Abstract:

A limited number of studies have been performed on the expectations and fears of university students after the introduction of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, and its huge impact in the Academic world on both teaching and research, followed by other recent Generative AI tools. This study aims to contribute to the rather insufficient work in this area, concentrating on the expectations of university students for the recent effects of fast developments in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field. It also tries to understand the fears of students related with AI, especially with regards to their job-finding fears after graduation and in the upcoming years. A questionnaire with 15 questions is prepared and applied to third year software engineering program students at the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU), North Cyprus. The questionnaire is designed to understand the opinion of students with respect to their expectations from the future such as the percentage of teaching to be taken over by AI in the coming 5, 10 or 20 years and whether AI will have intelligence that surpasses that of humans. Some questions are trying to understand the job-related fears of students, asking them to indicate what percentage of their jobs will be lost to AI in the coming 5, 10 and 20 years. Also, there is a question on whether they are afraid of the latest developments in AI The same questionnaire is also applied to third, and fourth year Engineering major students at Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey. The results are being processed, but early indications point to a common fact that most of the students think a considerable percentage of jobs in their profession will be lost to AI. Also, a number of focus group studies are programmed with third year software engineering students at EMU for a further analysis of negative opinions expressed during the questionnaire study. During the conference, the findings of the questionnaire and focus group studies will be presented and discussed. We believe this study will help researchers planning to work in this area of to determine the impacts of recent fast developments in the AI field.

Keywords:

Artificial intelligence, expectations of university students, software engineering, engineering.