAUSE has done good work on this front and continues to do good work on this front. So once again, EDUCAUSE and some of the institutions have already published their guidelines on how to use artificial intelligence and incorporate that within their academic lives. And now, that said, we also know that even though all higher education institutions are the same, they’re all different. We all have different values. We all believe in different uses of technology. We trust more or less the students. Hence, it’s very important that whatever inspiration you would take, you work internally on campus—as you have done with many other issues in the past—to make sure it really reflects the values of your institution. FASKIANOS: So, Pablo, would you point to a specific college or university that has developed a code of ethics that addresses the use of AI for their academic community beyond your own, but that is publicly available? MOLINA: Yeah, I’m going to be honest, I don’t want to put anybody on the spot. FASKIANOS: OK. MOLINA: Because, once again, there many reasons. But, once again, let me repeat a couple resources. One is of them is from the U.S. Department of Education, from the Office of Educational Technology. And the article is Artificial Intelligence and Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations, published earlier this year. The other source really is educause.edu. And if you look at educause.edu on artificial intelligence, you’ll find links to articles, you’ll find links to universities. It would be presumptuous of me to evaluate whose policies are better than others, but I would argue that the general principles of nonbiased, transparency, accountability, and also integration of these tools within the academic life of the institution in a morally responsible way—with concepts by privacy by design, security by design, and responsible computing—all of those are good words to have in there. Now, the other problem with policies and guidelines is that, let’s be honest, many of those have no teeth in our institutions. You know, we promulgate them. They’re very nice. They look beautiful. They are beautifully written. But oftentimes when people don’t follow them, there’s not a big penalty. And this is why, in addition to having the policies, educating the campus community is important. But it’s difficult to do because we need to educate them about so many things. About cybersecurity threats, about sexual harassment, about nondiscriminatory policies, about responsible behavior on campus regarding drugs and alcohol, about crime. So many things that they have to learn about. It’s hard to get at another topic for them to spend their time on, instead of researching the core subject matter that they chose to pursue for their lives. FASKIANOS: Thank you. And we will be sending out a link to this video, the transcript, as well as the resources that you have mentioned. So if you didn’t get them, we’ll include them in the follow-up email. So I’m going to go to Dorian Brown Crosby who has a raised hand. Q: Yes. Thank you so much. I put one question in the chat but I have another question that I would like to go ahead and ask now. So thank you so much for this presentation. You mentioned algorithm biases with individuals. And I appreciate you pointing that out, especially when we talk about face recognition, also in terms of forced migration, which is my area of research. But I also wanted you to speak to, or could you talk about the challenges that some institutions in higher education would have in terms of support for some of the things that you mentioned in terms of potential curricula, or certificates, or other ways that AI would be woven into the new offerings of institutions of higher education. How would that look specifically for institutions that might be challenged to access those resources, such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities? Thank you. MOLINA: Well, very interesting question, and a really fascinating point of view. Because we all tend to look at things from our own perspective and perhaps not consider the perspective of others. Those who have much more money and resources than us, and those who have fewer resources and less funding available. So this is a very interesting line. What is it that we do in higher education when we have these problems? Well, as I mentioned before, we build committees and subcommittees. Usually we also do campus surveys. I don’t know why we love doing campus surveys and asking everybody what they think about this. Those are useful tools to discuss. And oftentimes the thing that we do also, that we’ve done for many other topics, well, we hire people and we create new offices—either academic or administrative offices. With all of those, you know, they have certain limitations to how useful and functional they can be. And they also continue to require resources. Resources that, in the end, are paid for by students with, you know, federal financing. But this is the truth of the matter. So if you start creating offices of artificial intelligence on our campuses, however important the work may be on their guidance and however much extra work can be assigned to them instead of distributed to every faculty and the staff members out there, the truth of the matter is that these are not perfect solutions. So what is it that we do? Oftentimes, we work with partners. And our partners love to take—(inaudible)—vendors. But the truth of the matter is that sometimes they have much more—they have much more