"It's redesigning our systems to reward what humans do best while letting AI handle what it does best."
What is it about this drug that education can't just say it is bad. Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence does not do anything well. Why are we bending over backwards to make sure our students are addicted. Everything you said is true. We made this gauntlet. So we need to change this gauntlet. Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence IS A TOOL OF THE GAUNTLET. If we want something different then we don't use Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Thanks for this piece, Nick, especially at commencement time, when reflections about learning and life briefly get their due. You know that I agree with you about the dangers here and what AI has done to the humans using it. I also agree with a more pragmatic approach, and I think small-scale, content specific Ai-enhanced projects or mentor bots can help students. But more than anything, I think every school (and course) needs to focus on AI literacy from middle school on - how do these systems work? what are they good for? what are the ethical challenges? how are they using resources and impacting the planet?
You are absolutely right that students, especially young adults, feel a loss of agency and ability to change anything in their lives. Encouraging critical thinking about a technological and cultural transformation of this scope is a starting place.
As for earlier elementary grades, I’ll go out on a limb and say AI should not be part of the curriculum - at all. Students need to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic (math through algebra, I’d say) before AI is an effective tool. Learning how to think and relate to other humans has to come first if we don’t want the world to sink further into artificiality at the behest of deceptive Silicon Valley billionaires like Sam Altman: https://open.substack.com/pub/marthanichols/p/sam-altmans-ai-juggernaut-can-it?r=lh6m5&utm_medium=ios
So good to hear from you, Martha. Hope your project is going well. I am working on an AI Literacy framework that reflects both the opportunities and risks I have spent that past year identifying in my work. I am going to be transitioning in a more supervisory role—working with a larger number of school districts on their AI implementation processes—and I want to have a framework in hand. The pathway you are sketching out sound a lot like mine. I hope to publish something on it soon.
You’re exactly right about the front end of the problem — younger generations are being funneled into systems that teach dependence over capability, and the erosion of real-world skill is accelerating. My writing focuses on the other end of the life arc, but it’s the same structural failure: institutions built around managed decline, not durable human capacity. Whether it’s young people offloading thought to AI or older people pushed into irrelevance by design, the underlying problem is the same — we have to really work on these structural changes to life that AI and robotics are thrusting upon us all at a rapid rate never seen before in history.
Education, at least higher education, is no longer in control of itself. Too much has been surrendered to corporations, the needs of businesses, politics, and technology. I am not sure we have a way out.
"It's redesigning our systems to reward what humans do best while letting AI handle what it does best."
What is it about this drug that education can't just say it is bad. Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence does not do anything well. Why are we bending over backwards to make sure our students are addicted. Everything you said is true. We made this gauntlet. So we need to change this gauntlet. Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence IS A TOOL OF THE GAUNTLET. If we want something different then we don't use Large Language Model Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Thanks for this piece, Nick, especially at commencement time, when reflections about learning and life briefly get their due. You know that I agree with you about the dangers here and what AI has done to the humans using it. I also agree with a more pragmatic approach, and I think small-scale, content specific Ai-enhanced projects or mentor bots can help students. But more than anything, I think every school (and course) needs to focus on AI literacy from middle school on - how do these systems work? what are they good for? what are the ethical challenges? how are they using resources and impacting the planet?
You are absolutely right that students, especially young adults, feel a loss of agency and ability to change anything in their lives. Encouraging critical thinking about a technological and cultural transformation of this scope is a starting place.
As for earlier elementary grades, I’ll go out on a limb and say AI should not be part of the curriculum - at all. Students need to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic (math through algebra, I’d say) before AI is an effective tool. Learning how to think and relate to other humans has to come first if we don’t want the world to sink further into artificiality at the behest of deceptive Silicon Valley billionaires like Sam Altman: https://open.substack.com/pub/marthanichols/p/sam-altmans-ai-juggernaut-can-it?r=lh6m5&utm_medium=ios
So good to hear from you, Martha. Hope your project is going well. I am working on an AI Literacy framework that reflects both the opportunities and risks I have spent that past year identifying in my work. I am going to be transitioning in a more supervisory role—working with a larger number of school districts on their AI implementation processes—and I want to have a framework in hand. The pathway you are sketching out sound a lot like mine. I hope to publish something on it soon.
Thanks, Nick, it would be great to touch base again this summer. Should we put something on the calendar?
I think one could make this argument to students in a class AI policy. I certainly plan to make it part of mine.
You’re exactly right about the front end of the problem — younger generations are being funneled into systems that teach dependence over capability, and the erosion of real-world skill is accelerating. My writing focuses on the other end of the life arc, but it’s the same structural failure: institutions built around managed decline, not durable human capacity. Whether it’s young people offloading thought to AI or older people pushed into irrelevance by design, the underlying problem is the same — we have to really work on these structural changes to life that AI and robotics are thrusting upon us all at a rapid rate never seen before in history.
Nick, you made some great points. I read this early this morning and finished the day with one of Audrey Watters' paid posts that was also about the brutalization that AI is creating. https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-and-the-agentic-state-and-andor/.
Education, at least higher education, is no longer in control of itself. Too much has been surrendered to corporations, the needs of businesses, politics, and technology. I am not sure we have a way out.
You hit it head on. As designers of educational systems, we need to apply our philosophical foundations to creating the world we want to see for our students. I just created a post along these lines too....https://dustinmattison.substack.com/p/gaudi-and-dixon-a-meeting-on-the