Supporting Viewpoints: Imagining How We Should Educate Students for An AI World

Our book, Humanity Amplified, is centered around the theme of the need to adopt academic deep learning approaches to education (interdisciplinary PBL, debate (very interdisciplinary :), entrepreneurship programs, STEAM programs, etc.) to prepare students to thrive in a world where machines have human+ level intelligence and how to use AI augment their intelligence as participants in these deep learning programs.

Our theme is to move beyond using AI to only continue doing what we do now but to adopt instructional approaches that prepare students for this world.

We also challenge readers to do what SAUSD Superintendent Jerry Almendarez refers to as Imagining the Unimaginable. How can we start to think about how education can be completely different than it is today?

These are the key ideas that have influenced our work.

As Thomas Jefferson said in 1816, “Institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

__

Author Jane McDougal talks about “imagining the unimaginable”…and I think that’s where we are at right now, is we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing different moving forward? We already know what it looks like for the past 50 years. How are we going to lead different? How are we going to reimagine what teaching and learning looks like? Are we going to look at the skills of the future and the research that’s out there that brings us forward instead of always looking back?

- Jerry Almendarez, Superintendent, Santa Ana Unified School District

How does this technology support the skills that need to be taught to support the societal transformation that will likely be caused by AI?

-Jerry Crisci, Co-founder of the Center for Innovation at the Scarsdale Public Schools

AI is inevitable…and you’re not going to be able to dramatically slow that down.

-John Chambers, Former Cisco Systems CEO

Change over the next 5 years, 10 years will dwarf everything that's happened over the last 30...The Fortune 500 companies, they know this.

- Mark Cuban

The future of computing is accelerated…With our innovations in AI and accelerated computing, we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and driving the next wave of technological advancement…AI that understands the laws of physics, AI that can work among us…Robotics is here. Physical AI is here. This is not science fiction and it’s being used all over Taiwan…The factories will orchestrate robots and those robots will be building products that are robotic.

-Jensen Huang, NVIDIA

Everything society is built on [will be] completely modified in one generation. It’s not a slow process where we get to kind of figure out how to live that new lifestyle

- Roman Yoplansky

The question, really, is will schools shape this future, or will AI shape the future of schools

-    Byron King, Deputy Head Teacher, Surbiton High School

This—all of this—is barely version 1.0.

- Fei Fei Li, Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

As AI becomes more advanced, the things that set us apart are going to be our creativity, our adaptability, and our ability to think outside the box

- Julia McCoy, Creator and Co-founder, Content Hacker

Students and teachers are now at the center of the AI conversation. There's no going back now.
- Jason Gulya

I think it’s worth always putting it in context of this technology that, at least for the next five or ten years, will be on a very steep improvement curve. These are the stupidest the models will ever be….That’s the part that I find potentially a little scary, is the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labor market will change.

- Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI (ChatGPT)

The world is changing so fast now in the AI space…This is what our friend Ray Kurzweil has projected for some time…I mean we're getting indeed exponential acceleration and as Ray and others have predicted for a long time …Advanced AI technology in other areas is accelerating super super-fast and we don't need the acceleration to be super-fast everywhere to get to a singularity right you just need it to be super-fast in a few judicious places.

– Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET

Skate where the puck is going, not where it hits…Almost ignore GPT4, say it’s a great prototyping tool. Think, where do I want to be in 2 to 3 years when GPT6 is out…I think what people are expecting is a wave. We are going to get a tsunami.”

– Vinod Khosla, Billionaire Investor

There has been an assumption that there are certain activities that are “essentially human,” and that robots would never be able to replicate…This is no longer the case.

-Jerome Presenti, former Meta

AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on.

It is more profound than electricity or fire. – Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

There is absolutely no question that machines will eventually surpass human-level intelligence in all domains. There is basically no question about that. And it’s going to happen in the lifetimes of most people here.

– Yann LeCun, AI “Godfather”

I understand that denial. Most people didn’t ask for an AI that can do many tasks previously reserved for humans. Teachers did not want to see almost every form of homework instantly be solvable by a computer.

Employers did not want highly paid tasks that are only meaningful when done by humans (performance reviews, reporting) to be done by machines instead. Government officials did not want a perfect disinformation system released without any useful countermeasures. The world got much stranger, very quickly. So it is not surprising that so many people are trying to deal with the implications of AI by assuming that nothing is going to change, by banning it permanently, or even imagining that the changes brought by AI can be easily contained. As we have seen, those policies are not likely to work. Worse yet, the substantial benefits of AI are going to be greatly reduced by trying to pretend it is just like previous waves of technology, where changes take decades to occur.

-- Ethan Mollick

One of the things that annoys me most about people who work on AI is when they stand up and with a straight face say oh this will never cause any job elimination yeah you know this is just an additive thing this is just going to it's all going to be great. This is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs and this is going to change the way that a lot of current jobs function and this is going to create entirely new jobs. I kind of expect we're only a generation or two away from models that for the first time show some degree of real economic impact good and bad.

-Sam Altman

The big issue isn’t student cheating or figuring out how to use AI in the classroom; it’s that the work that AI is grabbing is the same as schooling’s focus. Students are set up to compete with AI rather than collaborate with it. They’ll lose that competition. … AI is gobbling expertise…People will be responsible for the vaguer, big-picture intellectual cousin—wisdom.

Long sought but mostly unrealized learning goals like critical thinking, relationship skills, and creativity can no longer be add-ons. We must design schools so they are the top priorities.

– Tim Dasey, Retired, MIT

I think AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species. Now, don't take this too literally, but I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives. Whether you think we’re on a 10-, 20- or 30-year path here, this is, in my view, the most accurate and most fundamentally honest way of describing what's actually coming. And above all, it enables everybody to prepare for and shape what comes next.

-- Mustafa Suleyman, AI CEO, Microsoft

AI is not just a technology or a business trend. It is a profound shift in how humans and machines interact….Generative AI has made machines conversational, and they are quickly moving from being our tools to being our teammates. Machines are no longer limited to tasks like crunching numbers and providing information. With generative AI capabilities, machines can also be our consultants, protectors, coaches, friends, therapists, bosses, or customers. Machines are going from what they can DO for us to what they can BE for us.

-- Gartner Inc.

We are now at a point where we have a new type of hybrid learning, and it is not about online or face to face anymore. It’s about humans and AI.

-- World Economic Forum

(E)veryone in middle school all the way through to getting a PhD. in comp sci will have to learn about AI.

– Bill Nye, The Science Guy

If these tools have so changed what (someone) can get done that the educational system no longer has value, then it's the educational system that needs to adapt to make people better.

Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI (ChatGPT)

Education and educators must prepare students for the new AI order of things. Educators’ lives are going to change in significant ways, not because their roles are likely to be automated away but because they need to teach a different curriculum and probably teach in a different way.

-Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

When we begin with a technology, we have a solution in search of a problem.

– Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education

The school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighbourhood, or on the playground.

- John Dewey

At present, we find ourselves face-to-face with tangible, wide-reaching challenges from AI like algorithmic bias, disinformation, democratic erosion, and labor displacement.

- Encode Justice and the Future of Life Institute

Sometimes you meet a group of people who restore your faith in the power of education to change the world.

- Darren Coxon, Coxon Consulting

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether people do.

– B. F. Skinner, Psychologist

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.

- -Thomas Jefferson, 1816

The quotes are fully sourced in our book.