As the uses of artificial intelligence rapidly expand, Oregon’s leaders want its future workforce to stay competitive—despite the possible dangers of the technology taking away the very jobs they seek.
In late April, Governor Tina Kotek announced that the state of Oregon was investing $10 million into a partnership with a leading AI corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
As part of the collaboration outlined in a memorandum of understanding, the corporation, Nvidia, will launch an AI ambassador program in the state’s colleges and universities to train students in AI-related work, build education programs and curriculum to meet “evolving industry needs,” and help identify opportunities to bring AI to public sector work.
“AI is transforming the way we live and work, and Oregon should not be left behind,” Kotek said in a press release announcing the investment. “This collaboration with Nvidia helps us meet the moment. Oregon will not only prepare our workers, businesses, and public service professionals for a prosperous future, we will lead the way.”
According to the governor’s office, Nvidia already has over 600 “university ambassadors” at institutions around the world.
“This is an innovative approach to prepare Oregonians for high-paying jobs in a fast-moving industry and to maintain Oregon’s place as a state where tech businesses come to set up shop—which benefits the communities where they operate and the state economy as a whole,” Roxy Mayer, Kotek’s press secretary, wrote in an email to the Mercury.
According to Mayer, Nvidia may not be the only AI company the state partners with.
“The Governor is open to more conversations—and actively having conversations—with other companies working in this space,” Mayer wrote. “Nvidia has a unique model that relates to [the] Governor’s interest in workforce development, but she recognizes there are others doing unique and important work in this space.”
Nevertheless, the deal with Nvidia stands as a marker of the state’s current approach to AI.
In February, Kotek unveiled the state’s artificial intelligence action plan—a document produced by a 14-person advisory council that included a pair of state legislators. The plan calls for the state to develop an AI “ecosystem” that uses the technology to bolster government efficiency and accountability “while upholding the highest standards of privacy and ethical integrity.”
In her announcement of the plan, Kotek said that the state “cannot ignore” the rapid development of AI and must instead approach the technology proactively. Mayer similarly wrote that the increasing prominence of AI is not something the state has any particular control over.
“The Governor is committed to using new technology like AI responsibly, ethically, and securely in service of making Oregonians’ lives better,” Mayer wrote. “She believes that to continue to be a global leader in the tech industry, Oregon cannot deny the challenges and complexities of the future—including the rapid evolution of technology—but we can do our best to prepare for them.”
Nevertheless, there are reasons to be concerned about the influence of the AI industry and the technology itself. Some have sounded the alarm about the effects AI use may have on literacy, while others have noted its unreliability as an information provider.
Ramon Alvarado, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon who serves on the school’s AI council, agreed that AI has arrived and that corporations like Nvidia are leading the way.
“It’s not like we live in a world in which there’s a choice,” Alvarado said. “This is undeniably a powerful, new technology that is very applicable in many domains.”
Understanding AI may be essential for college graduates to stay competitive in the workforce, but Alvarado noted that the deal with Nvidia is typical of the way in which states have slashed funding for public universities and increasingly sought, over the last five-plus decades, to outsource funding to private corporations and individuals.
Given that, Alvarado said, it makes sense that states like Oregon would choose to partner with a leading corporation like Nvidia. The graphics chip maker is currently valued at $3.9 trillion, and has positioned itself as an AI powerhouse. Doing so, in a sense, may help fulfill the state’s responsibility to equip its students to face a future that may in large part be determined by AI.
“Yes of course we want to do things responsibly, yes of course we want to [minimize] harms related to AI, but at the same time, we don’t want to leave our students without the ability to have trained on this brand new technology that promises to upend a lot of the conventional jobs they’ll be pursuing,” Alvarado said.
Still, Alvarado urged caution—arguing that the suggestion that AI will be ubiquitous in every part of society in the near future is unfounded. Matthew Ellis, a media historian and theorist at Portland State University, cautioned against the notion that AI’s rise is inevitable at all.
“If you actually look through the way that certain technologies emerge as institutional, corporate interest-led, created, [and] funded rather than inevitable, technological development, it’s very revealing.”
Ellis noted that, in contrast to previous technological innovations, the AI landscape is dominated by big technology firms like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Nvidia, which has been described in the MIT Technology Review as holding “a near monopoly on state-of-the-art chips for AI training and is another key choke point along the AI supply chain.”
For those corporations, it pays to create an impression that AI is now a fact of modern life and to get states to adopt that mode of thinking.
“When the state says that, to me, all they’re doing is reproducing the claim industry is making about itself and why it is important and why we don’t have a choice to use AI,” Ellis said. “That’s a discourse industry is saying about itself.”
The state, certainly, doesn’t want to be left behind economically. Central to Kotek’s approach, according to Mayer, is ensuring that Oregon retains its position as a leader in multiple facets of the technology industry.
“The Governor will continue to explore ways to invest in Oregon’s high-tech industry—such as semiconductors, software, [and] IT,” Mayer wrote. “It is an important industry in Oregon and the Governor believes in engaging with the industry to encourage its retention, expansion, and recruitment in the state.”
Injecting an AI-forward curriculum into state schools in partnership with a leading corporate entity, however, may be another matter.
Some are concerned with what is already known about how generative AI affects the brain, with a study conducted by researchers at MIT finding that student use of AI dramatically lowers brain connectivity—not to mention that AI is threatening the existence of many of the very jobs many students go to school to train for.
Alvarado noted that humanity has long been concerned about the arrival of new technologies, but that AI is presenting new challenges.
“It’s been a soul-searching exercise,” he said.
