Will AI kill Education?

If you missed day one of the Women's Forum for the Economy & Society (A Publicis Groupe company) it's captured here... https://events.womens-forum.com/women-s-forum-global-meeting-2023/onlinesession/f6368f8f-b724-ee11-a9bb-000d3abb7ad0

There were rich and deep conversations all day long and a lively (and at times nuclear) debate about if AI will kill education at the end of the day. It was moderated by Stephen Dunbar-Johnson and Sophie Lambin with the help of Stephanie Cress, Ons Jelassi, Dr. Katrin Gülden Le Maire, Shelley McKinley, Catherine Porter The New York Times, Sarah Sabina Montaldo, Karine Allouche Salanon (she,her), and Leila Toplic

I had the honor of setting the scene for the debate and it was fun framing it without picking a side.

We had a bit of AV trouble but if you're curious the debate begins at 04:52:34--->

Scene Setting

So Will AI kill Education?

Parsing that sentence is worthwhile.?

What do we mean by education?

When we say education you might picture an approach pioneered more than a century ago when we needed ever more workers to support the Industrial and later the Information Revolution. It was designed akin to a factory pumping out one-size-fits-all workers (after all it was too hard to scale and tune each class for a given learners experiences and background). We made students ready for a single career in their life–where they learned a stock of knowledge and a way of being, to then apply that knowledge to perform some role in a career until they retired.?

Yet the next few years will see a massive challenge in the form of resource allocation. We have the graying of the baby boomers and the decline in palpation numbers in many countries as well as a demand for far more workers in some industries to cope with the emerging existential challenges our society now faces. It’s not that there won’t be jobs, but that the right person with the right skillset, mindset, ethos, or toolset won’t be in the right place at the right time.?

Ultimately education may turn out to be about fostering a growth mindset where learners realize that they aren’t fixed in their capacity but can grow their potential throughout life. While they may not know how to do something “yet,” the struggle, or as neuroscientists call it “desirable difficulties” is when we grow neurons and connections between those brain cells, the fastest.?

The question might be, how might we as a society, level the field, and build the capacity to flourish? How do we help the next generation, learn… how to learn? How might we accelerate not only learning but unlearning as job categories collapse under the pressure of automation?

AI

Ahh. Automation. That’s my code word for robotics and artificial intelligence. So let’s explore what we mean when we say AI.?

Machine learning has always helped us automate predictions, pattern recognition, and processes. But in late 2017 a paper came out that was called “Attention is all you need.” It suggested a new “transformer” architecture (the T in GPT) that was generative (the G) and could be pre-trained (the P)?as a foundational model by feeding it all the data humanity has created. All the science papers, novels, catty conversations in soap operas and social media, and yes sadly all the biases built into our existing systems of oppression as well.

But to understand the potential of AI. Think of it like a subway map for the world of knowledge and once you’ve found a stop you’d like, by, say, writing a prompt, like “translate this sentence from French into Hindi,” you could resolve or diffuse out of that latent subway map a sentence that worked. Since computer code is a form of language suddenly people who had never written computer code could speak in French or English or Spanish and the system could output working computer code. Or input the code of life in the form of Gs As Ts and Cs and translate that into the shape of a protein that could fix an illness or cure a disease.

Last December chatGPT was a wake up call for many that weren't working in the field because these new generative ai systems became a part of pop-culture and suddenly gave us what I think of as the five C’s…

Create entirely new things, like a web search for paintings that don’t even exist.?

Converse in ways that seem like you’re interacting with another human.

Comprehend (or help us comprehend) complex ideas and translate them into synthesized insights for a ten year old or explore the implications of a business idea like a BCG consultant.

Command the system to not only write code from a sentence or a picture of a whiteboard sketch, but also run and debug the code and go out and solve issues and chain together a series of actions to accomplish your goals.

And Coach by asking the system to develop questions to quiz you about a topic that fits your own life experiences and context. Sal Khan and the Khan Academy has built a custom GPT coach to help math learners get “one-on-one” Socratic coaching so that millions of students can have the benefits of a personal learning coach. The gold standard in education--usually reserved for children of the elite--has been an unattainable goal when we have tried to scale education in the past.

So while some educators worry that students with access to AI will cheat on their essays, & tests. Other educators are experimenting, like Khan Academy in ways that entirely change the way we teach, and learn, at scale.

Will AI KILL education?

Do we mean it won’t even be possible to educate the next generation when there is no fruitful path for them to apprentice and learn the hard won skills that come from sweating the details? Particularly if AI makes it so easy to get an answer and we don’t create that “productive struggle” so important for learning? Do we mean destroy classic schools and universities? Or usher in a new model? Or do we mean kill the idea that we should even strive to educate our kids, if super human AI can solve all these problems?

Should we all just hope we and our kids are treated as nice pets by our AI overlords and give up? Those are the stakes in our debate today.

Time to begin.

If you can I'd strongly encourage you to watch the full debate and see how it turned out and tune in for Day 2 of the Women's Forum tomorrow!

What do you think will happen with education in an age of AI?