Speaker 1: What are the most important things for our students to
Speaker 1: learn now that we're in a world where AI is
Speaker 1: so much smarter than any human, Instead of learning skills
Speaker 1: that may not matter as much in the future, can
Speaker 1: AI help us to learn the important things?
Speaker 2: And what are the important things? Do we give up on.
Speaker 1: Education or are the very clever ways that we can
Speaker 1: direct our teaching to get the best out of our schools.
Speaker 1: What would Saul Khan, founder of the Kahn Academy say
Speaker 1: about all this? Well, you're lucky because you're about to
Speaker 1: find out. Welcome to inner Cosmos with me David Eagelman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these
Speaker 1: episodes we dive into our three pound universe to uncover
Speaker 1: some of the most surprising aspects of our lives and
Speaker 1: our times. Today's episode is part two about the future
Speaker 1: of education. In part one last week, I covered the
Speaker 1: long road of how technology changes schooling. For example, when
Speaker 1: the printing press was invented in fourteen forty, some thinkers
Speaker 1: of the time were sure that invention would dumb us
Speaker 1: all down, because now if you ask a student for
Speaker 1: an answer, the answer is right there, It's written down.
Speaker 1: You just pull the book off the shelf and wham,
Speaker 1: it's as though you can pretend you know something. And
Speaker 1: we went through similar debates when desk calculators were introduced,
Speaker 1: will the kids become stupid? And then there was the
Speaker 1: invention of the World Wide Web, And then when they
Speaker 1: Google burst onto the scene, and all you had to
Speaker 1: do was type your question into this little box and
Speaker 1: it had indexed all the information in the world and
Speaker 1: it could point you precisely where you needed.
Speaker 2: To go to find the answer.
Speaker 1: So suddenly it didn't matter what question the teacher asked you.
Speaker 2: As long as somebody somewhere.
Speaker 1: In the world knew the answer and had typed it
Speaker 1: on the web page, it was just one click away
Speaker 1: from you. In all these cases, educators were forced to
Speaker 1: change the way they asked questions and assessed a student's knowledge.
Speaker 2: And you know what, it wasn't that hard.
Speaker 1: So where are we with technology in general and AI
Speaker 1: in particular right now? I made three main arguments in
Speaker 1: last week's episode. I argued that the extant technology wires
Speaker 1: the brain of each generation differently, as in how they're
Speaker 1: wired to best learn and the ways they seek information.
Speaker 1: Then I gave many examples of the ways in which
Speaker 1: AI can be used to massively improve the way we teach,
Speaker 1: from individualized tutoring to reducing the workload on the teachers,
Speaker 1: to training critical thinking and magnifying creativity. If you want
Speaker 1: to hear more about that, please check out that last episode.
Speaker 1: And finally, I made the argument that the purpose for
Speaker 1: schooling for education is to give the students roots and wings,
Speaker 1: as Gerta phrased it, which just means giving them the
Speaker 1: foundations that they need for critical thinking and the ability
Speaker 1: to create new things and go off in novel directions.
Speaker 2: So today we're going to.
Speaker 1: Get someone else's take on the state of things, and
Speaker 1: not just anyone, but someone who has single handedly had
Speaker 1: perhaps the largest impact on the planet's education.
Speaker 2: That I know. That's all Con.
Speaker 1: And if you don't know his name, you surely know
Speaker 1: his creation, the Con Academy, which is an educational platform
Speaker 1: that provides free and very high quality online courses. It
Speaker 1: does this across math and science, and history and economics.
Speaker 2: Anything you want to learn.
Speaker 1: It has video lessons and interactive exercises and learning tools,
Speaker 1: and the key is, unlike a normal school system, this
Speaker 1: allows users to progress at their own pace, so Saul
Speaker 1: has a unique vantage point to view the world's education
Speaker 1: and as my neighbor here in Silicon Valley, he has
Speaker 1: the opportunity to see the latest greatest tech and understand
Speaker 1: where things are going.
