3.38. Dr. Mahesh Daas - Boston Architectural College

Dr. JP Novin welcomes Dr. Mahesh Daas, President of Boston Architectural College, to the podcast to discuss AI’s impact on higher education and the future workforce. Dr. Novin highlights Plexuss’s role in enrollment marketing and shares his pursuit of a doctorate in higher education. Dr. Daas provides an overview of Boston Architectural College’s 137-year history and its distinctive work-integrated educational model, along with the institution’s scholarly focus on robotics, AI, and design computation, including works such as Towards Robotic Architecture.Their conversation frames AI as the fourth industrial revolution, using the SMR framework, and explores how creative and cognitive work is increasingly vulnerable, while human excellence and the bespoke, relationship-driven nature of architecture continue to hold value. Dr. Daas emphasizes that education must prioritize “learning to learn” in order to adapt to collaboration with nonhuman intelligences and that experimentation through “sandboxes” is essential before regulation. He further stresses the responsibility of leadership to ensure that rapid AI adoption does not deepen social inequity by creating a divide between “humans with AI” and “humans without AI,” urging thoughtful, critical engagement with AI to empower individuals and society during this period of disruption.