Florida's First Applied AI Program Has a Responsibility to This Conversation

 

Miami Dade College launched Florida's first Associates & Bachelor of Science in Applied Artificial Intelligence.

That is not a small thing. It means MDC made a decision that AI literacy is not a luxury for a four-year university student. It is a right for the working adults, the career changers, the first-generation students who make up the MDC community.

I am one of those students.

I have spent over 20 years in operations accounting across construction, manufacturing, insurance restoration, and retail. I enrolled in the Applied AI program because I believe the people who understand both the operational side of business and the architecture of AI are the people who will determine whether this technology serves workers or replaces them.

What I am watching in this industry concerns me deeply.

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are deploying humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing facilities trained on the labor of human workers. OpenAI published a 13-page policy paper this week proposing wealth funds and robot taxes to manage the economic fallout. Not one proposal in that paper addresses ownership of the AI training data generated by skilled physical labor.

The workers being displaced built the intelligence that is replacing them. They own none of it.

This is the defining workforce question of our time. And it is being answered right now, in real factories, without the workers at the table.

Florida's first Applied AI program sits in the middle of one of the most diverse working populations in the country. Miami is a manufacturing city. A logistics city. A garment city. A construction city. The workers in those industries are MDC's community.

The program has an opportunity to do something no other applied AI program in the country is doing. Train students not just to use AI tools but to understand and protect the labor rights of the people those tools are built on.

To Madeline Pumariega, President of Miami Dade College. To Manny Perez, Dean of Engineering Technology and Design. This series is part of a larger framework that I want to bring into that conversation formally.

To Pedro Santos and Mr. Knight at Entech. The panel discussion we shared was the beginning of this conversation. The framework has grown significantly since then and the Entech network represents exactly the kind of industry partner a pilot needs.

The capstone project for Florida's first Applied AI program should not just demonstrate what AI can build. It should demonstrate what AI must protect.

I help business owners design autonomous financial systems that work alongside their employees and strengthen the way their teams make decisions. My approach is grounded in years of seeing what happens when systems are built without people at the center.

Follow the blog at mindfuldollar.blogspot.com.

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