President Greg Crawford
Well, that's fantastic. Do you like being called a geek?

David Seidl
I love being called a geek. It would be it'd be a lie if I didn't admit to it.

President Greg Crawford
Hello, I'm Greg Crawford, president of Miami University, and welcome to "In Such a Place," the podcast where we explore the future of higher education and the vital role colleges and universities play in shaping our world. Technology is evolving at an unprecedented speed, reshaping how we live, how we work, and how we learn. In this episode, Miami's Vice President for IT and CIO David Seidl shares insights on AI quantum computing and innovation. We explore how disruptive technologies are transforming communities, how universities can prepare students for a fast changing world, and ways to ensure technology serves the public good. Well, welcome to the show, David, it's great to have you here.

David Seidl
Greg, thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this.

President Greg Crawford
Great!

David Seidl
So Greg, I have been here at Miami for seven years, but before I got here, I started off my career even before college as a geek, I got a scholarship to the internet my freshman year of high school before anybody knew what the internet was, and helped my dad do internet training through the early 90s. Went to school at Eastern Michigan doing something called communications technology, which was an early interdisciplinary program that had computer science and communications and all kinds of things baked into it, and then did a graduate degree in cyber security, back before cyber security was the thing we all did. And so all along the way, I've been a fan of technology and the disruptions that happened because of technology.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's fantastic. Do you like being called a geek?

David Seidl
I love being called a geek. It would be it'd be a lie if I didn't admit to it.

President Greg Crawford
Oh my gosh. I remember hiring you, and when you came in for the interview, I know one of our qualifications was, Are you a geek? And boy, search committee thought you were just the perfect fit.

David Seidl
There was one moment in in my previous organization where the entire IT organization was in a room, and somebody said, who's the biggest geek in IT? And the whole room looked at me, and I knew I was in trouble.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's fantastic. Well, we're so glad you're here. We're so fortunate to have you at Miami, what is disruptive technology in your mind and and how is that different than just an ordinary technology or innovation?

David Seidl
Sure, I think about this from the lens of the impact on technology on society. And so there are moments in history where technology changes the world, and those moments have been becoming more frequent, and they're becoming faster over the past few decades. So as an example, the automobile changed the world. Electricity changed the world. In our lifetimes, computers have changed the world, and then the internet changed it, and then cell phones and smartphones, and now AI, all of these have huge social impacts. We usually don't know what the impact is going to be when it appears. Usually when it appears, everybody panics about it. There were discussions about newspapers being available to everybody being the end of society. The telephone was going to end society. The automobile was definitely going to end society. Each of these things happens. They have significant impacts. Society changes around it. Our cities are designed around cars, and then we live in the world that's left after that. And so disruptive technologies are the things that change the world in subtle and not so subtle ways, and we have to figure out how to live with them.

President Greg Crawford
I remember my first personal computer. It was at our high school. I remember the first time I got a laptop. I remember the first time I used email, and I do remember the first time I used AI. But, when was the first time you as our IT professional and CIO, when was the first time you used AI and what was it for?

David Seidl
Ooh, this gets back to a definitional thing. So most of us now when we say AI, we mean something like Chat GPT, Gemini, or Claude, but AI has existed in other forms for quite a bit longer. We had things that we were calling machine learning, where we were using computer systems that could learn things. And so I was using machine learning in information security a decade and a half ago, in early, early forms. In terms of when I first used Chat GPT type technology, when it released, it was so exciting. I was so exciting. I was one of the people who went out and clicked on it and said, What is this going to do? And I will fully admit, I was like, I don't know. This is this? Is this is really cool. It's one of the fastest growing things out there. Is it going to become a thing? And then I watched, and I saw the reaction, and saw that it was the fastest application to 100 million users that we've ever seen, and that tells you the world changed, whether you are ready for it or not. The world is different right now. And so I said, I better get on board, and I've been using it since.

President Greg Crawford
So I have a quote here. We're going to go back to the geek theme, if that's okay with you?

David Seidl
Absolutely.