expertise on some of these topics. So for example, if you’re thinking about incorporating artificial intelligence to some of the academic materials that you use in class, well, I’m going to take a guess that if you already work with McGraw Hill in economics, or accounting, or some of the other books and websites that they put that you recommend to your students or you make mandatory for your students, that you start discussing with them, hey, listen, are you going to use artificial intelligence? How? Are you going to tell me ahead of time? Because, as a faculty member, you may have a choice to decide: I want to work with this publisher and not this particular publisher because of the way they approach this. And let’s be honest, we’ve seen a number of these vendors with major information security problems. McGraw Hill recently left a repository of data misconfigured out there on the internet, and almost anybody could access that. But many others before them, like Chegg and others, were notorious for their information security breaches. Can we imagine that these people are going to adopt artificial intelligence and not do such a good job of securing the information, the privacy, and the nonbiased approaches that we hold dear for students? I think they require a lot of supervision. But in the end, these publishers have the economies of scale for you to recommend those educational materials instead of developing your own for every course, for every class, and for every institution. So perhaps we’re going to have to continue to work together, as we’ve done in higher education, in consortia, which would be local, or regional. It could be based on institutions of the same interest, or on student population, on trying to do this. And, you know, hopefully we’ll get grants, grants from the federal government, that can be used in order to develop some of the materials and guidelines that are going to help us precisely embrace this and embracing not only to operate better as institutions and fulfill our mission, but also to make sure that our students are better prepared to join society and compete globally, which is what we have to do. FASKIANOS: So I’m going to combine questions. Dr. Lance Hunter, who is an associate professor at Augusta University. There’s been a lot of debate regarding if plagiarism detection software tools like Turnitin can accurately detect AI-generated text. What is your opinion regarding the accuracy of AI text generation detection plagiarism tools? And then Rama Lohani-Chase, at Union County College, wants recommendations on what plagiarism checker devices you would recommend—or, you know, plagiarism detection for AI would you recommend? MOLINA: Sure. So, number one, I’m not going to endorse any particular company because if I do that I would ask them for money, or the other way around. I’m not sure how it works. I could be seen as biased, particularly here. But there are many there and your institutions are using them. Sometimes they are integrated with your learning management system. And, as I mentioned, sometimes we ask the students to use them themselves and then either produce the plagiarism report for us or simply know themselves this. I’m going to be honest; when I teach ethics and technology, I tell the students about the antiplagiarism tools at the universities. But I also tell them, listen, if you’re cheating in an ethics and technology class, I failed miserably. So please don’t. Take extra time if you have to take it, but—you know, and if you want, use the antiplagiarism tool yourself. But the question stands and is critical, which is right now those tools are trying to improve the recognition of artificial intelligence written text, but they’re not as good as they could be. So like every other technology and, what I’m going to call, antitechnology, used to control the damage of the first technology, is an escalation where we start trying to identify this. And I think they will continue to do this, and they will be successful in doing this. There are people who have written ad hoc tools using ChatGPT to identify things written by ChatGPT. I tried them. They’re remarkably good for the handful of papers that I tried myself, but I haven’t conducted enough research myself to tell you if they’re really effective tools for this. So I would argue that for the timing you must assume that those tools, as we assume all the time, will not catch all of the cases, only some of the most obvious ones. FASKIANOS: So a question from John Dedie, who is an assistant professor at the Community College of Baltimore County: To combat AI issues, shouldn’t we rethink assignments? Instead of papers, have students do PowerPoints, ask students to offer their opinions and defend them? And then there was an interesting comment from Mark Habeeb at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Knowledge has been cheap for many years now because it is so readily available. With AI, we have a tool that can aggregate the knowledge and create written products. So, you know, what needs to be the focus now is critical thinking and assessing values. We need to teach our students how to assess and use that knowledge rather than how to find the knowledge and aggregate that knowledge. So maybe you could react to those two—the question and comment. MOLINA: So let me start with the Georgetown one, not only because he’s a colleague of mine. I also teach at Georgetown, and where I obtained my doctoral degree a number of years ago. I completely agree. I completely agree