Strange and scary digital happenings transpired about the time that Virginia Tech professor Rishi Jaitly brainstormed a new fellowship focusing on technology leadership.
Developers introduced ChatGPT to a planet that wasn’t necessarily ready to have all its digital actions and interactions fed into machine learning networks. A New York Times reporter interacting with a chatbot beta wrote that the machine fell “in love” with him and wanted to be destructive in the world. ChatGPT developer Open AI’s board and chief executive have tussled, with the board ousting and reinstating Sam Altman in the space of three recent days.
Authors and other creators accused tech leaders of stealing their works and feeding them into neural networks in order to create new things with little to no human participation.
Not long after Jaitly’s brainchild — VT’s Institute for Leadership in Technology — got rolling in September, more than 30 attorneys general filed suit against Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram. The suit, which AGs including Virginia’s Jason Miyares filed in a California federal courthouse, alleged that Meta and its networks bear responsibility for children’s social media addiction and related problems, including depression. Elsewhere on social media, major advertisers abandoned X, formerly known as Twitter, after owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Jaitly, a New York City native whose resume includes international leadership positions at Google and Twitter, said this is the right time to bring humanities into the tech equation. He and Sylvester Johnson, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for the Humanities, believe that the Leadership in Technology class of 2024 is the first time anyone has tried such an approach.
The 11 students will study while continuing their jobs at such companies as Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter. Since September, they have engaged in classes that include historic examples of leadership and ancient religious texts, with sections on storytelling and artistic creation still to come. After a two-day introductory visit to Blacksburg, they have been meeting online, with more in-person events planned.
The goal for the yearlong fellowship is to develop the students — mid-career technology leaders from as close as Blacksburg and Charlottesville and as far away as India, Ireland and Mexico — into what Jaitly calls “full-stack” leaders. It’s a play on tech-world terminology: A full-stack developer can build both the server side and client side of an application.
“I think that the arts and the humanities are an antidote to so much of what ails culture,” Jaitly said. “I’m of course positing via our institute that the humanities are a route to leadership. I know there is a there there, as evidenced by our class and the demand for our institute.
“But if you take a bigger step back, you know, the humanities aren’t just a superpower that gives you the skills and sensibilities for higher leadership. They’re sort of a path to a healthier civic life, a healthier digital culture, a healthier interior life. … Anyway, I think you’re going to see, we are one example of many responses to the last two decades of inescapable tech.”
Jaitly, 40, who graduated from Princeton University with a history degree, got a job as communications director and speechwriter for former Google CEO (and one-time Blacksburg resident) Eric Schmidt before helping pioneer Google’s and YouTube’s moves into South Asia. He would return there in a similar role for Twitter.
Jaitly has been on the ground floor for startups including Times Bridge, an international investment and partnership firm centered in India, and Michigan Corps, which uses the internet to help Michigan natives give back to their home state. (Why Michigan? Detroit is his wife’s hometown.)
“When I was coming of age in leadership, it felt like … we were ushering in techtopia, and I think we’ve all realized in the last few years, myself included, that the story’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said. “I do view our institute and what I founded in context of a larger cultural response to not just what’s the superpower of the future, but how do we realize a better version of ourselves individually and collectively? … It’s occurring in a moment where, you know, there’s a lot of public conversation. It makes us sort of feel relevant in the zeitgeist, which is pretty cool.”
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Jaitly grew up a son of doctors — his mother an oncologist, his father a cardiologist. He was going to be a doctor, too. But something different was clicking inside him.
“It seems like I animate … feeling deep, intellectual joy when I’m immersed in the study of the human past,” he said. “And I started taking chemistry courses and all that sort of stuff. And I told myself, Look, I think I’d be a great doctor, but I want to enjoy every step of the way. I want to feel intellectually alive, not just at the payoff, but each step along the way.”
He was a student leader, and after he graduated, Princeton selected him to join its board of trustees. Coincidentally, the university added Google’s Schmidt to the board, and the two became friendly. Jaitly was asked to deliver the prayer at the end of a meeting. Schmidt, after hearing the prayer Jaitly wrote, turned to him and told him that Google needed people like him.
“I’ll never forget that moment,” Jaitly said.
He was working for a Washington, D.C., nonprofit at the time and considering going into education.
“I wouldn’t have gotten to that point had I not stayed connected to my intuition around who I am and what my playbook is, and what my compass is, and I wouldn’t have gotten to what I’m doing now,” he said. “You know, because I could have kept settling and cruise-controlling. But I’ve never settled for that cruise control. And I think, hopefully, there’s some lessons there for young people in particular.”
He, his wife and children had moved to Charlottesville in recent years, where he was running Times Bridge, an arm of The Times of India publication company. Times Bridge connects Western companies such as Uber, Airbnb and Coursera to expansion in India and other Asian markets, Jaitly said. He was its founding CEO, but as had so often happened in his life, he desired change. Simultaneously, a friend and former Google colleague, Scott Hartley, had written a book, “The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World.” (It’s now part of the LIT class curriculum, and Hartley is an adviser for Virginia Tech’s humanities department.)
“In all these tech companies, I would look to my left and there’d be a business credential person, and to my right, I’d look and there would be an engineering credential person. But I somehow survived and thrived, right?” Jaitly said. “I built products at Google. I led engineering acquisitions at Twitter. I did plenty of sales deals. I built a venture firm. And it dawned on me about six, seven years ago that the humanities that broadly construed my sensibility had played a pretty big role in my success in tech.
“And I also realized that it plays this underground invisible role in Silicon Valley. The difference at Google between a senior manager of engineering and a vice president of engineering often amounted not to someone’s a better computational thinker than the other, but amounted to human skills. Maybe he was an English major and then did engineering, or maybe he or she had an ability to inspire and envision or be creative or be empathetic or think about the market differently.