President Greg Crawford
Alright. And so I got a quote here that you're "an eternally curious geek with a focus on people." So how does that perspective influence how you approach disruptive technologies and actually how you approach your job here at Miami?

David Seidl
I realized that curiosity was a key part of my personality pretty early in my life. I was the kid who take things apart to see how they worked, and couldn't always necessarily put them back together, but I was curious along the whole way, and that curiosity means that I like to look at things from a bunch of different lenses. And so as I as I've grown in my career, I've also found that being people-centric is where my heart is. So I get to engage intellectually and with my heart when I think about things like that. So when I think about disruptive technologies, the geek in me is all in on this cool disruptive technology, and the human-centric and people-centric and organizational leader side of me says, What does this mean for the people and the organizations that I care about and the people around me? And so when you stop and think about that, you look at social change. And if you said, How has the internet changed your life? It might be a little thing like, when's the last time that you actually picked up a phone book? When is the last time you placed an order via a phone call? Or, what do you not leave Oxford for because Amazon will deliver it? But it also might mean that you are someone like me who, in the mid 90s wrote a letter for a scholarship and said, I think this internet thing is going to be a thing, and maybe I'll have a job in it, and an entire career might have appeared from somewhere that didn't exist three or four years before that. And I've spent my entire professional life doing a thing that was a dream when I was in high school. You can have all of those things with these technology disruptions.

President Greg Crawford
That's great. So you're in the era of IT, and you probably started in the dial up time.

David Seidl
Before dial up.

President Greg Crawford
We took our phones and we plugged them into this sort of suction cup type of device, and off we went, and we thought it was fast.

David Seidl
Oh yeah.

President Greg Crawford
So talk to me a little bit about the biggest changes you've seen over your career, over the few decades that you've been working in this IT space.

David Seidl
When I started teaching Internet training as a young teenager, working with my dad, who's a public librarian and who is also a bit of a geek as a public librarian, most people had never used the internet, and you had to teach them what a web browser was and how to visit a URL, visit a website. They'd never used email. You remember the first time you used email. We were taking people through their first time using email, and we've had an entire societal shift in how we access information, about how we conduct business, about the kinds of roles that we have. If I turn off the internet to Miami, the institution would stop. A few things -- we'd still feed people in the dining halls. A few other things would still happen, but the institution would pretty much stop. That was not how the world was 30 years ago. That's been a massive change, but that was on our computers. We had to go to a computer, we had to we had to access the internet that way. The next change I really like to reflect on is cell phones and smartphones. And think about the first time you pulled out your phone to look for something, first time you answered an email on your phone, and what that meant about your life. If people wanted to get a hold of you before that, they had to call a phone that was maybe not where you were at. You were not 24-by-7 accessible. You could take a vacation and because that phone didn't follow you, unless you gave them the phone number of the hotel you were at, nobody could reach you. And now all of that is with you. The knowledge of the entire planet is in your pocket for easy access. Communication with people from around the world, I met people from around the world because of the internet. I have friends in countries all over the world from the 90s because of the internet, and I would never have met them in a small town in Michigan otherwise. And that changed the world. Today, AI now interacts with you as you ask it questions. It helps you with analysis. It is starting to do logical operations. It's starting to act in ways that appear creative. It is enabling us to do things that we ourselves are not good at. So I am not an artist. If you ask me to draw something, you're going to get some moderately bad stick figures. But when I want to do design work, now I'm asking AI to help me get an idea closer to a place where I can take it to a real artist and say, now I've got an idea. And so we have enhanced human capability with this tool, and we don't know where it's going to go, but it's going to go there fast.

President Greg Crawford
Let me ask you this question. This has been a great conversation so far. So technology and disruptive technology is great, right? We all benefit from it in so many, many ways, unique and also collectively. But nevertheless, you lose your cell phone, you don't know what to do with yourself. You have thunderstorm in Oxford, internet goes out. What do I do with myself? As an IT professional how do you decouple from all of this technology? Because I think in some ways, we have to every now and then.

David Seidl
Yes.