Speaker 2: So, without further ado, here's my interview with Saul con.
Speaker 1: Okay, sal So, you're famous for having started the con Academy.
Speaker 2: Tell us about the history of that.
Speaker 3: Oh hi, you know, I guess you go back about
Speaker 3: twenty years ago. A little over twenty years ago. My
Speaker 3: original background was in technology, and I go to business
Speaker 3: school and I find myself. I'm working at a hedge
Speaker 3: fund in Boston. Two thousand and four. I'm a year
Speaker 3: out of business school. I get married. My wife grew
Speaker 3: up in New Jersey, so all of my family from
Speaker 3: New Orleans, where I was born and raised, comes to
Speaker 3: New Jersey for the wedding. While they were staying with me.
Speaker 3: My cousin, it just came out of conversation was having
Speaker 3: trouble with math Navia. She was twelve years old, and
Speaker 3: when I asked her about it is unit conversion, etc.
Speaker 3: I told Navy, I'm a hundred percent sure you can.
Speaker 3: You can learn this material if you're up for it.
Speaker 3: I'm happy to tutor you remotely when you go back
Speaker 3: to New Orleans. She agrees, she goes back. We start
Speaker 3: working together, slowly, but surely she gets unit conversion. She
Speaker 3: gets caught up with her class, littlehead of her class.
Speaker 3: Then I'd become what I call a tiger cousin. And
Speaker 3: I call up her school and they.
Speaker 2: Said, who are you? I said, I'm her cousin.
Speaker 3: And I actually convinced them to let her retake a
Speaker 3: placement exam because I thought, like, well, she knows her
Speaker 3: material now, and they did, and she went from being
Speaker 3: like a for lack of better word, to remut, like
Speaker 3: in a slower track, to not being in a faster track.
Speaker 2: So I was like, well, this is cool. Like I'm
Speaker 2: able to connect with a young cousin.
Speaker 3: I start tutoring her younger brother's words preadient, the family
Speaker 3: free tutoring is going on. Before I know it, I'm
Speaker 3: tutoring ten to fifteen cousins, family friends. You know, I
Speaker 3: saw a common pattern that they were struggling, not because
Speaker 3: they weren't going to good schools, not because they didn't
Speaker 3: have good teachers, not because they weren't hard working or bright.
Speaker 3: It's because they had gaps in their learning, especially in
Speaker 3: a topic like math. But even you know, part of
Speaker 3: the reason we were having trouble in science was gaps
Speaker 3: sometimes in their math. So I started writing software for
Speaker 3: them to kind of give them practice them being your cousins,
Speaker 3: my cousins. Yeah, this was back in the day. If
Speaker 3: you had to look for practice problems on factoring polynomials,
Speaker 3: there were stuff on the internet, but they weren't very
Speaker 3: good and they were very inconsistent. It's like, well, I
Speaker 3: think I could write a little piece of software that'll
Speaker 3: generate problems for them, and then I want to keep
Speaker 3: track of how they're doing. And then that was the
Speaker 3: first conducaut I mean, nothing to do with videos. Then
Speaker 3: this was two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Then how many people were using it?
Speaker 3: Initially just my cousins, and I was seeing benefit and
Speaker 3: I could keeping track of them. Yeah, ten to fifteen cousins,
Speaker 3: and then words started to spread. Their friends started to
Speaker 3: sign up to it because they're like, oh, this is
Speaker 3: really helping me get good at math, and so their
Speaker 3: friends and at some point had to shut it down.
Speaker 3: There got to about ten thousand folks who were trying
Speaker 3: to use just the software, and it was taking down
Speaker 3: my thirty dollars a month web hosting, and that wasn't
Speaker 3: engineered perfectly either to scale to that. So I actually
Speaker 3: just didn't allow anyone else to sign up, which is
Speaker 3: like the opposite of Silicon Valley, Like, no, I don't
Speaker 3: like it, there's too many people here. And then and
Speaker 3: I was showing this software off at a dinner party.
