AI Literacy Needs to Include Preparing Students for an Unknown World
Preparing students for it is easier than educators think
By the time children born today are in kindergarten, artificial intelligence (ai) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity.
— Ray Kurzweil, Google, AI Scientist for 61 Years
Whatever you think AI is right now, it will be something different in a few years. If your AI literacy efforts don't address fundamentals that transcend today's AI, then you'll be playing a constant battle of whac-a-mole. It's not about prompting. It's about understanding how to approach challenges and collaborations, or even recognize a challenge. It's about judgment and decision making, clarity and precision of communication, creativity, critical thinking, etc.
— Tim Dasey, Retired, MIT
Has any Fortune 500 publicly (or, quite frankly, privately) discussed any scenario planning for the possibility of AGI or AGI-like AIs? Even computer scientists who are skeptical of LLMs think 2032 is possible, as do betting markets. That is within investment planning horizons.
— Ethan Mollick, Wharton
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Today’s AIs are pretty insignificant compared to what we will have in 5-7 years. In 5-7 years, we will live in a world of highly intelligent machines that can do a lot of what we do and more (at a minimum). What their exact intelligence level will be is pretty insignificant.
In 5-7 years, our students will enter kindergarten, middle school, high school, university, and graduate programs. As AI capabilities grow, there is considerable uncertainty as to what the latter three will look like.
Will education for students coming of age look the same as it does today? Will students learn primarily in fixed and hybrid locations? Will they still earn “degrees?" Or will learning be primarily online and be taught by AI educators? Will home-schooling supported by AIs and immersive environments, perhaps supported by charter schools, radically expand? Will students aim for “degrees,” or will they (and us) learn continuously as needed to run their own businesses or stay in remaining and new job opportunities?
They will enter the “job market” and co-habitat this world. They will compete against experienced applicants who lost their jobs to AIs and against those who know how to use AI to 10X+ their own abilities.
Will adjacent devices (think “phones/tablets”) or brain-computer interfaces enable seamless learning experiences? Does AI mean that learning no longer has to be an event in some protected time and space or can it just become an integrated component of our daily lives the same way our social media is?
The reality is that we don’t know what the world will look like in 5-7 years. We don’t know what schools will look like and what the economy will look like. And that’s not because we don’t know if we will have achieved AGI by then; regardless of AGI, AI systems in 5-7 years will be incredibly powerful and their abilities will be widely integrated into software that everyone can use, and this will change the economy. Education and health care are expected to be the most impacted sectors.
In one of the quotes above, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick pushes the issue of AGI with businesses, asking what they are doing to plan for an “AGI-like” world?
I’ve raised the issue on several instances with educators: What are you doing to prepare students for this world? How are you thinking about preparing the school (systems) you lead? Are you prepared to lead, or will your educational institution be led into this new era by “Edtech/big tech”? We can’t complain when others lead if we don’t. You can either lead your educational institution into a world of AI or you can let Bigtech lead it there.
Mollick points out that 2032 “is within investment planning horizons.” It’s become almost cliche to say, “education is an investment in the future.” It is. But it isn’t if we aren’t preparing students for the future that is here/coming.
While many educators are struggling to understand and incorporate AI into instruction, that’s not even the most important thing educators need to focus on to prepare students for the AI World.
As Tim Dasey notes, we need to “to approach challenges and collaborations, or even recognize a challenge. It's about judgment and decision making, clarity and precision of communication, creativity, critical thinking, etc.”
These are things educators already know how to do; they just need to supercharge them. Schools could enhance their curricula by incorporating debate, Model UN and mock government programs, business plan competitions, internships and apprenticeships, interdisciplinary and project-based learning initiatives, makerspaces and innovation labs, community service-learning projects, student-run businesses or non-profits, interdisciplinary problem-solving challenges, public speaking, and presentation skills courses, and design thinking workshop.
These programs foster essential skills such as recognizing and addressing complex challenges, collaboration, sound judgment, and decision-making. They also enhance students' ability to communicate with clarity and precision, while nurturing creativity and critical thinking. By providing hands-on, real-world experiences, these initiatives bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, preparing students more effectively for the multifaceted challenges they will face in their future academic and professional lives.
We have many more details and thoughts on this in our $9.99 book.