President Greg Crawford
What's your special secret on how to get away and be human for a little bit without all the noise from this technology?

David Seidl
I like to learn new skills. So one of the most dangerous things to have me say is, how hard could it be? Because I usually very quickly figure out how hard it is. But I love to learn new things, and I also like to make things. So I grew up as a woodworker because of my dad. I have learned blacksmithing. I do leather working. I love to make things and then give them their people. So a lot of people running around Miami have pens that I've made. I am always looking for the next skill. I love to cook, I love to read, and I also write books in my spare time. So I stay pretty busy with things that are not technology, because that fills the other side of who I am.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, well, that's I ride my bike.

David Seidl
That I know.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that clears my head every morning.

President Greg Crawford
So let's talk about some examples of disruptive technology. We have all kinds of it, you know, taking place, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence and so many other things on all the sensors in our world that help predict things and and help us out in life. Now, if you think about all these different disruptive technologies, how do you think they'll impact Miami, or how do you think they've already impacted Miami?

David Seidl
The interesting thing is that Miami sits at the conflux of a bunch of these things, right? Because we teach students, we need to be able to educate them on the disruptive technology. But disruptive technologies have an impact, and then they have a long tail of what happens afterwards. The internet didn't happen overnight. It appeared over time, and now we just live with it and accept it. And so Miami has to adjust to it, because our students are bringing our faculty, bringing our staff are bringing it AI, for example, right now it's very real. We have to change how we do assessments in class. You can no longer just assume people will not be using AI for a lot of their a lot of their work. We have to change the expectations and tell students, this is an AI forward assignment. This is an AI is okay assignment. This is a no AI assignment. They're going to walk into a world that today's AI is not tomorrow's AI and will not be the AI by the time they graduate, and by the time they finish their career, they will have lived through entire technology cycles that go over and over, right? So I'm 30 years in, AI was not on our radar in a meaningful way five years ago like this, let alone 10. What did I learn in undergrad to prepare me for this? I learned to learn. I learned how to acquire knowledge and new skills. I learned to not stop doing so, and I learned that I could adjust and just move forward. And I think that's the thing that college does. It's not just hard skills, it's learning how to be a complete human being and one who's ready for the future.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that's great. So let's talk about the hard skills too. Yeah. So you've been, you're very active in the Miami Thrive, which is our strategic plan, our new, big, bold plan that we have just finished, and we're entering in the execution phase. But there's been sort of a confluence of a lot of new programs, facilities, infrastructure, around some of these disruptive technologies. So first. First, you know, we have the new McVey Data Science Building, which has got technology to the hilt for our computer science faculty, our Emerging Technology Business and Design faculty, and also our statistics faculty. And we moved into thrive in the last year, we've really focused in on quantum computing with a great new partnership with the Cleveland Clinic, and also a wonderful resource to have a quantum computer right here in Ohio, up in Cleveland, it's just very neat and powerful. And as you know, we were the first ones to come out with that Bachelor of Science degree, and then we had a lot of AI that came out of this Miami Thrive strategic plan across the board, that we need to train experts and people that can make these engines, and we need to know how to use all these engines. So when you look at all these different efforts, can you tell me how you see the convergence and how it may be benefiting students or Oxford or the state of Ohio or the nation? I know it's a big question, but would love to get your insights on that.

