UT Austin Faculty Initiative AHOI Grills Linguist and Philosopher on AI, Alignment, and the University's Future
gregd_nlp · x · 2026-10-05
UT Austin's Liberal Arts school published a wide-ranging interview with linguist Kyle Mahowald and philosopher Harvey Lederman about their new faculty collective, AHOI (AI+Human Objectives Initiative), which aims to keep advanced AI's social impact aligned with human goals and values.
Key threads:
- Whether alignment is a hopeless project, and why universities have been "asleep at the wheel" on AI.
- How AI is already transforming research and teaching, and what skills tomorrow's workers will need — if there are workers at all.
- What social institutions will be needed to navigate upheavals in work, democracy, and education.
- Whether humanistic thinkers still have time to shape AI models, or whether the timeline of expansion is already locked in.
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