The Shift AI Podcast: Redefining Education through Human-Centered AI with Atypical AI CEO Bethanie Maples

As the landscape of education undergoes a seismic shift driven by artificial intelligence, Bethanie Drake-Maples stands at the vanguard of this educational revolution. As the founder and CEO of Atypical AI , Maples is at the helm of this transformation, where AI is not just assisting but actively reshaping how we personalize education and connect different aspects of learning. With experience at @Google AI, Google X , and as a researcher at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) , Maples has witnessed the evolution of AI in education, but nothing compares to the potential she sees in AI-powered personalized learning.

"I think everybody will have a personal tutor or friend that's available for them that they deeply trust, which can be a cognitive aid for them wherever they go," she says.

On this episode of the Shift AI Podcast, Maples sits down with host Boaz Ashkenazy to delve into how AI is revolutionizing education, empowering teachers, and creating more holistic learning experiences. Together, they explore what this AI-driven future means for learners of all ages, offering a glimpse into a world where education is more personalized, connected, and accessible than ever before.

Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com .

Success in the Workforce: "There has been an abysmal focus on the skills that make people actually successful in the workforce dealing with other humans versus the knowledge and cognitive skills that people think are needed in order to do a specialist job.? We should be perhaps less focused on cognitively or factual attainment and more focused on making sure that there are good assessments and therefore good teaching of the skills that will allow people to have good job options when they leave college which just typically has not happened." (link )

Focus and Lifelong Learning: "I think that people can no longer not be experts. AI will come in and it will do a lot of low level automation of different cognitive tasks and what that calls us to do kind of in mass is become more deeply expert and whatever thing we're going to do. It's no longer going to be possible to go do a four year degree and then kind of coast for a couple decades in whatever you do.? A constant kind of upgrading and a more active approach to being an expert in your chosen niche set of areas or fields is going to be needed in order to keep pace with what's going on." (link )

AI Tutors and Learning: "Imagine you have a learner and they miss class, and they need help at home to remediate that. So you've got an AI tutor there. And then imagine that that learner goes and switches grades and goes to a different place and they lose all of the information and learning that they acquired in one school. But imagine that can go with them and there's actually an agent that understands where they've been ." (link )

Weird Expertise: "We need more people that are willing to be experts in really weird things. Maybe it's sociologists that are also into cosmetic dentistry. Focusing, allowing people to be experts and opening up the aperture of the interesting kind of different mixes of what expertise could be, is a way that we will be able to coexist with AI and feel like it's augmenting us and helpful." (link )

Listen to the full episode of Shift AI with Atypical AI CEO Bethanie Drake-Maples here .

Boaz Ashkenazy is the founder and CEO of Seattle-based AI solutions provider Augmented AI and the host of the podcast Shift AI .

The Shift AI Podcast is presented by Augmented AI