President Anders O. Bjarklev editorial from Dynamo.
AI is a powerful technology. It holds enormous potential to accelerate solutions to some of our greatest societal challenges, ranging from healthcare to energy optimization. But artificial intelligence is not a magic spell that produces miraculous results simply by uttering the words.
Nevertheless, we see several examples of this, including during the autumn local election campaign, where free nurseries were promised in Copenhagen. The funding, according to the optimistic politician, was to come from savings in administration, partly by utilizing AI, which would make expensive staff redundant. A ‘calculation’ that was criticised for being completely unrealistic. In other words, it was pure wishful thinking.
Now it is reported that universities in this country can save hundreds of millions of kroner in research administration with the help of AI. As the President for 15 years at DTU, where I, together with the rest of the executive management and our board, have always focused on running efficiently, avoiding waste and staying within budget, I must point out that it also sounds completely unrealistic that we could achieve savings on that scale in our research administration through the use of AI. It is also wishful thinking.
We have seen this before, for example around 10 years ago, when the public sector switched to Digital Post, where the sky-high expectations for savings proved difficult to meet. Around the same time, Sundhedsplatformen (Danish integrated health platform) was introduced in the Capital Region of Denmark and Region Zealand. Here, too, disproportionately high expectations regarding the scale of the savings had been created in advance.
At DTU, we love technology. We develop it. We teach it. We use it ourselves. But no matter how enthusiastic we may be about technology, we also maintain a critical stance towards it. We therefore issue this call whenever anyone tries to ‘sell’ technological solutions as pure magic: Be critical, remain realistic, and avoid magical thinking. Anything else would be irresponsible and unethical.