Speaker 3: And by this point we had moved out to northern California,
Speaker 3: and I was at a dinner party in San Mateo
Speaker 3: and the host and I was showing off this stuff
Speaker 3: I was making, and she said, well, how are you
Speaker 3: scaling your lessons. I'm like, I'm not. He's like, whight
Speaker 3: you record some videos on YouTube for your family. I said,
Speaker 3: that's a dumb idea. You know that's cat's playing piano.
Speaker 3: That's not serious. But I did it anyway. Two thousand
Speaker 3: and six, Okay, and yeah, I just started making mini lessons.
Speaker 3: Actually YouTube forced them to be mini lessons at a
Speaker 3: ten minute limit at the time, on things that I
Speaker 3: found myself having to re explain to my cousins a lot,
Speaker 3: Like I'd explain least common multiple to one of my
Speaker 3: cousins one week and then the next week, I'm re
Speaker 3: explaining it to another cousin, and so I said, well, okay,
Speaker 3: I know least common multiples shows up a lot, you know,
Speaker 3: negative exposed.
Speaker 2: So I just kept doing it.
Speaker 3: I started emailing them and saying, any question you have,
Speaker 3: I'll do it asynchronously. You email me the question, I'll
Speaker 3: give you a video explanation of it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And so we started building up a library of that.
Speaker 3: And you know, my cousins really appreciated it. I sometimes joke,
Speaker 3: but it's true. They said they liked me better on
Speaker 3: YouTube than in person. And what they were saying is
Speaker 3: that they like the asynchronous, the on demand, the no shame.
Speaker 3: But we still were getting on the phone and they
Speaker 3: did appreciate me as a human being being in their life,
Speaker 3: and we were able to go deeper on the phone.
Speaker 3: But and yeah, and then one thing led to another.
Speaker 3: Two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, fifteen to
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand folks.
Speaker 2: I was still at the Hedge Fund.
Speaker 3: I set up as a nonprofit in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: the mission Free World Class Education for Anyone, Anywhere. Two
Speaker 3: thousand and nine, quit the day job. Two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine was a hard year, but twenty ten, we got
Speaker 3: our first real funding to become an organization.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And how many people use con Academy now, Oh, you know,
Speaker 1: it depends on how you account for it. I think
Speaker 1: we're one hundred and seventy million registered users, but.
Speaker 2: You know, not everyone uses it all the time.
Speaker 3: You know, in a given year, it's probably closer to
Speaker 3: about one hundred million folks are using it.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 1: I mean, that must make you the biggest single educator
Speaker 1: and now I know you have a whole team of
Speaker 1: people doing it now, but the biggest educational organization in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: I would assume. Yes, it depends how you account for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, but in some ways yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean some people can make an argument that you know,
Speaker 3: YouTube amongst other things, does some stuff. But yeah, I look,
Speaker 3: but I always point out to the team that's nice.
Speaker 3: But we have a long way to go because even
Speaker 3: of that one hundred million, there's probably about three million
Speaker 3: that are like really getting a lot out of it.
Speaker 3: They're using it almost like you know, regularly, and those
Speaker 3: people are really getting an education.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 1: Okay, So now we find ourselves in twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: and AI is on the scene, and so how are
Speaker 1: you using AI in the con academy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I remind my because it's very easy to
Speaker 3: get nambored with technology, especially things as cool as generative AI.
Speaker 3: We had a preview if you rewind up two two
Speaker 3: and a half years summer of twenty twenty two. Sam
Speaker 3: Altman and Greg Brockman reach out to me at the
Speaker 3: time and it's just this kind of cryptic email saying
Speaker 3: and I didn't know them that well. I'd run into
Speaker 3: them at some conferences and this and that, and they said, Hey,
Speaker 3: we're training our new model. We think this is the
Speaker 3: one that's going to really get people interested. We want
Speaker 3: to launch with some social positive use cases that you
Speaker 3: GPT four it ended up being GPT four And this
Speaker 3: was this was about five months before chat GPT came out,
Speaker 3: which actually was a bit of an accident. Chat which
Speaker 3: and Chat GPT wasn't even built on GPT four. It
Speaker 3: was built on GPT three point five. But when they
Speaker 3: emailed me, I was like, I was curious. I had
Speaker 3: seen GPT two and GPT three. I thought they were
Speaker 3: very cool, but I didn't think there were anywhere close
Speaker 3: to ready for prime time.