with the issue that we have to teach new skills. And one of the programs in which I teach at Georgetown is our master’s of analysis. Which are basically for people who want to work in the intelligence community. And these people have to find the information and they have to draw inferences, and try to figure out whether it is a nation-state that is threatening the United States, or another, or a corporation, or something like that. And they do all of those critical thinking, and intuition, and all the tools that we have developed in the intelligence community for many, many years. And artificial intelligence, if they suspend their judgement and they only use artificial intelligence, they will miss very important information that is critical for national security. And the same is true for something like our flagship school, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, one of the best in the world in that particular field, where you want to train the diplomats, and the heads of state, and the great strategical thinkers on policy and politics in the international arena to precisely think not in the mechanical way that a machine can think, but also to connect those dots. And, sure they should be using those tools in order to, you know, get the most favorable position and the starting position, But they should also use their critical thinking always, and their capabilities of analysis in order to produce good outcomes and good conclusions. Regarding redoing the assignments, absolutely true. But that is hard. It is a lot of work. We’re very busy faculty members. We have to grade. We have to be on committees. We have to do research. And now they ask us to redo our entire assessment strategy, with new assignments that we need to grade again and account for artificial intelligence. And I don’t think that any provost out there is saying, you know what? You can take two semesters off to work on this and retool all your courses. That doesn’t happen in the institutions that I know of. If you get time off because you’re entitled to it, you want to devote that time to do research because that is really what you sign up for when you pursued an academic career, in many cases. I can tell you one thing, that here in Europe where oftentimes they look at these problems with fewer resources than we do in the United States, a lot of faculty members at the high school level, at the college level, are moving to oral examinations because it’s much harder to cheat with ChatGPT with an oral examination. Because they will ask you interactive, adaptive questions—like the ones we suffered when we were defending our doctoral dissertations. And they will realize, the faculty members, whether or not you know the material and you understand the material. Now, imagine oral examinations for a class of one hundred, two hundred, four hundred. Do you do one for the entire semester, with one topic chosen and run them? Or do you do several throughout the semester? Do you end up using a ChatGPT virtual assistance to conduct your oral examinations? I think these are complex questions. But certainly redoing our assignments and redoing the way we teach and the way we evaluate our students is perhaps a necessary consequence of the advent of artificial intelligence. FASKIANOS: So next question from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi: Who should safeguard ethical concerns and misuse of AI by criminals? Should the onus fall on the creators and companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft to ensure security and not pass it on to the end users of the product? And I think you mentioned at the top in your remarks, Pablo, about how the founder of ChatGPT was urging the Congress to put into place some regulation. What is the onus on ChatGPT to protect against some of this as well? MOLINA: Well, I’m going to recycle more of the material from my doctoral dissertation. In this case it was the Molina cycle of innovation and regulation. It goes like this, basically there are—you know, there are engineers and scientists who create new information technologies. And then there are entrepreneurs and businesspeople and executives to figure out, OK, I know how to package this so that people are going to use it, buy it, subscribe to it, or look at it, so that I can sell the advertisement to others. And, you know, this begins and very, very soon the abuses start. And the abuses are that criminals are using these platforms for reasons that were not envisioned before. Even the executives, as we’ve seen with Google, and Facebook, and others, decide to invade the privacy of the people because they only have to pay a big fine, but they make much more money than the fines or they expect not to be caught. And what happened in this cycle is that eventually there is so much noise in the media, congressional hearings, that eventually regulators step in and they try to pass new laws to do this, or the regulatory agencies try to investigate using the powers given to them. And then all of these new rules have to be tested in courts of law, which could take years by the time it reaches sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court. Some of them are even knocked down on the way to the Supreme Court when they realize this is not constitutional, it’s a conflict of laws, and things like that. Now, by the time we regulate these new technologies, not only many years have gone by, but the technologies have changed. The marketing products and services have changed, the abuses have