Back in Uzbekistan, this time to talk about AI and universities

In 2016, I first came to Uzbekistan as an election observer. I loved the exquisite hospitality, the architecture in Samarkand and beyond, the plov and the gorgeous ceramics, and I tried to convince basically everyone I knew to come. Last week, after ten years, I came back to a very different Uzbekistan – its GDP has almost doubled in the meantime, and now the New York Times is writing about Uzbekistan as the next big travel destination! Over the past six months, I’ve had the privilege of working with Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Digital Technologies on the future of the country, quite literally: how to prepare and upskill its 1.4 million higher education students and their professors and instructors to learn in the age of AI, and how to use frontier AI. No country or university has figured this out yet, and Uzbekistan is really leaning in. Minister Sherzod Shermatov, also former Minister of Education, passionately opened our training-of-trainers programme for 60 tertiary education professors and instructors spanning computer science, AI, data science, and non-technical fields. This group will take AI fluency to their peers, students, and administrators across the country. In my experience working with senior political leaders, there is a natural pull to emphasise infrastructure, investment, and access to frontiers models when dealing with AI – what I’d call the supply side. Many leaders find it harder to approach the human side, and the demand side, of the AI equation. But as research on previous technological revolutions has shown: the countries that benefit the most are not necessarily where the technology is developed, but rather where it is adopted at scale. Winners diffuse new technologies throughout their industries, with government as a demand anchor, through investments in people, skilling, and training at scale. So far many educators see the impact of AI over the last three years as net-negative, in spite of its benefits, because it has made it much too easy for students to bypass the productive struggle that learning depends on. I am especially proud of the practical handbook we have developed for tertiary students in Uzbekistan: Learning and Thriving in the Age of AI. It focuses on the question that every education system now has to answer, but only few (if any!) have successfully answered: When does AI help students learn better, and when does it get in the way of learning? What should students practically do today and in the next 5-10 years? I truly hope it will be useful for Uzbekistan’s present and future higher education students, and for the teachers and professors helping them navigate this coming transition. A huge thanks to the Ministry of Digital Technologies, especially Mansur Mamadjanov and Malika Abdullaeva, and to the TBI Uzbekistan team, including Caitlin Coyle, Dan Grinevics, Mamur Tukhtamatov and David Hoffman as well as my co-facilitator Benjamin Welby for both very hard work and very fun times 🇺🇿🤖💪🏼