David Seidl
We have access to things that other people don't. And that is a really compelling moment. And I believe you've told this story in public as well the Cleveland Clinic when they went out to get the quantum computer and talk to IBM. IBM said, but nation states ask us for these. You know, France asks for one of these, not a medical clinic. That kind of access puts our students on the leading edge of being able to do quantum. And it's a good time, because this is, this is the beginning of when quantum is beginning to be accessible. At the same time, everybody who graduates from Miami over the next few years needs to know how to use AI. That is going to be table stakes for how we move forward, and the way we're combining those is through a lot of different things. Our programs and classes now have AI baked into them. We've just released a five part short course that is free for every faculty, staff and student at Miami to learn about AI from some of our amazing faculty members who took really deep knowledge, condensed it down, made it accessible, and built courses that are going to be available. I'm really excited about that. That is a baseline thing, but it's a really good baseline for all the people at Miami. And then we're bringing in technology. So through a National Science Foundation grant, we will bring on Miami's first really capable AI and GPU computation cluster that's going to allow our faculty to do research, our students to do research, to do things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do elsewhere. And we're looking at how we grow that. Just resourcing is big. The other side of it, and this is as a people person around this, as a person who thinks about technology and people, the and people side at Miami is great because our faculty are collaborating across boundaries. And so you're starting to see faculty from computer science working with physicists in quantum. You're seeing people in English and the Farmer School of Business and Computer Science and EHS all working together on AI projects, and so you start to see science appear at those interdisciplinary boundaries, thinking in ways that otherwise might not occur, or getting resources that might otherwise not be available. That's where I think Miami's going to have a really competitive advantage and a compelling pitch for our students. You can come in and do things that cross boundaries and that will serve you well for the rest of your life.

President Greg Crawford
Oh, that's great. And I like what you said also about the resources that are available to them. How many people are going to have access to a quantum computer in the next five or 10 years? It's not going to be very many.

David Seidl
It's nobody.

President Greg Crawford
Right? It's going to be great. And we're just so fortunate to be partnering with Cleveland Clinic to afford that to our students, to be those select few that have access to it.

David Seidl
When I talk to peers in the industry, so people at credit card companies, people at major Fortune 500 companies, they see the need to be ahead on quantum and they're starting to recruit quantum faculty. They will be able to recruit quantum undergrads from Miami, and that's the kind of staffing that they want to be able to fill in those ranks to support the people who are moving those decisions forward. If I was 18 right now, that's the thing I would be writing my letter about and saying, hey, AI and quantum, something's going to be there. I want to be one of the people who helps figure it out.

President Greg Crawford
I look back and if I was going to do it all over again, I would have, I'll go into physics in a heartbeat again. I just, I love nature and trying to explain it. And then in my era, it was semiconductors and flat panel displays and solar cells. And that was how quantum interconnected with me in my own education. But if I went back to my junior, senior year in college in a heartbeat, I'd be going after qubits and studying the superconductivity of materials that contribute to quantum computers.

David Seidl
And I will leave the physics of it to you, because quantum physics does melt my brain, but the application of things on my side, it's going to change the world in ways that we don't understand it. AI plus quantum is something I point my finger at and say, We're. When you put the two of them together, we're going to have unexpected outcomes, but they're going to be really remarkable.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I agree. So let's take that question a step further then you think about maybe how AI has influenced our culture. Now you are the IT person around here, and you're the one we look to to predict the future and to forecast and to keep us safe from the bad guys who are trying to break into our internet. You do all of that, from cyber security to everything else that we have on campus. Go back one year in your mind and reflect and give me one example of how something that AI has done, or that you observed that you did not expect.

David Seidl
There was a really recent moment that it makes sense, but it still surprised me, and so open AI just updated chat GPT from 4.0 to 5, and Chat GPT's personality changed, and people are mad. And Greg, I'm telling you, they are very mad because their friend was rewritten and is not as friendly as it was. Are you a person who names his cars? Do you name your vehicles?

President Greg Crawford
No, just our vacuum cleaner.

David Seidl
Gotcha. We like to humanize things, right? So the things that we interact with, we have a name for them. It has a personality. We like to do that and read into it. And so people have been building relationships with their chat bots. But the technology upgrade cycle means that your new friend may hit version five and no longer respond to you the same way, and you may get short, efficient answers, or you may get a different tone. And I knew all of those things about how people interact with technology, the ire that people felt so quickly and the the amount of response still surprised me.

President Greg Crawford
That is interesting.

David Seidl
Yeah, because we're now going to spend the rest of our adult lives with chat bots in it,

President Greg Crawford
Yes.

David Seidl
And with AI in it, and those will have an impact on us and the people around us. And we hope we get it right, but we're going to get it wrong sometimes too.

