How AI Will Force Education to (Finally) Change
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Today, we are talking about how AI could force education to change in ways that it should have a long, long time ago. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Thanks to today's sponsors, Blitzy and Vertise Labs. And to get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief. ♪

All right, friends, welcome back to a long reads episode of the AI Daily Brief. Although this one is going to be a little bit different. There were a couple of different sort of viral articles that all related to this topic of AI and education. And I ended up deciding that instead of doing a full article read through, we're going to read a couple of excerpts and basically have a broader sort of more general discussion.

Now, I would like to establish some bona fides for this discussion since I am about to present some heretical opinions when it comes to college and AI and education. And basically what I'd like to say is that I am not some renegade entrepreneur who dropped out to go pursue a totally alternative path. I went to Northwestern, graduated near the top of my class, was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, and stuck around for three years building more programs at Northwestern, some of which have actually survived to this day.

Point being, I loved college. I think the undergraduate experience was incredible from a human developmental perspective, from an intellectual interest perspective. And yet I also believe, with every fiber of my being, that there is basically no correlation between high achievement in school and high achievement in the real world. Or at least there is far less correlation than the economic underpinnings of our college and educational system would want you to believe.

So that's my background. That's the perspective that I'm bringing into this conversation. This week, a piece in the New York Intelligencer went wildly viral. It was called Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College. ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project.

Now, unsurprisingly, part of the setup for this is the story we talked about a couple of weeks ago, which is the cheat on everything startup Clulee, which was founded by a college dropout or rather someone who was kicked out of college for cheating.

The company's thesis is that what we call cheating today is just a pattern of the future that you might as well go get out ahead of. I'm not going to rehash all the arguments from that. You can go back and listen to the episode, Is the Future of AI Cheating on Everything? But I do want to grab a couple of the highlight quotes that have gone particularly viral from this piece. One was, I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in. And when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic.

Critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line? To what extent is schooling hindering students' cognitive ability to think critically? Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy, but one that argues learning is what makes us truly human. She wasn't sure what to make of the question.

I use AI a lot, like every day, she said. And I do believe it could take away that critical thinking part. But it's just, now that we rely on it, we really can't imagine living without it.

Another viral quote was the section about Roy Lee, the Clueless founder, who provoked so much of this conversation a couple of weeks ago. The piece reads, Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools. He didn't get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college before transferring to Columbia.

His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.

When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn't worry much about academics or his GPA. Most assignments in college are not relevant, he told me. They're hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them. While other new students fretted over the university's rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as intellectually expansive and personally transformative, Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get into an Ivy League university only to offload all the learning to a robot, he said, it's the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.

Now, this is not some rabid piece, vaingloriously defending the higher education system and pretending that AI is all bad. A lot of it just recognizes that we're in the midst of a change that we won't fully understand the implications of for some time. The author writes, It'll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students' brains. Some early research shows that when students offload cognitive duties onto chatbots,

Their capacity for memory, problem solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical thinking skills. One found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.

And even as someone who is fully invested, as you guys well know, in AI and optimistic about the future, I think it's totally reasonable to have these questions. They're concerns that I share. I think about them in the context of my kids. What I don't think, though, is that the challenge that AI represents to education and the potential diminishment of the current system we have is necessarily a fully bad thing.

Let's hold aside the set of opinions that view this as just awful. If you go search for college AI on X, you're going to find plenty of people who will tell you that this is bleak, or in this case, just unrelentingly bleak. But I want to share some different takes. Investor Nick Carter writes, I fully support the rampant use of AI among college students. Grade inflation meant most college grads were already functionally illiterate. AI is just the catalyst to expose it. The credential was already worthless. Now it's just undeniable.

He continues, around 63% of high school grads enroll in college. The number should be 15 to 20%. The subset of people who actually have the desire and will to learn for themselves, even in the age of AI. Most grads are just there to check the box. Similarly, Abby for the people, who I would venture to say is probably on the opposite end of the political spectrum as Nick, writes, please don't act surprised that kids are using AI in college. Most are only there to get a degree in the hopes that they won't be forced to work for minimum wage for their entire life.

Capitalism has turned higher education into a means to an end. Ariel Azarod writes, And again, I'm not reading all of the political subtext, but we are talking about wildly divergent political backgrounds that these people all saying roughly the same thing are coming from.

I thought this take by the Babylon Bees' Dan Dillon was really funny. People are mad that kids are cheating their way through college with AI. Meanwhile, their future job will mostly consist of writing AI prompts, so it actually seems like decent job experience? Today's episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context. Which,

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And then there's the set of takes that start to turn on the idea that maybe this reflects something that needs to change on a more fundamental level. The New York Times' Kevin Roos writes, I'm sympathetic to the professors quoted in this, but at a certain point, if your students can cheat their way through your class with AI, you probably need to redesign your class. Investor John Arnold writes, there is a massive disconnect between how AI is rapidly transforming the nature of learning, knowledge, and intelligence, and the

and the glacial pace of change at universities. And the reality is something has to give. Anand Sanwal writes, AI is eating entry-level jobs. For the first time in nearly four decades, recent college grads are doing worse in the job market than the general population. Not the same, worse. That bottom rung of white-collar work, the reports, the research summaries, the PowerPoints, the reality is that AI does that all now, faster, cheaper, 24-7. And AI is only getting better, faster, and cheaper.

