A college junior asked me, "Do you think AI will affect much of our lives?"

College students are ill-prepared, even when change has accelerated dramatically. The pace of change has accelerated to the point that one can no longer wait for authorities to guide us through. Everyone is struggling to keep up. This includes colleges, companies and whole industries. Technological changes now seemingly occur not in decades or years but in months and weeks.

So, what should I say to this college junior? I would anchor my answer in a concrete case to illustrate. As the CEO of a firm with an AI platform for treating language-based disorders, I will use a reading disability, dyslexia, as the case study. From this case, these are the 5 takeaways.

1. Do an Environmental Scan

Companies undertake environmental scans regularly to identify opportunities, risks and threats to their strategic goals. This involves monitoring and analyzing internal and external environments. By looking at the big picture in this way, businesses can be more proactive and thus effective in dealing with change.

Individuals too should do the same routinely. Otherwise they could be left wondering outside the office building the morning they were laid off, "What just happened?" As organizations respond immediately and nimbly to fluctuations in the industry, an employee's stellar job review or contribution to the boss's prized project no longer buffers them from layoffs.

In scanning the dyslexia landscape, we find that current delivery systems for diagnosis and treatment contain many points of friction. The public school system primarily is tasked with this responsibility as it serves most of the child population. About 1 in 5 children has dyslexia. Yet barely half of these children get diagnosed and treated. And even when treated, schools' teacher-led interventions are unable to help them overcome their reading difficulty. Here is a situation with a huge, persistent problem in need of a solution. And indeed, AI provided a solution, with far-reaching implications to the field.

For your field of interest, how does the landscape look? How may it look in a year? Or 6 months? What role may you play in it? Do you need to adjust previous expectations?

2. Don't Assume the Innovation Isn't Here Yet

Just because you don't see it in the market yet doesn't necessarily mean that the product does not exist. For example, our firm worked quietly for 10 years on developing a novel way to correct a neurological condition, dyslexia. From the public's standpoint, our AI program seemingly appeared out of nowhere last year, when media started covering it.

Like us, other tech developers may also operate in stealth mode to protect intellectual property and trade secrets. The more substantial the technological breakthrough, the more likely it will seemingly burst upon the scene in finished form.

One may consider the large, intractable problems in a field to gauge where big changes may occur. But it is harder to predict or determine if they will be solved and when. This is because it depends on many factors in a fluid, dynamic market. Just as important, innovation is driven by individuals.

Who are the people in your field? What is their specialization or expertise? What skills are missing? What should you learn or develop to be able to contribute to it substantially?

In some cases, the solution is found outside the field. This is true of the dyslexia problem. Dyslexia, as a neurodevelopmental disorder and learning disability, is traditionally studied and treated in pediatrics, psychology, neuroscience and education. Traditional methods cannot correct this disorder to get at-risk students to read on grade level.

By redefining dyslexia in computational terms, AI technology managed to identify its underlying language processing inefficiencies and clear them. Therefore, think outside the box.

3. Develop Other Types of Thinking

Thinking outside the box is creative thinking. Creative thinking involves identifying problems, seeing new patterns, connecting disparate domains and exploring solutions in situations with no right answers. You can see how crucial creative thinking is, given a world with shifting answers, where practitioners sometimes are still trying to figure out the right questions to ask.

Schools put a premium on critical thinking, i.e., skeptical examination of carefully selected valid information to arrive at sound judgment. But other types of thinking are equally essential nowadays. I alluded to strategic thinking in discussing environmental scanning. Strategic thinking involves understanding the situation, identifying goals, crafting a feasible solution to achieve these goals and anticipating opportunities and threats. That is what every college student who is about to enter the workforce should do.

Discussions on ethics in AI often revolve around cheating with ChatGPT. But ethical thinking is more than that. With each innovation, we must ask, “Who does it impact? For better or for worse? Does it serve a wider good?”

In reviewing your whole program, which types of thinking does it focus on? Are any left out? If so, how do you plan to develop them on your own?

4. Don't Compete Where Computers Have an Advantage

We used to think of artificial intelligence as simulation of human intelligence, like robots that perform mundane tasks that humans pass on. However, AI can surpass human intelligence in some areas now.

A case in point is the AI expert system used for dyslexia. Training a teacher to support a student with dyslexia takes many hours of coursework and at least 100 hours of practicum. Even then, the teacher still cannot get to the root of the problem to clear the student's reading difficulty.

This problem has 3 requirements that computers can fulfill but not humans. The first is real-time analysis of billions of data points per pupil to decide how to design the next activity for the student. The second is to do so at sub-second speeds to match the student's brain processing. The third is to perform these tasks for all students in need all at once.

In short, AI can outperform human practitioners in some areas and do so at scale.

True, these are turbulent times, yet they also bring exceptionally bright opportunities. In the dyslexia case, the AI invention benefits all stakeholders. Teachers' instruction is now more effective with formerly struggling learners. Schools get relief from these pressures: low reading scores, teacher shortage, ballooning special ed costs, rising school taxes and budget cuts.

I repeat, do the environmental scan. Where are the opportunities in your field? You may have to re-evaluate old assumptions to find new opportunities.

5. Rethink Old Assumptions

When our team challenged the old assumption—that dyslexia could not be corrected—a new field emerged. In this field, a brain condition can be diagnosed and treated non-invasively with a game-based program in the cloud.

2024 was a watershed year for AI. By using natural language, AI became accessible to the layperson and thus all industries. To get a computer program to produce grammatical sentences like we do, there are basically 2 possible paths. One is to create a perfect syntactic model that will generate grammatically correct sentences and filter out ungrammatical ones. We are nowhere close to this elegant solution. (I started my career in syntax, the study of sentence formation, and switched to AI because of this.)

Another is to consume all data available from speakers and writers and make guesstimates on the next possible word in a sentence. Large Language Models (LLMs) follow this second path.

The lesson here is that an AI breakthrough may simply circumvent a problem rather than try to solve it.

About the author

Coral PS Hoh, PhD, is a clinical linguist and architect of Dysolve® AI. She is the founder and CEO of EduNational LLC, the maker of Dysolve® AI.