Local Opinion: AI and Mother Nature

The University of Arizona, Tucson’s sacrosanct dinosaur-in-the-making, seems to be turning a blind eye to two major systemic challenges, both with heavy local implications. And both seminal opportunities to reorient and retool this ossifying institution before it’s too late. They should be ‘full frontal’ to executives running UA.

The first is the looming water crisis we all knew would inevitably get here. UA’s current response to this multi-billion opportunity, and one with profound global humanitarian aspects, has been underwhelming.

Arizona’s prime, Federal Land-Grant University is behaving like the sludgie bureaucracy it has slowly evolved into, with broad mission creeps of every description. It’s exhausting because these shallow diversions lack the gravitas worthy of a state flagship institution. Certainly not characteristic of the kind of university the Feds had in mind with their 17 federal statutes since the Land-Grant concepts’ creation in 1862 with the Morrill Act.

The water crisis is politically unpopular with UA’s liberal cognoscenti; their response is classic demand-centric, i.e., more bureaucratic control and conservation. We’re seeing that now. Yet the opportunity calls forth a deeper narrative, one in keeping with Arizona’s Western ethos. And one modified in a way that would show a technological supply-side solution, with broad environmental positives and globally humanitarian ones as well.

Conceptually, I’m referring to a joint partnership with Sonora, Mexico, and the US Deptartment of Energy, using UA’s civil, environmental and materials engineering, and desert agriculture expertise. One that would make use of DOE’s rapidly stepped-up development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). And the distinct, verified possibilities mating-up the SMR and Baja desalination units using new materials like graphene. Sonora, like Arizona, has a ground and surface water problem as well, but they have a globally significant agribusiness industry that tens of millions depend upon.

The sidebar payoff to success here would be an Arizona-Sonora manufacture and global export of SMR components (not all that different from large mining equipment) to poor, ocean-front nations who could do the same thing with instant power and clean water. A task that totally fulfills the Land-Grant university narrative.

UA’s second major existential challenge, and a shared quandary with America’s expensive and bloated educational-industrial complex, one young people are increasingly skeptical of …is what to do about AI?

History shows the invention of gunpowder did more than anything to end the medieval Dark Age and spur on the Renaissance. It was the very essence of “disruption”. Well Wilbur and Wilma, it’s time to “wake-up and smell the silicon”, gunpowder has just been re-invented, and you live in an ivory-clad, medieval castle.

So get ready; you’d better start learning those new Jurassic tap dance moves; otherwise, I give UA the institution 3-5 years, tops. Make no mistake; AI has the potential to turn UA into a white-dwarf star, existing as this whiney educational boneyard, one acrimoniously funded every year by a very hostile state government.

Of the two challenges listed above, AI is the planet-killer because of the speed and completely new landscape it designs for any competition, every single day. And it’s dirt cheap ‘disruption’ as well.

The only way I see forward is to become one lean, mean, technology-transfer machine. In that regard, the institution will have to jettison a lot of post-high school daycare activities, courses, personnel, etc. and do a serious retool. Isn’t that what PCC was set up to take on?

All this will take truly remarkable leadership, first from the Arizona Legislature, second from the Board of Regents, and finally with boots on the ground in the university C-suite. AI is not holding its breath; neither is Mother Nature.