The AI that could bring sanity to higher education

When people tell me they’re confused about artificial intelligence, it usually doesn’t take long before we get to Matthew McConaughey. If you haven’t had the pleasure, Salesforce, the terminally dull enterprise software company, hired McConaughey, the terminally handsome actor, to star in ads in which he wanders around AI-generated landscapes, drawling AI buzzwords like a beat poet. In one instance, he talks to a squirrel. Like all of McConaughey’s work, the ads demand attention and defy comprehension — a perfect mirror of the current AI moment. We’re saturated with talk about the arrival of AI and the changes coming to everything we do. But the way the tech industry communicates, those changes appear to be largely in the future, with benefits that make sense only if you’re baked out of your mind.