“The Thinking Machine,” AI, Higher Ed Professional Staff Work

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt

Published in April 2025

AI hadn’t really changed how I work until my institution partnered with Anthropic and I got access to Claude Cowork. While experimenting with Cowork, I read The Thinking Machine.

The book is not about how AI will change higher education. While The Thinking Machine talks about the impact of the release of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022 (“Students realized they could use it to write essays and homework was forever obsolete” p. 191), The Thinking Machine provides no insights into AI and the future of the university.

And yet, if we want a book to spark conversation about the future of professional staff work in higher education, then The Thinking Machine is an excellent choice.

Note that I’m restricting this AI–and–book reading recommendation to university professional staff work. There is plenty of conversation about AI and the future of teaching and learning and too little discussion about how AI will change professional academic staff work.

If my experience with Claude Cowork is generalizable, then academic professional staff work is about to undergo a radical shift. Since I started to integrate Cowork into my workflows, AI has become the medium in which I manipulate information. Spreadsheets, decks and documents are now developed, edited and refined collaboratively with Claude.

The process of discovering, synthesizing and adding value to information—the work of the academic staff laptop class—now almost always includes AI in the loop.

Once you start to work with AI to do knowledge work, you want more AI. The challenge becomes not finding ways to apply the tools, but running out of usage tokens. The scarcity is not potential productivity, but compute.

Upon complaining to a friend at my institution who works in IT about running up against my weekly Claude usage limits, he wrote back joking that a “small town in North Carolina is expecting rain that they can use to cook dinner since the diversion of local water supplies to Anthropic to cool servers just for you.”

The technological infrastructure that is changing the work of higher ed professional staff is, of course, NVIDIA’s GPU chips. The Thinking Machine tells the story of how NVIDIA’s advances in GPUs and parallel processing massively paid off when companies like OpenAI began to utilize these chips to train their deep learning models. Where NVIDIA’s business was once focused on supplying hardware for high-powered gaming PCs and on niche design and research markets, its chips are now optimized (and highly sought after) for the massive data centers that train and run the most advanced AI models.

The author of The Thinking Machine, Stephen Witt, approaches the subject with a deep concern about what AI will do to work (and his work as a writer). One of the themes of the book is Witt’s attempt to understand why NVIDIA’s co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, is so unconcerned about AI’s potential negative impact on society. And why is someone like Geoffrey Hinton (who received a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on neural networks and machine learning) so worried?

Witt is a fantastic writer. His 2015 book How Music Got Free changed how I thought about Napster, iTunes and the collapse of the legacy music industry. Reading The Thinking Machine hasn’t changed how I think about AI. Instead, I have been intensively using AI in my work, which has changed my thinking. But the book has helped me understand the infrastructure on which AI depends and the company (NVIDIA) and its CEO (Huang) at the center of this technological revolution.

If higher ed professional staff choose to read The Thinking Machine, we may wonder which of our jobs will not only be supplemented and complemented by AI but also replaced. And we might end up talking about the future, where any funding for hiring new academic staff or knowledge jobs must be accompanied by a justification for why that role can’t be accomplished with existing resources and AI.

What are you reading?