President Greg Crawford
Absolutely. So here's that big question for you has a little bit of a narrative. So, you know, leading an organization through covid, you know, we had our head down and we worked, worked, worked to keep everybody safe and secure for several years. We wake up after the covid pandemic and boom, AI seems to just be here today, 2022, 2023 whatever that timeframe is. Now I'm told that AI was actually researched for a long time. It actually probably goes back to the 1950s and so I was just curious. There must have been other waves of AI coming that we either missed or we didn't recognize or it wasn't ready. But how could it have been in play for so long that we knew about it and yet it's only been very recently since we've all sort of benefited from it or have been thinking about how to use it?

David Seidl
There were, I think, two things that made that moment happen. The first one was large language model research that really looked at how humans use language and how words are put together, and the transformers that actually make that work. So transformers a technical term, but basically it's the thing that makes AI actually produce text. And so some very foundational research had been happening in the few years before then, and was starting to take off with some Ooh aha moments. As a scientist, you know that moment the laboratory where I go, that's different. And there was some research from Google and other places that was really moving that forward, and that was happening. And people who were really AI knowledgeable, some of our faculty members were amongst them, were saying, There's something cool happening here, but what had not been made available was an interface to it that normal people could use. So researchers were playing with it. Major companies were using it behind the scenes to start to do transformative stuff, but you and I couldn't see it, and then open AI, put a web interface on the dang thing, and suddenly you could talk to this thing, and it would respond in ways that sounded really human. And so that moment in time was where you saw that 100 million users in the shortest amount of time we've ever seen because there's a compelling product that does interesting things. The next set of advances where you get better at doing math, you get better at doing logic, you get to do that. Those are harder than the initial, I call it a Mad Lib approach, where it's filling in a next sensible word, but those are the moments that also make the biggest difference in terms of AI being usable for other things. And now you can take AI and you can give it a data set, and I frequently do this exercise with folks. We download a free data set, and I say, ask the AI to tell you what's interesting about that data set, and it does a pretty good job. It's now a tool, and it's a useful tool to make us better at what we do that keeps getting better, that's changing the world.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, it's an interesting time, if you think back, and there's no doubt that NASA and space drove a lot of interest the United States for young people to want to race to engineering or science, you know, careers and do different things that it's always been credited to the space program that we had. And, you know, there's no doubt that computers for computer science majors gave them a great career. And the interest in young people. Do you think AI or even quantum computing is going to catch the attention of, you know, middle schoolers and high schoolers to pursue a career? Is that one of those revolutions, again, that we're experiencing that may drive some of these, some students, to really drive into these sort of new, technological, disruptive spaces?

David Seidl
Yes and, and the and is because the underlying things behind AI in particular remain math and statistics and relatively complicated subjects around engineering. Using AI is something that I think a lot of folks are going to be doing, and using AI tools is going to be broadly accessible. And I started down a path into computer science, and I will fully admit I am not a person who loves the math, and then I said, I can do IT, and I can use computer science, and I kind of a very successful career that I really enjoy in that space. And I think that's going to be a path a lot of people follow is using AI, using AI tools, but the underlying science of AI may remain somewhat esoteric. The same thing for quantum the people who can wrap their heads around quantum physics, there's not a whole lot of y'all, but the people for whom quantum may be absolutely transformative in terms of doing analysis or folding proteins or synthesizing materials or performing encryption to keep things secure. Those folks, there's a lot of them, and that's where it's exciting as well.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, I think we just had a conversation with our Chair of our department of computer science and software engineering. And you know, it's just been interesting with computer science departments, how they've gone from a computer science degree now to having AI degrees and quantum computing degrees, and they're really broadened out in terms of what they do. And one of the elements that he was impressing on us is that there's just more math required. And so it really does take somebody with that kind of acumen to jump into some of these new areas where disruptive technologies are prevalent.

David Seidl
And the interesting question there is, How soon does AI become really capable of self improving, and when do we lose the ability to understand what it did? Yeah, that's scary. It's terrifying and exciting, which is where disruptive technology sits.

