Keywords
AI;DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION;EMERGING TECHNOLOGIESAbstract
This tutorial is based upon the Best Tutorial at I/ITSEC 2024, which focused on the why, how, and what of Generative AI. In 2025, we expand to include an examination of other emerging AI innovations, including Agentic AI, advanced robotics, quantum-empowered AI, and AI in combination with other fields, such as Generative AI-empowered synthetic biology.
Our tutorial is quite human-centric. It’s not a deep dive on software development or deep mathematics, nor is it another lazy walkthrough of “prompt engineering” recipes. Instead, we’ve approached AI from a different lens, exploring the questions it raises about our structures and systems, ways of working, and the future of our communities.
Our tutorial includes several parts:
- We begin by reviewing the foundations of AI, so that even those who’ve somehow avoided discussions of Generative AI can have a sense of what these algorithms can do and roughly how they work. This includes a no-nonsense overview of the relationships between Good Old-Fashioned AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Generative AI. It will also include a brief description of how Generative AI works, including considerations of data quality and bias.
- New in 2025, we consider emerging innovations in AI, such as Agentic AI and the combination of Generative AI with other emerging and disruptive technologies, such as synthetic biology.
- Then we pause to underscore the tightly entwined relationship between Modeling, Simulation, and Training (MS&T) and AI. Both fields inherently rely upon each other, and they overlap in many ways.
- We then explore notions of change across art, culture, organizations, society, and security. How will these structures evolve as AI grows more pervasive? Examples include structural changes to work, the ways we value and navigate information, and new models of learning and assessment.
- Finally, we end with a practical discussion designed to encourage attendees to engage in strategic foresight: thinking about how Generative AI is likely to create change within their own organizations and communities and what they should be doing to influence and navigate these changes.
This is an exciting (if volatile) new world, and perhaps, the ideas explored within this tutorial will help attendees find their ways a little bit better.