Technology and Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education

In this candid, thought-provoking commentary, ASU President Michael M. Crow dismantles the fear and skepticism surrounding technology and artificial intelligence in education. He challenges critics by reframing technology as a fundamental part of human advancement—from written language to genetically modified crops to modern smartphones. Crow argues that higher education must embrace innovation to unlock the full potential of the human brain—what he calls the “supercomputer in your head.” By leveraging AI, advanced visualization tools, and adaptive learning technologies, universities can expand access, reduce costs, and deepen learning outcomes across disciplines. This video is essential viewing for educators, technologists, and policymakers seeking to understand how AI can enhance—not replace—the human learning experience in the 21st century.

I don't understand people that are opposed to what technology, the glasses that you wear on your face that allow your eyes to actually work?

The books that you read: that's only a 500 year old technology. The symbols on pages that you, that you read, that you would have read on papyrus or wood or stone before that, even that a recent technology of writing. The chickpeas that you consume, the wheat that you eat, those have been engineered by humans, both of them, for over 10,000 years. The clothing that you wear on your body is a technology. So what is it about technologies that you're afraid of? The phone that you talk on the typewriter that you typed a message on before there were computers, before you were keyboarding. You were typing before you were typing. You were writing before you were writing, you were singing. You know, and so in some ways, I like, don't get it.

And so, yes, we have to be concerned about how we enhance learning, how do we help learning to be, to be, competent? How do we help human beings to be, you know, masters of the past, masters of the present, and masters of the future?

Anything that helps people to achieve the full realization of the supercomputer that's in their brain, in their head, we need.

There was a picture that I sent out a few weeks ago, taken from a Harvard lab of a small 57,000 cell portion of a woman's brain in which the advanced photo micrograph of the picture was down to the level of the individual neurons and the synapses connecting the neurons and the chemical structures connecting all of that.

So this is a small 57,000 cells, which is smaller than the end of a pin, that the structure was as small as the end of a pin with 57,000 cells in it. Those 57,000 cells had a memory equivalency in the trillions of bytes of information in 57,000 cells. People have no idea that we have between our ears. And, you know, we just have to find ways to enhance that.

So it turns out that human beings are not capable of remembering a 400 digit number. We're capable of building a machine that can remember a 4 million digit number.

Well, why wouldn't we use that for everything that we do? The human brain is not capable of thinking about 25 things at one time. It might be capable of seven things at one time, or eight. Some people are nine, occasionally 11. If I can get a machine that can help me to think about complexity in different kinds of ways, or if I am a, a plumber and there's a series of ways that I can enhance my learning by using advanced visual learning systems, learning, having tools, visualization, enhancement, all kinds of other things that can enhance my ability to be a better plumber. Why wouldn't I use that?

And what I do get is I think that people are worried about how we used to learn. Okay. I haven't seen any of that going away. People still read books. People still talk to their parents. People still talk to their rabbis or their imams or their ministers or their gurus.

I mean, you know, you know, they're still learning that way. And other such people, they, we learn visually. And so, I guess, you know, movies, which are unbelievable portrayals of human drama and human psychology and human emotion and human experience and human stories that are unbelievably telling or motivating or depressing to teach you things. That's all technology that's existed for, you know, 120 years.

And it's been transformational to everything that we are. And so I guess I'd say I don't get the question.