Speaker 2: But as a nerd, I just wanted to see what
Speaker 2: they were going to do. So two weeks later they
Speaker 2: had finished the training and they had myself and our
Speaker 2: chief Learning officer, Kristin. We were on a zoom with
Speaker 2: them and they had a little chat interface and this
Speaker 2: was new too.
Speaker 3: People don't remember these, you know, just even have a
Speaker 3: chat interface with an AI. And they had an ap
Speaker 3: biology question and there's actually context why they picked ap biology.
Speaker 3: But they said, so, what's the answer and I said, oh,
Speaker 3: c it's osmosis. And then they clicked enter and the
Speaker 3: AI said, oh the answer ce. I'm like, okay, ask
Speaker 3: it why. It explained it. And people are used to
Speaker 3: this now, but in the summer of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: this was different than anything anyone had ever seen before.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, okay, this is weird. Ask it why
Speaker 3: the other choices are incorrect? It explained it beautifully, I said,
Speaker 3: ask it tried another question like that.
Speaker 2: It did a great job. And that's when I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: what is this like? Am I being punked?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: But we saw it before, not all of open AI
Speaker 3: even saw it. But then they gave Kristen myself access
Speaker 3: to it over the weekend and we couldn't sleep, and
Speaker 3: we couldn't tell anyone about it, Like, because this was
Speaker 3: the biggest secret, I couldn't tell my wife about it.
Speaker 3: But I was like middle of the night, I was
Speaker 3: slacking christ and I was like, look, I just got
Speaker 3: it to write the Decoration of Independence and the voice
Speaker 3: of Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: Isn't this hilarious?
Speaker 3: And I'm writing poems and I'm doing this and look,
Speaker 3: if you prompt it the right way, can.
Speaker 2: Act as a tutor.
Speaker 3: And that's when going back to what Kin Academy was
Speaker 3: always about. As I mentioned, I started tutoring my cousins
Speaker 3: and everything that we've done over the last fifteen twenty years,
Speaker 3: it's really about how do we use technology to approximate
Speaker 3: elements of a tutor on demand bite sized video kind
Speaker 3: of approximates an on demand explanation from a tutor. These
Speaker 3: practice problems that you're doing, the problems that you need
Speaker 3: to do as opposed to what everyone else is doing.
Speaker 2: That's what you would do with a little bit of
Speaker 2: a good tutor. They would give you what you need.
Speaker 3: And when we realize that you could steer or prompt
Speaker 3: these this new generation of models to really be not
Speaker 3: just pretend to be the tutor, but really have strong
Speaker 3: tutor moves, so to speak.
Speaker 2: We're like, Okay, this thing has.
Speaker 3: Issues, It hallucinates, it makes horrible math errors. But if
Speaker 3: we assume that those things can either be mitigated or
Speaker 3: they're going to get a lot better, which has happened.
Speaker 3: This is going to be a game changer for us
Speaker 3: being able to scale up what we think is world
Speaker 3: class education, which is more personalization. Giving what Navia had
Speaker 3: in sal what if every student we could eventually get there.
Speaker 1: So let's double click on that idea about an AI tutor,
Speaker 1: because I heard it talk from Steve Jobs way back
Speaker 1: in the day, maybe in the nineties or something. He said,
Speaker 1: just imagine if everyone had Aristotle as a tutor, if
Speaker 1: I'm remembering what he said, treg But I asked my
Speaker 1: son about that at someonhere. He's thirteen years old, and
Speaker 1: I said, you know, hey, what would it be like
Speaker 1: for you to have Aristotles a tutor? And he's said,
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't do much with it. And the reason
Speaker 1: he said that is because, first of all, his internal
Speaker 1: model of what he knows and what Aristotle knows from
Speaker 1: all his writings they're different. So you wouldn't even know
Speaker 1: what to ask him. But besides that, what he wants
Speaker 1: to do is be with friends and play video games stuff.
