On Monday, President Safa Zaki announced a $50 million donation from Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings ’83 to propel the College toward the forefront of liberal arts institutions engaging with artificial intelligence (AI). With this unprecedented gift, the College will launch the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, which will shape Bowdoin’s interdisciplinary approach to examining and grappling with the ethics and utilization of AI.

“We will continue to see the accelerating trend in what AI is capable of,” Zaki said in an interview with the Orient. “I think some of the most interesting and important questions in the years to come won’t be answered by a single field, but they’ll be answered by lots of different approaches. I want Bowdoin students to be at the forefront of leading those conversations, because I believe in the power of this education and what it affords in the long run.”

For Zaki, the College’s commitment to the common good is at the center of the initiative, which is the product of a months-long conversation with Hastings on AI use.

“This whole project is about essentially making sure that the impacts of AI have the greatest chance of benefiting and not hurting humanity,” Zaki said. “Essentially, how AI can help humanity flourish rather than flounder in the face of this transformative technology.”

Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Eric Chown will chair an advisory committee to guide the initiative’s implementation and future and also serve as its faculty director. Seven faculty members representing a variety of departments will serve on the committee, reflecting the College’s interdisciplinary approach to interacting with the impacts of AI.

“President Zaki very much feels like this initiative is about supporting and enabling faculty,” Chown said. “In that sense, a lot of the leadership should come from the faculty. This committee will be there to provide that leadership, to decide what events to organize, who to invite to them [and] what kinds of things we should be doing for other faculty who aren’t on the committee who want to participate in AI.”

In addition to offering faculty trainings, workshops and symposiums on AI use, the committee will handle the hiring process for ten new faculty members across a wide range of disciplines in the coming years.

“What we’re talking about is not [hiring] people who are experts in making AI,” Chown said. “We’re talking about people who engage with it in different ways, who look at its impact on society or how it can be used to supercharge research in [fields such as] art history or anthropology.”

The advisory committee will work to incorporate the perspectives of students, faculty and staff in creating a foundation for adapting to the future of rapid AI development.

“At some level, the timeline [of the initiative] is forever,” Chown said. “What we would really like to do is set this up so that it’s a sustainable path for Bowdoin well into the future. AI is changing so much—and it’s not just AI. It’s education and technology in general—that we need to think of ways that Bowdoin can sustainably go forward and be agile enough to deal with those changes.”

Recognizing the constantly evolving landscape of AI use across disciplines, Zaki emphasized that Hastings’s gift—the largest in Bowdoin’s 231-year history—will afford the College the resources to create a lasting impact on AI study.

“One of the really nice things about this gift is that it leaves the College with a lot of flexibility on how to use it…. The speed at which this [AI development] will happen is worth us sitting up and taking notice and making sure that we’re ready,” Zaki said. “We’re graduating students who are thinking about the ethics of this, who are well versed in the ways in which this will complicate our lives. [We need to make sure that] our faculty have the time to experiment with different modes of teaching that might work better as the world changes and that they have the right resources to do so if they choose.”