President Greg Crawford
So, can you pull your crystal ball out for us?

David Seidl
Got it right here.

President Greg Crawford
Alright, that's really that's a big crystal ball, my goodness. So I mean, we heard this, maybe we even overuse this phrase quite a bit, but students today will likely work in careers that don't even exist yet. I think we've all seen that. We've experienced it in our own careers and so forth. But how should higher ed adapt to prepare students for such a kind of a career path that may seem uncertain, or maybe it may be several pivots. Unlike what we did, where we stuck with the same thing for decades, graduates today may be pivoting over and over and over again, and we're kind of seeing that in the job numbers, changing jobs, quite a bit changing industries. What do you think the role of higher ed is in this rapidly changing world?

David Seidl
This is really familiar to me, because as a technologist, I frequently tell people the technology I started my career with doesn't exist anymore. You can't even find it at Goodwill or in a scrap heap. It's been gone for 20 years already. And what I think people at that point, when I was an undergrad, were not saying, is change is going to be a continuous part of your life, and your career is going to be different, like you said, Greg, it's going to keep changing. I think we can equip our students by talking to them about the reality of that, and we have to then bring it to the classroom and say, Hey, roughly every five or 10 years, there will be a major, major change that disrupts your industry, other industries, industries around you, your life, the lives of others. And if you want to stay on top of that wave, here are some ways to think about it. Never stop learning. Find ways to stay engaged, build communities and networks, and then challenge yourself to just keep moving in those directions. I think there are a lot of things that we prepare people with. We just need to formalize and reinforce telling them and preparing them.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, that's a great answer. I agree. So in higher ed, too, are often perceived as being slow, but when you think about the changes and even the just the past few years, how rapid they have come, and how fast things have changed, and the skill sets and the new type of technology acumen that graduates need, how can higher ed keep pace with this? And how do we have to think differently than we might have thought even a decade ago?

David Seidl
It's a mindset change. I'm in a space where it changes all the time, and even I find myself sinking into a rut, right? It is comfortable to do the thing you have done before. It is comfortable to run things the way that you have before. I think we have to culturally, really reinforce that, change awareness and then cut space for people to not always be under constant change, right? So you need an ebb and flow. And so we have to find ways for different people to be at the at the cutting edge. We have to find ways to reinforce the positive aspects of it. We have to give people space to be human. Those all at once are hard here. We're we're changing our ERP, we're changing our main software product. We're doing AI. Quantum is coming. How do we find time for faculty members to refresh their classes, spend time on their students, invest in themselves, and still take a bit of time? And I think that's a challenge we've got to face, but I think it's something we can do.

President Greg Crawford
That is interesting. So when you think about that, we have so much technology in our lives, and we're looking at everything, whether it's a computer or iPhone, what have you, and you do have to decouple and think about being human. And Miami's always impressed upon the importance of a broad education, right? You study and what you're really good at your major, and then you do a lot of other things, and expand your thinking, your horizons, and also maybe engage in something that challenges you, that you're interested in, but maybe you didn't think was your thing, but you're going to jump into it head first. When you think about that, and you think about students, expectations shifting. Also in the future, we've seen a lot more of students headed towards the professional degrees, whether it's the technology space or business, etc. What kind of ways or education do you think we still should be doing here in Miami and and versus how we might have to change a little bit, because there's a lot coming at these new graduates when they get ready for their career?

David Seidl
I frequently ask people, How many of the hard skills that you learned are you still using 20 years in, and they say bits and pieces. And I say, how many of the softer skills that you learned are you using? And they'll say almost all of them. So am I using the programming language I learned in my freshman year as an undergrad? I haven't touched it in 20 years.

President Greg Crawford
I learned Pascal, by the way.

