Mathematician Po-Shen Loh Urges Critical Thinking and Humanity in the Age of AI
Young people should commit to deep learning and understanding—even as artificial-intelligence tools deliver efficiency and make information more accessible, renowned mathematician and social entrepreneur Po-Shen Loh told the Milton community. Loh explained that AI tools must be combined with critical thinking, curiosity, and ethics in order to have positive impacts in the world.
“Even today, I keep learning. I keep coming up with new experiences,” Loh told audiences in the Hobbs Commons of the new Farokhzad Mathematics Center. “You can’t figure out what interests you unless you’re always learning new things.”
Loh is a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University and served as the coach of the U.S.A. International Mathematical Olympiad team from 2013 to 2023. He was once a member of the team, along with Milton grad PAUL VALIANT ’01. In 1999, Loh received a silver medal in the Olympiad while Valiant won gold.
Loh spent a day at Milton speaking with students in the morning and an audience of students, faculty, alumni, and families in the evening. He visited classes in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments and spent time with Middle School faculty and students, as well as the school’s College Counseling Office and AI working group.
AI has led to many advancements in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), but Loh explained that STEM and humanities learning must go hand in hand. “You need both. If you don’t have humanities, you have no business doing any research that might affect real people. If you’re going to build things that are going to affect the lives of real people, you better understand people, or you shouldn’t be doing it. On the other hand, if you’re on the humanities side, I strongly recommend you figure out what the heck all this STEM stuff is, because it’ll make you able to do everything more effectively.”
With this mindset, Loh has founded programs and software that help middle and high school students build intelligence and problem-solving skills. “We need to build intelligence,” he said. “It is not just whether you can get the score on the test. If you know how to solve a problem because you saw it before, it doesn’t count. You’ve got to turn the ideas into something.”
Students should be empowered by their skills—along with their values—to think critically and make a difference, Loh said. “The world will be run by you, your generation. So the question then becomes, how do we empower people who have this fire in them, to want to do something of value for other people?”