Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

The final question comes from Kevin O’Keefe who asks, How should we be educating our students today to prepare them for a future where a machine will write for them and think for them? This is a seismic shift that our society hasn’t yet figured out. Yes, there have been technological advances like the simple calculator ,where we did not need to do long division ourselves, but when you take away the rigor of thinking for yourself and allow a machine to do that for you, how prepared will our children be for the future?

I think that the jury on AI is still out. To be sure, it can do some incredible things, but lately I’ve been hearing a lot of “where do we go from here” talk surrounding it. That being said, regardless of where it takes us, there is going to be a lot of disruption. Some of it is already happening.

I have a lot to say on the subject of AI and learning. I’m actually working on a book on the future of learning, but don’t hold your breath. It will take a while to finish and publish.

What you’ve probably heard of AI and learning so far has been students giving an assignment to a large language model and then having it complete the assignment or write a full paper.

Clearly, this makes no sense as no one is learning anything. To prevent this from happening in the future, we are going to have to change how we teach.

Our current educational system isn’t designed to teach children in the best way possible. It is designed to teach children at scale. It isn’t for teaching one person; it is for teaching hundreds of people. Many of the things we think of as staples of the educational system, such as written tests and papers, are things that can be evaluated en masse.

I think that there is enormous potential for AI to actually be the teacher. One-on-one instruction has proven to be, hands down, the best way for people to learn. The problem is, you can’t really do that in a school with hundreds or thousands of kids.

Try this yourself. Go to a site like ChatGPT and tell it that you want it to tutor you in some subject. Pick something that you don’t know very well. If you think you aren’t good at math, then have it teach you exponents or logarithms.

It will go through things step by step. Feel free to ask it questions like a five-year-old if you don’t understand it. It will go at your pace and at your level of understanding, because there is no other level when working one-on-one.

How do we evaluate progress in such a way that we can be sure that AI isn’t doing all the work?

One solution will be to require tests or essays to be done on paper or on devices that are not connected to the internet. Some places are doing this already. Another way would be to treat the classroom like a dojo. To advance, you have to demonstrate your ability to a master or a panel of masters, aka teachers. You would have to prove to them via live questions and answers that you are competent and know the subject matter. If you talk to someone and ask questions, you can quickly tell if they know what they are talking about or not. There might be other solutions as well, but what they will all have in common is that it will require a rethinking of how we currently do things.

There is a whole lot more to be said on the subject, but the short of it is the way we’ve done things is going to have to change.