David Seidl
I learned Pascal early on as well, and 14 other languages along the way, and I currently use basically zero of them, because I've moved into a leadership role and nobody wants to let me do programming anymore. But the public speaking course that I took, I'm in a room with the president of a university, who's my boss, talking to a podcast audience that's paying off right now. The courses I had that made me think history courses, the classes that taught me to communicate, English courses, I use those every day. The hard skill courses taught me how to learn new skills, and I use the learning process of those new skills all the time. I'm learning AI using the same techniques I used to learn new technologies when I was an undergrad and grad student. All of those components need to be there. We just have to recognize why they're both valuable and how they become valuable over our lifespan.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, yeah, when you think about AI, and you think about, you know, what is, you know, your strength as a human, or your strength as an organization, and then and you compete effectively, that way you get better jobs, or maybe your organization gets better ranked, whatever it may be. Now, with AI coming on board, I think you know, you can fill in your gaps in many ways. And so talk to me a little bit about that, because I think it's, it's an interesting question, because if your strength was a writer, now, more people can write more effectively and communicate. They can even build PowerPoint slides more effectively, right? And they can do math quicker. And so in organizations, you know, once that those may have not have been so student centered can now be more student centered. So when AI kind of brings up organizations or people you know, closer to where we term excellence, or you know and so forth, what do you think about that? Are we all going to have to get better? Or what's it going to say about our strengths and weakness?

David Seidl
There's, there's an old quote, "The future is here. It's just not distributed equally." And I think that's part of technology change, especially around disruption like this is it's going to hit at different speeds. And so there will be places where you can continue doing the same thing for a while. It's the old "How long do you keep making buggy whips" question. But what I think we're all going to have to do is we're going to have to understand that we are competing in a space where the technology is changing and you have the opportunity to use new tools. I grew up at a point in time where not everybody knew how to use Microsoft Office, and then we started interviewing, and would say, Do you know how to use Microsoft Office, and if you wanted a job, you probably needed to be able to use some of those tools. AI is going to be an expectation that you know how to use that tool. Now. Nobody says, Do you know how to use Microsoft Office? Nobody says, Do you know how to use email? That is table stakes for having a job these days. And if you didn't, and you showed up, we'd say, Greg, what's going on? Why don't you know how to type? Why can't you send an email? Why can't you do these things? AI is going to be like that. We're all going to be expected to leverage tools to make us better, because that's part of the job, and we'll be not only covering for the things we're not as good at, but hopefully, using AI as a multiplier. And I'm a big preacher about technology, should be a multiplier. We should be able to do more because we've got technology around AI has to do that to be valuable, and it's doing that right now. It should only get better.

President Greg Crawford
Well, that's a great answer, very optimistic answer. So you we have a lot of graduates out there that are going to probably enter in the IT field in the next year or two, that'll be graduating from Miami and and you, I know, you interview a lot of people, a lot of entry level people that are just, you know, coming in with a brand new degree and jumping into a space, and it could be certainly higher ed, but we know it crosses every industry, whether it's healthcare or manufacturing or not for profits. What are some of the questions that you ask when you're hiring somebody brand new, just coming out of college that wants to go into the IT space? What should some of these graduates get ready for?

David Seidl
I like to ask people what they have learned recently and how, and I don't care if you say I learned a technical skill, or I made fancy toast. I want to know that you are curious and willing to learn, and I like to see what the answer for that is. We as an organization like to ask about how people communicate, what they do when they face challenges, how they have made a project or something complex happen, how they plan it out, how they think about it. All of those are really useful. I like people who can think, and I like people who have potential. Because if I can have those two things, and then you can communicate, and I can put you in a room and get along with people, I can have you do an amazing thing for the rest of your career. If those are the things you walk in with, if you have a bundle of skills, like a Miami grad has as well, I can put you in a job, aim you in a direction, and you're going to do amazing things. So I look for all of those things, but I care a lot about the thought process.

President Greg Crawford
So your field in IT, you can't afford to be in a silo. You're working across boundaries. You work with every single unit on campus, every single one, every single academic department, and in so many ways, you're doing a lot of work that's transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary. You certainly got to carry around a lot of different vocabularies from one unit to the next. Tell us a little bit about that and why it's so critical to think that way, to be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary if you're in this disruptive technology space.

