US Government Says Schools Will Teach Students How to Use AI "Tools"
At the Paris AI Summit, US Vice President JD Vance said US schools will teach students how to manage, supervise, and interact with AI tools.
Why? Because the Trump administration refuses to believe the tools will replace workers/human beings. It actually angers him that people think it will replace workers.
Why do people think it will replace workers?
1. It’s being sold to companies as a worker replacement
The focus of AI development has been on worker replacement, not augmentation (and the administration doesn’t want to regulate AI in any way, making it hard to shift this direction)
New jobs will also be able to be done with AI.
The goal for entrepreneurs is to build companies with minimal labor costs.
There are more challenges to the idea that there are unique human intelligence qualities (creativity, critical thinking, emotional connection).
Labor jobs will be replaced by robotics, including humanoid robotics, which is rapidly advancing.
Teaching students only how to use tools won’t help because other AIs can tell the tools what to do (and he mentioned no ideas beyond teaching them how to use AI tools).
Putting humans with AIs may slow the AIs down (they may come to view us as flies that get in their way when they try to work Brynjolfsson)).
More and more “tasks” can be done with AIs. Once AIs can do all or nearly all of the tasks, how much is each of us worth?
There are no easy solutions. As Miles Brundage noted the other day -
As AI advances toward GPT-5 and we get closer to AGI (Hassabis, Omodei, and many others) over the next couple of years, absent a major war (possible), AI will probably be the most difficult challenge we face as a society.
It’s time to start thinking about it, and I have sketched a basic outline of an idea this administration may be open to — The Battle for AI Supremacy is About Education, Not AI Models.
These are challenging times, but it may be our best shot.
For more on AGI and 100X the world’s GDP soon, check out Dwarksh’s new podcast.
Are we preparing our students for this?