Revitalizing American manufacturing has been at the center of political and economic discourse — and presidential campaigns — for decades. David Siegel thinks he has an answer: Start paying more attention to our physical world and less on the virtual one.
Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun recently sat down with Siegel — a computer scientist, philanthropist and co-founder of tech-focused financial services company Two Sigma — to discuss everything from revitalizing American industry and infrastructure to artificial intelligence and next steps for higher education.
The world of higher education will play a vital role in the revitalization, Siegel says. Partnerships between private industry and academic institutions are more necessary than ever, not only to train the next generation of innovators but also to provide them with the resources and space to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors in high-need sectors in the U.S., such as advanced manufacturing.
“Higher ed, like everything else in society, has to evolve, and it has evolved. Northeastern is an example of innovation in higher education. There’s a lot of money to be made, actually, by refocusing on these challenges, but it has to start with the education because who’s going to do it if no one graduates with an itch and the right skillset with an understanding of what the industry problems are?” Siegel told Aoun during a fireside chat in Northeastern’s ISEC Auditorium.
The solutions to many of our most pressing problems — housing, food, transportation — won’t be solved by AI but by everyone pitching in, Siegel says.
“It really comes from a thousand shining lights,” he says.
Endeavors like jumpstarting American advanced manufacturing or things like semiconductors face deficits in workforce and know-how, both of which have gone abroad.
“What’s needed is everything, and everyone can do their part,” Siegel says. “Northeastern and other institutions can partner with industry to improve the workforce. The government can do certain kinds of things. Hopefully, the youth of America will want to devote their careers to it. They’ll hopefully do the thing that people do with software: They’ll create startups.”
However, universities have to be more open to their faculty and students starting businesses and entrepreneurial ventures in the first place, Aoun adds.
“Many of our faculty have launched various companies, and also some of these have been incubated here in the labs, and we really foster that,” Aoun explains.
All of that work will be a generation-spanning project but one that Siegel views as vital if the U.S. wants to solve some of its most challenging problems. For a generation, Siegel says, the U.S. “has ignored physical world problems from shipbuilding to building infrastructure of all kinds, any kind of manufacturing problem” in favor of pursuing innovation in tech that remains rooted in the virtual world.
Although Siegel expresses skepticism about AI — “it’s in the virtual world, our problems are in the physical world,” he says — he admits that AI tools will become turbochargers for academic research in a way that could produce physical world solutions. As a result, Siegel founded the Open Athena Project last year to help provide academic researchers with private-industry-caliber AI software engineers to fill a gap that exists in higher education.
Siegel and Aoun both agreed that, despite some anxieties about AI replacing entry-level jobs, these tools could instead raise the standard for what an entry-level job is in the first place. That, in turn, could raise the caliber of students who are coming out of universities and provide an even more skilled workforce downstream.
“Essentially, entry-level jobs are no longer going to be entry-level jobs,” Aoun says. “They’re going to be second level, which is good.”
To address the challenges Siegel discussed, the solutions have to start with education. That means not only evolving higher education but learning from global leaders across industries, Aoun says.
The conversation was the final piece of a daylong leadership retreat focused on Northeastern’s priorities across teaching and research, with a particular emphasis on the university’s artificial intelligence strategy.