Speaker 1: So that model of tutor, I think isn't going to work.
Speaker 1: But what you're doing is different. It's not just someone
Speaker 1: available to answer questions for you. So tell us about
Speaker 1: how you think about surfacing information in the learner.
Speaker 3: No, that's right, and I want to be clear where
Speaker 3: you know, it's a journey and it's only going to
Speaker 3: get hopefully better over time. But immediately when we started
Speaker 3: seeing all this, we said, all right, well, some of
Speaker 3: the limitations of classic con Academy is you could watch
Speaker 3: a five minute video, but what if you have a question.
Speaker 3: If you have a peer around, you could ask them.
Speaker 3: If you have a teacher around, you can ask them.
Speaker 3: But what if you're a young girl in Afghanistan and
Speaker 3: you don't have a school.
Speaker 2: What do you do? Then?
Speaker 3: If you're working on a on a exercise and you
Speaker 3: just got stuck. We try to make it as gradual
Speaker 3: as possible, but sometimes you just get stuck, and that's
Speaker 3: an that's the most likely time that you'll just engage.
Speaker 2: What if you could get unstuck?
Speaker 3: So the first iteration of what we called what we
Speaker 3: still call Conmigo, which is the AI tutor on con Academy,
Speaker 3: was supporting those use cases. Now, to your point and
Speaker 3: to your son's point, what we see is about ten
Speaker 3: fifteen percent. We haven't, you know, had a formal study
Speaker 3: of this, but what we're observing about ten fifteen percent
Speaker 3: of students make good use of that. They're the students
Speaker 3: that if they watch a video, they're still curious. They're like,
Speaker 3: what about this, or how about this? What if we
Speaker 3: change this variable? And so they know how to ask that.
Speaker 3: But there's another eighty percent of students who are like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know whatever, this isn't my thing. And so what
Speaker 3: we're realizing is to have the benefits of an Aristotle,
Speaker 3: and Aristotle was Alexander the great tutor. Aristotle didn't just
Speaker 3: sit there and wait, I'm guessing, didn't just sit there
Speaker 3: and wait for Alexander to ask him another question. He said, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is what we're going to do, young Alexander. And
Speaker 3: by the way, how come you didn't do your homework.
Speaker 3: I'm going to go talk to was it Prince phil
Speaker 3: King Philip or verbal Macedonia?
Speaker 2: Yeah, his dad, right.
Speaker 3: Philip of Macedonia I'm going to go talk to King
Speaker 3: Philip about you're not doing your work.
Speaker 2: And that's what I used to do with my cousins.
Speaker 3: Yes, I would answer their questions, but most of the
Speaker 3: time I was driving, I'd be like, this is what
Speaker 3: we're going to do today because I noticed this, And
Speaker 3: if they showed up unprepared, I would hold them accountable.
Speaker 3: And sometimes I would call their mom or their dad
Speaker 3: up and say, look, you got to make sure they
Speaker 3: have time for this. And so we are working on
Speaker 3: ways that the AI can be more proactive.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: At the end of the day, we do think that
Speaker 3: that teacher and if a student has access to a teacher,
Speaker 3: which is true of most of the world we live in,
Speaker 3: there's parts of the world where they don't, But if
Speaker 3: they have access to a teacher, the teacher is still
Speaker 3: the biggest motivational mechanic for students. And so we are
Speaker 3: thinking about how can the AI both support the teacher
Speaker 3: as a teaching assistant helping them with some of their tasks,
Speaker 3: but then also be a connective tissue and the teacher
Speaker 3: can hold the student accountable on working with the A
Speaker 3: and then the a I can report back to the
Speaker 3: to the teacher. So it's a journey on how we
Speaker 3: can make it more and more part of that loop
Speaker 3: and it can drive more and more, but once again
Speaker 3: not replacing the humans, but but optimizing the connection with.