“So right around then, I said I’ve got to get involved as a side hustle in evangelizing, for young people in particular, that your path into technology and entrepreneurship need not necessarily always be about business credentials or tech credentials. You can be an entrepreneur and a leader in technology as a humanist, too, someone who’s horizontally capable.”
In that pursuit, Jaitly began joining boards, which included an appointment to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Among his colleagues there: Virginia Tech humanities guru Johnson, who saw in him someone who would make a good fit at the university’s Center for Humanities, as a professor of practice and distinguished fellow.
“So a couple of visits later, it just dawned on me that this might be a uniquely compelling stage on which to evangelize and incubate new ways for the humanities to sit in our educational and civic life,” Jaitly said. “And I was really struck by the publicly spirited nature of this place, the service-centric nature of our culture, the entrepreneurial nature of this place, [where] any idea, all ideas are entertained.”
He delighted in the full-circle nature of it all. Two guys he met on boards were involved — one who used to live in Blacksburg lured him from a public service career to tech, and within two decades, a guy who lives in Blacksburg had lured him back to public service.
“I’m a believer in listening to the universe, and it had me at hello,” he said.
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Jaitly’s arrival at Virginia Tech in June 2022 came at a fraught time for higher education.
Across the country, enrollment in humanities studies fell drastically between 2012 and the pandemic era, according to a New Yorker piece titled “The End of the English Major.”
Those changes coincide with a general push toward STEM — science, technology, engineering and math education.
Virginia Tech, however, has grown its humanities offerings. Johnson, the humanities center’s founding director, also is in charge of the university’s Tech for Humanity Initiative. He has noted the issues at other universities while reading articles decrying the death of humanities education. Meanwhile, tech CEOs appear regularly before Congress to answer questions regarding privacy, bias, fairness, policy and regulation issues, monopoly concerns — “the human side of tech,” Johnson said.
“We’ve got to incentivize comprehensive education, comprehensive skills. I don’t know if you just want to admit we don’t really care about democracy and we don’t care about society and we don’t care about the outcomes as long as we can all just do math and write code, which by the way, AI is going to do better than we can anyhow. …
“We certainly need technical learning, and we need the humanities. … We need the judgment and discernment and the training, the expertise and understanding of how to structure our societal innovation, not just technical innovation. They have to go together, and we have to recognize that if we’re unhappy about the technology leadership, that is really a reflection of our society, a reflection of our policies and our curricula and our school and our degree programs and the way we train the talent.
“And if we don’t like it, let’s be more comprehensive, let’s change how we’re preparing future talent. And let’s reward students for their curiosity when they actually want to go beyond technical only. Let’s encourage them to be comprehensive, because that’s what we need for our future.”
Johnson, like Jaitly, began his college career with an interest in science. He majored in chemistry and education with a minor in religion at Florida A&M University, then emerged from Union Theological Seminary in 2002 with a doctorate in contemporary religious thought.
“I have really enjoyed being able to work with him, because he has tremendous skill and experience,” Johnson said of his new colleague. “He has created many times something out of a vision that people might not have understood at the time that he was envisioning it, and then it comes to life and everybody gets it.”
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Class member Sruthi Krishnan learned about the fellowship via an email from a colleague at Boeing’s facilities in Huntsville, Alabama. Boeing has multiple Virginia Tech connections, including some employees who also teach there.
Krishnan graduated from Virginia Tech with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering, with a mathematics minor, and moved to Huntsville 11 years ago. She is a structural and payload design engineer and part of a Boeing team supporting NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville.
She said that exploration outside her technology-centric comfort zone is key. In her application letter for the fellowship, she wrote that humanities learning has been scarce in her professional journey. Meanwhile, she has watched as AI entered the humanities and created existential questions.
“So within the current technology landscape, if AI machines can do everything that a human can but much better, then what is so special [about] being a human?” she wrote. “Where is the ‘awe and wonder’ in the other that the humanities inspire?”
Krishnan does not want to be a manager, per se, because she knows that within a few years of that sort of work, her technical skills will atrophy. But communication and understanding among teams is crucial to her job.
“I don’t know how most people think of engineers. You see them as someone who sits in a corner and does coding all day long,” she said, then chuckled. “And that’s exactly the kind of person that I am, but I also want to talk. … I want to do technical leadership.”
The class of 2024 is an amazing group that was already doing impressive work in their respective fields, Johnson said. They’re bringing knowledge and experience of their own, plus curiosity and insight into complex issues, he said. They understand the value of high level humanities skills, not simply for leadership purposes, but for personal enrichment.
“And it’s also clear that their participation in this program is going to be transformative, because it is a proof of concept; it is demonstrating to the world … I would say, maybe, giving permission for other people to do this,” said Johnson, who was leading the students in November through a seminar entitled Scriptures and Sacred Narratives. “You don’t know you want to do something until you see someone do it, and you realize that maybe you were just too afraid to imagine it, or try to, and someone does it and you think, Oh yeah, I’d like to do that too, and now I know I can.
“And we think that’s what’s going to happen as well, because everyone in this group of fellows is a real exemplar in their own way.”
Johnson and Jaitly believe the concept can move beyond the Virginia Tech landscape and on to other institutions. Jaitly said he has received hundreds of inquiries from around the world.
“Humanistic study has many forms of value,” Johnson said. “This is one of them. It can elevate leadership and can enrich it. But if you make that available, and we think that there’s a demand … we think that it can grow significantly. …
“It doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter where you live. … You know, it’s not some alien thing that we teach. This is something that’s just integral to the human condition and, actually, I think the longer people go through their lives, the more thoughtful and aware and interested in these things they become.”
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