changed, and the criminals have changed. So this is why we’re always living in a loosely regulated space when it comes to information technology. And this is an issue of accountability. We’re finding this, for example, with information security. If my phone is my hacked, or my computer, my email, is it the fault of Microsoft, and Apple, and Dell, and everybody else? Why am I the one paying the consequences and not any of these companies? Because it’s unregulated. So morally speaking, yes. These companies are accountable. Morally speaking also the users are accountable, because we’re using these tools because we’re incorporating them professionally. Legally speaking, so far, nobody is accountable except the lawyers who submitted briefs that were not correct in a court of law and were disciplined for that. But other than that, right now, it is a very gray space. So in my mind, it requires everybody. It takes a village to do the morally correct thing. It starts with the companies and the inventors. It involves the regulators, who should do their job and make sure that there’s no unnecessary harm created by these tools. But it also involves every company executive, every professional, every student, and professor who decides to use these tools. FASKIANOS: OK. I’m going to take—combine a couple questions from Dorothy Marinucci and Venky Venkatachalam about the effect of AI on jobs. Dorothy talks about—she’s from Fordham University—about she read something about Germany’s best-selling newspaper Bild reportedly adopting artificial intelligence to replace certain editorial roles in an effort to cut costs. Does this mean that the field of journalism communication will change? And Venky’s question is: AI—one of the impacts is in the area of automation, leading to elimination of certain types of jobs. Can you talk about both the elimination of jobs and what new types of jobs you think will be created as AI matures into the business world with more value-added applications? MOLINA: Well, what I like about predicting the future, and I’ve done this before in conferences and papers, is that, you know, when the future comes ten years from now people will either not remember what I said, or, you know, maybe I was lucky and my prediction was correct. In the specific field of journalism, and we’ve seen it, the journalism and communications field, decimated because the money that they used to make with advertising—and, you know, certainly a bit part of that were in the form of corporate profits. But many other one in the form of hiring good journalists, and investigative journalism, and these people could be six months writing a story when right now they have six hours to write a story, because there are no resources. And all the advertisement money went instead to Facebook, and Google, and many others because they work very well for advertisements. But now the lifeblood of journalism organizations has been really, you know, undermined. And there’s good journalism in other places, in newspapers, but sadly this is a great temptation to replace some of the journalists with more artificial intelligence, particularly the most—on the least important pieces. I would argue that editorial pieces are the most important in newspapers, the ones requiring ideology, and critical thinking, and many others. Whereas there are others that tell you about traffic changes that perhaps do not—or weather patterns, without offending any meteorologists, that maybe require a more mechanical approach. I would argue that a lot of professions are going to be transformed because, well, if ChatGPT can write real estate announcements that work very well, well, you may need fewer people doing this. And yet, I think that what we’re going to find is the same thing we found when technology arrived. We all thought that the arrival of computers would mean that everybody would be without a job. Guess what? It meant something different. It meant that in order to do our jobs, we had to learn how to use computers. So I would argue that this is going to be the same case. To be a good doctor, to be a good lawyer, to be a good economist, to be a good knowledge worker you’re going to have to learn also how to use whatever artificial intelligence tools are available out there, and use them professionally within the moral and the ontological concerns that apply to your particular profession. Those are the kind of jobs that I think are going to be very important. And, of course, all the technical jobs, as I mentioned. There are tons of people who consider themselves artificial intelligence experts. Only a few at the very top understand these systems. But there are many others in the pyramid that help with preparing these systems, with the support, the maintenance, the marketing, preparing the datasets to go into these particular models, working with regulators and legislators and compliance organizations to make sure that the algorithms and the tools are not running afoul of existing regulations. All of those, I think, are going to be interesting jobs that will be part of the arrival of artificial intelligence. FASKIANOS: Great. We have so many questions left and we just couldn’t get to them all. I’m just going to ask you just to maybe reflect on how the use of artificial intelligence in higher education will affect U.S. foreign policy and international relations. I know you touched upon it a little bit in reacting to the comment from our Georgetown University colleague, but any additional thoughts you might want to add