David Seidl
The things that occur at the boundaries are frequently the most innovative and interesting. And if you can break silos, if you can get people who otherwise don't work together or don't even know what they're doing to talk about it. You can have those aha moments. You can have that, ooh, if only I had a this thing, and the other person says, Well, I've got that. I've always wanted one of your things. Those moments are how you change organizations and get things done. And so one of my jobs is to basically travel around Miami, building relationships and listening to people and then looking where we solve things that were either unsolvable or that nobody's paying attention to or that need to be done, and we can connect them. And I laugh, Greg, I'm the child of two librarians. I am an introvert through and through, but I'm an introvert with a coping strategy, and my coping strategy is I tell me, tell myself it's part of my job to go do that and break down those silos and to make things visible. And when we've done it, for example, with our AI task force that we had running people said, oh, I can suddenly see the rest of what's going on, and I couldn't before, and now I have ideas, and now I know who to talk to, and now I can do this cool thing, or I can give my students this experience. That's where magic happens, and that's what I want to do, because I thrive on that kind of magic happening.

President Greg Crawford
We got to look ahead 10 years and think about disruptive technologies, and what do you think is coming down the pike, and how might it impact our communities? How might impact higher ed and so forth? And I just can't help but reflect upon what we talked about earlier, that in 1950s we had some AI getting started, and then, you know, it came, you know, decades later, in a big and bold way which we see today. What are we looking at in the next 10 years that maybe we don't have our eyes on quite yet, but is coming down the road in terms of a disruptive technology.

David Seidl
The thing I have been waving my hands at because I don't know what it's going to look like, is something I mentioned earlier, quantum plus AI.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah.

David Seidl
Because there are things that quantum is really good at solving in a very short and direct process that AI takes a lot of computation for. But if you combine the two of them and you're able to use AI for really broad discovery using quantum we might get answers to things that we currently cannot solve or don't even think to solve. And I think that's pretty exciting. I also think that there are terrifying scenarios around that where AI gets very smart and we don't understand what it's doing anymore. And as a science fiction fan, there are some bad scenarios behind that too. So I'm hoping that we have the people who are thinking about ethics and boundaries in the room as we're building those tools.

President Greg Crawford
I think so too. I think that combination of those two technologies, and the speed at which in the growing is going to be very impactful.

David Seidl
When we get to... we're in the moment for our audience, where, back when computers were in the basements of just a handful of organizations around the country, the government had one, IBM had one. We're in that moment for quantum and they're relatively small scale quantum computers in terms of capability. In 10 years, quantum is likely to be a thing that most major corporations have access to, and that is starting to move out into the rest of society as something that's accessible. And that timeframe means that change will happen as it becomes more available, and then we will see those unexpected interactions.

President Greg Crawford
Yeah, well said. So let's go to one final question. Okay, you're gonna leave our listeners. I know they probably enjoyed this podcast as much as I did, David, so great job.

David Seidl
Thank you.

President Greg Crawford
But let's leave them with just one thing, one takeaway from this conversation about disruptive technologies. What do you want to leave our listeners with today?

David Seidl
Greg, you know me pretty well. I want to leave our listeners with an assignment, and that is to go challenge yourself. The example I frequently give is that one of my staff members said I'm going to use AI a different way every day for 30 days, and I'm going to report it out to the organization in a this is what I did over my summer break, kind of report on a daily basis. And he did everything from put in his doctor's appointments and figure out what questions he was going to ask the doctor, to figure out recipes for what he was going to cook that night based on what was in the fridge. This is your moment. Take a little bit of headspace, figure out an AI tool and challenge yourself, and you will be riding the wave of the disruptive technology well.

President Greg Crawford
David, thank you. I know everyone's enjoyed the conversation today, and thank you for being with us and sharing all your expertise and your wisdom with our listeners. And this disruptive technology theme is really fun to think about with you.

David Seidl
Thank you, Greg. I really had fun.

President Greg Crawford
Thanks for listening to this episode of in such a place from Miami University. Stay tuned for more great episodes with more great guests wherever podcasts are found.