Along Route 66, a campus prepares students for the future of AI

It's the 100th anniversary of Route 66, a roadway that has both shaped and reflected the twists and turns of the U.S. economy and its development. So what does a journey along Route 66 teach us about where the American economy might be headed next, amid the advent of artificial intelligence? To find out, “Marketplace Morning Report” David Brancaccio set out from Southern California and then stopped in Arizona, at a campus where AI is getting a full embrace.

Lidar technology creates 3D maps of an environment by bouncing light off of objects. It’s what self-driving cars like the Waymo robot taxi in which I started my Route 66 journey use. It’s also what students at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff use to make 3D maps of forests. Students like Keegan Line, a second-year in the Ph.D. program at NAU’s School of Forestry.

“The main technology I use, is aerial lidar,” Line said. “We're using it to look at the forest in like a 3D sense, as opposed to 2D data.”

Line uses lidar for habitat identification. Also, it’s good for understanding wildfires. But to tell a pinyon from a juniper from a quaking aspen takes more than lidar. It takes machine learning — artificial intelligence — to help humans like Keegan make sense of it all. That means Line is also a kind of shepherd for his AI flock.

“You have to definitely tailor it to the problem itself,” he said. “You need a lot of refinement. And you have to then look at the output and say, “Does this make sense? Is this something that's actually useful, and how can we use this in making decisions?”

One of Line’s faculty advisors, Andrew Sánchez Meador, has been using AI in his research since the early ‘90s, before it was cool. He finds the tech indispensable. But he’s also careful.

“The big thing to watch out for is a model that seems better, but you don't really know why it's better,” he said. “And then when you apply that model in new place or in a new scenario, or give it new data, it may not perform the way you thought it was going to perform.”

It’s not just AI in the department of forestry. Northern Arizona University is in the spring of what it’s declared as “The Year of AI Empowerment.” José Luis Cruz Rivera is NAU’s president.

“When manufacturing went away and mining went away, everybody was asked to code,” he said. “Just get a coding certificate, and that will resolve your issues. But now we're in the era of AI, where a lot of the things that we thought we needed to do, and the ways we needed to prepare and to be able to have careers of consequence, have totally been challenged.”

Cruz Rivera also teaches electrical engineering. When his own students came back bewildered when they were steered wrong by a ChatGPT hallucination on a problem set, he saw a big teaching opportunity.

“How you inquire in a more productive way,” he said. “How do you validate what you're hearing back and how do you stay in control of the cognitive process related to the work that you're engaging ChatGPT in?”

The campus community decided now’s the time to focus on this for themselves, for the university bureaucracy, and beyond.

“Not just for our students, but how we connect with the community and how we provide the resources to make sure that the kids in the Boys and Girls Club, the teachers and the advisors in Flagstaff High School, the people working in the city offices, have the training and the resources they need,” Cruz Rivera said. “It's ultimately about how we ensure that the human remains central to the work, and is a sovereign entity in the connection with the AI. It's not the other way around.”

This fall, NAU launches a bachelor’s degree in AI that goes beyond the technical.

“There will be a course on questioning AI,” Cruz Rivera said. “Let's not just talk about the practical aspects of it, or how to design it or how to use it. Let's question it. Let's question the bias that's built in, and how we can counter that. Let’s question the environmental impacts. Let’s question how the flow of capital could actually lead to a very dystopian future. Because if you are going to be an engineer working with AI and machine learning, we want you to have that world view available to you if and when the moment arises.”

I asked Cruz Rivera if this kind of attention to AI and the university’s presence in the community could help make the Flagstaff region an innovator or a hotbed for the development of the technology.

“I hope that it will, at a minimum, ensure that the Flagstaff community, the Northern Arizona community, is empowered by the technology and not subjugated by it,” he said.