before we close? MOLINA: Well, let’s be honest, one particular one that applies to education and to everything else, there is a race—a worldwide race for artificial intelligence progress. The big companies are fighting—you know, Google, and Meta, many others, are really putting—Amazon—putting resources into that, trying to be first in this particular race. But it’s also a national race. For example, it’s very clear that there are executive orders from the United States as well as regulations and declarations from China that basically are indicating these two big nations are trying to be first in dominating the use of artificial intelligence. And let’s be honest, in order to do well in artificial intelligence you need not only the scientists who are going to create those models and refine them, but you also need the bodies of data that you need to feed these algorithms in order to have good algorithms. So the barriers to entry for other nations and the barriers to entry by all the technology companies are going to be very, very high. It’s not going to be easy for any small company to say: Oh, now I’m a huge player in artificial intelligence. Because even if you may have created an interesting new algorithmic procedure, you don’t have the datasets that the huge companies have been able to amass and work on for the longest time. Every time you submit a question to ChatGPT, the ChatGPT experts are using their questions to refine the tool. The same way that when we were using voice recognition with Apple or Android or other companies, that we’re using those voices and our accents and our mistakes in order to refine their voice recognition technologies. So this is the power. We’ll see that the early bird gets the worm of those who are investing, those who are aggressively going for it, and those who are also judiciously regulating this can really do very well in the international arena when it comes to artificial intelligence. And so will their universities, because they will be able to really train those knowledge workers, they’ll be able to get the money generated from artificial intelligence, and they will be able to, you know, feedback one with the other. The advances in the technology will result in more need for students, more students graduating will propel the industry. And there will also be—we’ll always have a fight for talent where companies and countries will attract those people who really know about these wonderful things. Now, keep in mind that artificial intelligence was the core of this, but there are so many other emerging issues in information technology. And some of them are critical to higher education. So we’re still, you know, lots of hype, but we think that virtual reality will have an amazing impact on the way we teach and we conduct research and we train for certain skills. We think that quantum computing has the ability to revolutionize the way we conduct research, allowing us to do competitions that were not even thinkable today. We’ll look at things like robotics. And if you ask me about what is going to take many jobs away, I would say that robotics can take a lot of jobs away. Now, we thought that there would be no factory workers left because of robots, but that hasn’t happened. But keep adding robots with artificial intelligence to serve you a cappuccino, or your meal, or take care of your laundry, or many other things, or maybe clean your hotel room, and you realize, oh, there are lots of jobs out there that no longer will be there. Think about artificial intelligence for self-driving vehicles, boats, planes, cargo ships, commercial airplanes. Think about the thousands of taxi drivers and truck drivers who may end up being out of jobs because, listen, the machines drive safer, and they don’t get tired, and they can be driving twenty-four by seven, and they don’t require health benefits, or retirement. They don’t get depressed. They never miss. Think about many of the technologies out there that have an impact on what we do. So, but artificial intelligence is a multiplier to technologies, a contributor to many other fields and many other technologies. And this is why we’re so—spending so much time and so much energy thinking about these particular issues. FASKIANOS: Well, thank you, Pablo Molina. We really appreciate it. Again, my apologies that we couldn’t get to all of the questions and comments in the chat, but we appreciate all of you for your questions and, of course, your insights were really terrific, Dr. P. So we will, again, be sending out the link to this video and transcript, as well as the resources that you mentioned during this discussion. I hope you all enjoy the Fourth of July. And I encourage you to follow @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Again, you send us comments, feedback, suggestions to [email protected]. And, again, thank you all for joining us. We look forward to your continued participation in CFR Academic programming. Have a great day. MOLINA: Adios. (END)

Panelists discuss the social, economic, and political factors that contribute to the mass migration of people from Central and South America toward the United States and Mexico and potential U.S. policy responses. The Silberstein Family Annual Lecture on Refugee and Migration Policy was established in 2019 through a generous gift from Alan M. Silberstein and the Silberstein family. The lecture provides CFR with an annual forum to explore emerging challenges in refugee and migration policy in the United States and around the world.