Great piece once again. I strongly agree that AI is primarily exposing a system that was already broken, certainly in my own experience. We effectively already had a Kafkaesque credentialing machine that most people thought was inhuman. The defining experience for millions upon millions of students has been the impersonal 300-seat lecture hall where you are lucky to have maybe one conversation with a lecturer throughout your degree. That model is arguably more alienating than a machine that at least (phenomologicaly) responds to you personally.
My hope is that AI might actually help with some of this. For the first time in history, a student reading Aquinas or tackling a complex physics problem set can have a patient, personal tutor. It's not human, but it's a form of interactive dialogue 99.999% of people never had access to before. My, perhaps overly optimistic hope, is that it could help re-humanize learning at scale.
Two other thoughts to extend your point:
- Job Displacement Fear: We often get this wrong. When spreadsheets first arrived people thought it was game over for accountants. Just as what actually happened I think AI will likely just inflate work expectations (probably both in degrees and professional work). We will just catch up there in a few years.
- The Physical World: The AI transformation isn't just a digital change. You can already see a big push for general-purpose robots, the 'physical world' skills we might see as 'safe' will be transformed too. I think this makes your core argument even stronger! If both knowledge work and physical trades are likely to be radically changed in the coming decades, building an entire education system as a 'job pipeline' is almost comically futile.
Agree to most of this. I enjoy using AI for factual retrieval—like what year did such or such happen? And so on. I think it's harder when it comes to interpretive decisions (the WHYs). So an AI tutor can be helpful, I agree, but probably has some specific limits.
Agree about job displacement. I think some of it is real, some are not a real threat.
Physical world. I agree. And even plumbers/contractors will use augmented AI to learn how to build/finish a project. And robots are going to be build houses very soon (i.e., a robotic construct that can finish a frame of a house). It's happening already. Give it 20 years for mass production.
So no one is SAFE. But there is likely an order of effect.
Amen. Do you think that digital overload could also reignite a craving for this kind of deep formation to occur in in-person settings? Or at the very least, a preference for a hybrid of sorts?
You’re in my head, Wyatt.
Nice!
Great piece once again. I strongly agree that AI is primarily exposing a system that was already broken, certainly in my own experience. We effectively already had a Kafkaesque credentialing machine that most people thought was inhuman. The defining experience for millions upon millions of students has been the impersonal 300-seat lecture hall where you are lucky to have maybe one conversation with a lecturer throughout your degree. That model is arguably more alienating than a machine that at least (phenomologicaly) responds to you personally.
My hope is that AI might actually help with some of this. For the first time in history, a student reading Aquinas or tackling a complex physics problem set can have a patient, personal tutor. It's not human, but it's a form of interactive dialogue 99.999% of people never had access to before. My, perhaps overly optimistic hope, is that it could help re-humanize learning at scale.
Two other thoughts to extend your point:
- Job Displacement Fear: We often get this wrong. When spreadsheets first arrived people thought it was game over for accountants. Just as what actually happened I think AI will likely just inflate work expectations (probably both in degrees and professional work). We will just catch up there in a few years.
- The Physical World: The AI transformation isn't just a digital change. You can already see a big push for general-purpose robots, the 'physical world' skills we might see as 'safe' will be transformed too. I think this makes your core argument even stronger! If both knowledge work and physical trades are likely to be radically changed in the coming decades, building an entire education system as a 'job pipeline' is almost comically futile.
Thanks, Alastair.
Agree to most of this. I enjoy using AI for factual retrieval—like what year did such or such happen? And so on. I think it's harder when it comes to interpretive decisions (the WHYs). So an AI tutor can be helpful, I agree, but probably has some specific limits.
Agree about job displacement. I think some of it is real, some are not a real threat.
Physical world. I agree. And even plumbers/contractors will use augmented AI to learn how to build/finish a project. And robots are going to be build houses very soon (i.e., a robotic construct that can finish a frame of a house). It's happening already. Give it 20 years for mass production.
So no one is SAFE. But there is likely an order of effect.
Amen. Do you think that digital overload could also reignite a craving for this kind of deep formation to occur in in-person settings? Or at the very least, a preference for a hybrid of sorts?