Meanwhile, fewer entry-level hires, diminishing college ROI, grads drowning in debt and uncertainty. We told students, get into a good school and everything else will work out. Kind of looks like that promise is busted. This chart isn't just a red flag, it's a siren. Now this comes from a piece by Derek Thompson, who by the way graduated Northwestern right around the same time as I did, called Something Alarming is Happening to the Job Market, a new sign that AI is competing with college grads.

And this, while a little beyond the scope of today's episode, is one of those short and medium-term challenges that I do think we absolutely need to be thinking about when it comes to AI.

As I've mentioned before, my base case is that things look really good for the world once we've really adapted to the new paradigm that AI represents, but that the dislocations in the short term could be tremendous. We're not going to be able to just tell people who have been in their jobs for four decades that they need to upskill and it'll be fine. And we're going to see certain types of dislocations that are profound and that we have to deal with the consequences of.

One of those is the fact that there's basically no place for new employees to go to get mentored and learn from an older generation because AI is just sucking up so much of the work that they would have previously done. Frankly, I haven't seen a lot of good solutions to that problem, but it is the type of problem that we're going to have to address.

But I think addressing real problems is exactly the point. The call to action here is not to ban AI from colleges. It's to design education for a new world in which AI exists.

Professor Ethan Malek wrote, I warned about the homework apocalypse in 2023. It happened as I predicted. There is a world where AI and traditional education get along very well. Mixes of active in-class learning, AI-assisted assignments and tutors, blue books, etc. But it needs to be built. And that's the point. It needs to be built. The more time we spend fighting the tide, and the less time we spend redesigning education fundamentally from the ground up for this new and finally unignorable reality,

the worse off we're going to be. And what's great is that there is a ton of energy around that potential redesign. Another piece that I liked this week on these themes was by Sid Dobrin on govtech.com and was called, Is This Our Sputnik Moment for AI in K-12? The U.S. needs a national plan to compete with China for dominance in the next generation of world-changing technology, and the education sector needs different degrees of oversight and objectives than commercial AI.

He pointed to President Trump's recent executive order, arguing that advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth will be pivotal for maintaining our global competitiveness, but it's really all about the how. He points to the fact that China has for years emphasized the importance of AI education to create a future talent pool, and that the U.S. has to catch up.

Now, this, of course, is focused on education around AI itself, but the broader point about a redesign and recommitment to education I think stands as well. One group that's offering some perspective on that is the CS4ALL initiative, who recently released an open letter that starts, What if a single class could help close wage gaps?

unlock $660 billion in economic potential every year for everyday Americans, and address the skills gap we currently face. It goes on, This is possible today if we include computer science and AI as a core part of every student's education. Just one high school computer science course boosts wages by 8% for all students, regardless of career path or whether they attend college.

Yet most students never even try computer science because it's not a graduation requirement. Only 12 states require students to even learn about basic computer science. In the age of AI, they write, we must prepare our children for the future, to be AI creators, not just consumers. And they went live with a letter signed by 250 or more CEOs, including those from Microsoft, Adobe, American Airlines, AMD, Etsy, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Khan Academy, DoorDash, Sweetgreen, I mean, you name it.

Now, I do not believe that we have a single clear silver bullet, like mandating CS education as a part of normal curriculums. But I also think that we should not avoid the easy wins that we have right in front of us for sake of longer-term, bigger structural changes we need to make. In other words, is ensuring that every high school student in America has a CS class as part of their graduation requirements going to solve all the problems?

Absolutely and obviously not. But is it net better than not having them have that requirement? Absolutely, yes. So let's do it. And then let's do more. And then let's do some more after that.

College has for too long underserved its participants in America. And college has for too long had completely warped economics that simply do not work for the world as it is anymore. It seems to me that it is this economic pressure that is most likely to ultimately lead to change, but we need to start having alternatives. Now, of course, the challenges we're designing against the moving target. It would be a mistake to redesign the system based on today's AI capabilities, which are going to do nothing but improve.

If you need an example of this, just look out around the availability of AI upskilling courses and tools. They're all about skill sets that were sure useful six months ago, but say nothing about the future in which, for example, we're managing swarms of agents, which is a capability that has now come online. Point being that it is going to be immensely hard to redesign the system, but we simply don't have a choice. We have to try, and we have to do it now.

Anyways, guys, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.