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United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Sustainable Development

Futures of Higher Education and Artificial Intelligence

HESI Action Group

Introduction

Accelerated developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially with the widespread adoption of generative AI applications such as ChatGPT, is hugely impacting the higher education sector. With the emergence of AI-powered applications and robots replacing human labour, it has become common that trained machines perform much better than the top 10% of human performers in most standardized tests including bar exams, university entrance exams (OpenAI, 2023) and adult literacy tests (OECD, 2023). Additionally, AI-enabled deepfake technologies have become so sophisticated that differentiating them from real images is increasingly difficult, influencing critical human decisions such as elections and financial investments. This rapid advancement of AI questions the long-term relevance of what schools are teaching today, compelling the higher education sector to reevaluate teaching, learning, research, engagement, and management and administration. Alarmingly, a 2023 UNESCO global survey found that only fewer than ten per cent of schools and universities have developed institutional policies and/or formal guidance concerning the use of generative AI applications.

In the meantime, the progress towards the SDGs has been significantly stagnant. In 2023, the UN SDG progress report revealed that a mere 15 per cent of the 138 assessed targets are on track toward the 2030 while nearly half (48%) of the targets have no progress or even regressed below the 2015 baseline (UN, 2023). The sluggish progress is attributed to various global challenges such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, widening inequality and political unrests. These interconnected global issues call for a fundamental shift and groundbreaking innovation to put sustainable development back on track.  

In this regard, higher education institutions (HEI) play a crucial role in harnessing the potential of AI in accelerating sustainable development while mitigating its harms. HEIs can take the lead in exploring, examining and understanding the complexities that AI will bring to higher education and the education sector at large. This new role entails ensuring inclusive access to AI for all learners without widening technological divides and compromising data security; innovative use of AI to tackle challenges towards achieving a sustainable society; and ethical development of AI with the human rights at its core principle.  

This Action Group under the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) serves as a transdisciplinary collaborative platform to build a knowledge base on the current trends, opportunities and risks that AI poses to higher education through the lens of sustainable development. It aims to bridge the academic community with UN agencies through evidence-based and research-oriented recommendations and global guidelines for maximizing the potential of AI in achieving the sustainable future while closely scrutinizing the impact of AI in environment, employability and human rights. It seeks to establish a concrete mechanism that fosters synergies among key stakeholders in the fields of higher education, sustainability and AI, such as UNU AI Network, UNESCO, United Nations Academic Impact, Academic Council on the United Nations Systems, Global Digital Compact and other Actions Groups of HESI.

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