Navigating the Next Big ThingSpring 2025

I was seven when my family replaced our rotary dial with our first push-button telephone. My siblings and I endlessly pressed the lit numbers to hear the beeps. Some older brothers even held a contest to determine the fastest button-pusher in the household. We felt very modern.

Some time later, our TV console with its rabbit-ear antenna was replaced by a sleek Zenith model with a remote control. Not only could we navigate six local channels — the new device also had a mute button. We would never have to listen to annoying commercials again.

While in school, I shared a Royal typewriter with my seven siblings. During college, my part-time office job introduced me to IBM word processors — no more editing with messy Liquid Paper. IBM marketed its auto-save capabilities, but after losing 23 pages of my senior thesis, I learned to be skeptical when something sounded too good to be true.

My father never quite mastered the remote control, and my mother’s Hotmail account outlived the brand. My parents have since passed away, but I would love to see their reaction to almost every American adult carrying a pocket-sized, all-in-one computer, camera and phone.

The rapid modernization of consumer tech over the past 50 years has been staggering. Those of us who’ve been around more than a handful of decades — and, honestly, even those of us who haven’t — have navigated lives filled with constant technological change. This issue’s cover story celebrates Oregon State’s significant role in the newest of these changes — artificial intelligence.

AI is more than a trendy catchphrase. This technology that OSU alumni like Jensen Huang and faculty like Distinguished Professor Emeritus Thomas Dietterich have helped pioneer has the potential to deliver stunning analyses of vast amounts of data at unimaginable speeds, accelerating breakthroughs in research and development, automating workflows and processes, reducing human errors and eliminating repetitive tasks.

I don’t know what changes AI has in store, but when I think about it in the context of our great university, I feel the same excitement I did when I held my first cellphone.  What unyielding global problems will AI help our researchers solve? How will it position today’s students to achieve what we never imagined?

The future is now. While I admit to some trepidation, I have never been so proud that Oregon Staters are leading the way.