At the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, fears are often expressed that computers will replace human beings. The reality is, in many fields, this is already happening — and rightly so.
The machine proved able to rapidly analyse massive amounts of data — in this case, two million pages of medical journals, 1.5-million patient records and 600 000 medical findings — and then apply its synthesis to the CT scans shown to it to reach its conclusions. This level of information absorption clearly surpasses human ability.
This is easier said than done, though. One cannot just feed any data into a computer and expect a stream of solutions to be spat out on the other side. There is a useful term for this in computer science — “gigo”, which stands for “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, if your input is flawed, so will your output be.
It is our task as universities to prepare our students for the new world of work where the discovery of useful knowledge from data will become integral to most of what they do in future. Furthermore, big data and AI will fundamentally change not only the world of work, but also our world as knowledge workers at universities.
At Stellenbosch University, we responded to this challenge by adopting new rules on academic entities within and alongside departments and faculties. This has paved the way for establishing our new School for Data Science and Computational Thinking, which will be launched at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study on July 29.