I tend to be an AI optimist, but I do feel bad for my students who may never benefit from the struggle of thinking about how to get a point across coherently.
It would be a disaster if they could get all the way through school without being made to struggle through getting a point across coherently. I believe we possess the tools to make them do that. The most important tool is tech-free class time. There's also group work, presentations (graded stringently), and mentoring. All this can be difficult to manage, but it's why we need human teachers, not just tech that communicates information.
Really, asking kids to get info down on a sheet of paper or a Canvas upload risks falling into a Lump of Labor Fallacy situation. They don't *need* to do this work unless it's demonstrating learning. If they don't demonstrate learning, then there's no point in doing them.
So we need to be really intentional about making sure they are demonstrating learning outcomes, and guarding our (their) class time so they have to struggle through the tough parts of learning and communication.
The calculator analogy is spot on. We don't stop teaching long divison because calculators exist, and we shouldnt stop teaching writing because AI exists. The key insight here is that boring work builds the cognitive scaffold for the real work. If anything, AI forces educators to be more intentional about which skills are worth preserving and why. That's actually a healthy pressure.
Well said, Mark. Another example, people also said we wouldn't need to know facts once we had Google. But you won't know what to Google if you don't know any facts.
Really good stuff. I'm also an AI optimist, but it's easy as a teacher to be pessimistic about the impact on learning. Thanks for sharing a positive take!
I think it's ok to be an AI macro economy optimist but an AI education pessimist.
About education, we've had access to books for a really long time. If exposure to information was the problem in education, then books would have solved in a long time ago. But exposure isn't the problem, so it can't be the solution. Skilled teaching is more important than ever!
Thanks for sharing your views on AI and teaching. Also, we appreciate you reading Decode Econ.
I tend to be an AI optimist, but I do feel bad for my students who may never benefit from the struggle of thinking about how to get a point across coherently.
It would be a disaster if they could get all the way through school without being made to struggle through getting a point across coherently. I believe we possess the tools to make them do that. The most important tool is tech-free class time. There's also group work, presentations (graded stringently), and mentoring. All this can be difficult to manage, but it's why we need human teachers, not just tech that communicates information.
Really, asking kids to get info down on a sheet of paper or a Canvas upload risks falling into a Lump of Labor Fallacy situation. They don't *need* to do this work unless it's demonstrating learning. If they don't demonstrate learning, then there's no point in doing them.
So we need to be really intentional about making sure they are demonstrating learning outcomes, and guarding our (their) class time so they have to struggle through the tough parts of learning and communication.
The calculator analogy is spot on. We don't stop teaching long divison because calculators exist, and we shouldnt stop teaching writing because AI exists. The key insight here is that boring work builds the cognitive scaffold for the real work. If anything, AI forces educators to be more intentional about which skills are worth preserving and why. That's actually a healthy pressure.
Well said, Mark. Another example, people also said we wouldn't need to know facts once we had Google. But you won't know what to Google if you don't know any facts.
Really good stuff. I'm also an AI optimist, but it's easy as a teacher to be pessimistic about the impact on learning. Thanks for sharing a positive take!
I think it's ok to be an AI macro economy optimist but an AI education pessimist.
About education, we've had access to books for a really long time. If exposure to information was the problem in education, then books would have solved in a long time ago. But exposure isn't the problem, so it can't be the solution. Skilled teaching is more important than ever!
Stephen: great read as always. This is my new favorite line: "Boring work gets us the skill we need to get to the fun work."
Yep. No matter what whiz-bang stuff AI can do, it can't be human for us. We still have to do the work to get the skills and experiences that we want.