Speaker 2: The humans so that they don't have to worry about
Speaker 2: some of the busy work. Great.
Speaker 1: So I want to come back to that point about
Speaker 1: what this will mean for teachers, but I want to
Speaker 1: quickly interject something, which is so I'm sort of a
Speaker 1: history buff, but I blanked on this issue about King
Speaker 1: Philip of Macedonia and so, but my question is, I
Speaker 1: mean the question everyone's asking currently is, you know, with
Speaker 1: AI in the world and that's not going away, what
Speaker 1: is the importance of memorizing facts?
Speaker 2: How will education change?
Speaker 1: Will it be important for children to learn a lot,
Speaker 1: you know, the Battle of Hastings was ten sixty six,
Speaker 1: or will it not be so important because they can
Speaker 1: retrieve that information to a point?
Speaker 2: What's your take on that.
Speaker 3: I'm solidly in the camp that content knowledge is really
Speaker 3: valuable because and we've seen this pattern before Calculator comes
Speaker 3: out in the sixties and seventies, We're like.
Speaker 2: Oh, no, one has to learned arithmetic anymore. Well, it
Speaker 2: turns out.
Speaker 3: The people who benefit the most from calculators are the
Speaker 3: people who understood arithmetic and why why They know how
Speaker 3: to use the tool. They know when the tool can
Speaker 3: be used, they know when the tool can't be used.
Speaker 3: They know when there's a precision error in your calculator.
Speaker 3: You know, they know that one third is the same
Speaker 3: thing as point three repeating, and so they know that,
Speaker 3: Like when your calculator shows zero point three two two
Speaker 3: two two two two two three, they're like, oh, one third,
Speaker 3: And that's a simple example, but you could imagine other ones.
Speaker 3: You could not send people to the moon if you
Speaker 3: only use a calculator but you didn't have an understanding
Speaker 3: of things like floating point errors, or if you didn't
Speaker 3: understand things of whereas the calculator have a limitation. Similar thing.
Speaker 3: Internet comes out, Google comes out. People say, oh, you
Speaker 3: can web search everything. Why do you need to have
Speaker 3: any knowledge anymore? It turns out that people with knowledge
Speaker 3: are going to have much better information. For example, you
Speaker 3: might have forgotten that it was the Battle of Hastings,
Speaker 3: but you're you'll be like, hey, you know google, William
Speaker 3: the Conqueror, what was that battle again?
Speaker 2: Or you know, I remember that the card English.
Speaker 3: You know, English has a lot of French words in
Speaker 3: it was it was that related to the Battle of
Speaker 3: Hastings and and and the Norman conquest. And if you
Speaker 3: at least have some of that, you wouldn't even begin
Speaker 3: to ask the right questions. Or let's say that you
Speaker 3: just have a homework assignment and you copy and paste
Speaker 3: it into Google this is twenty years ago. You got
Speaker 3: you got five search results, or YouTube videos start showing up.
Speaker 3: Unless you have some context and some critical thinking of
Speaker 3: judging what's solid information or not, you could just be
Speaker 3: completely misguided. Like if you didn't know it was the
Speaker 3: Battle of Hastings and you click on a video it's
Speaker 3: like we're going to talk about William the Conqueror and
Speaker 3: the Battle of Pudding and you're like, oh, it's the
Speaker 3: Battle of Pudding. And it might have been a joke video,
Speaker 3: but you didn't even watch enough of it to like
Speaker 3: that's going to be a problem. And I see pre AI,
Speaker 3: those with the most content knowledge are the people in
Speaker 3: the position to use the Internet for their knowledge work,
Speaker 3: and they're the ones that I see the difference between
Speaker 3: when I web search versus when a younger child does,
Speaker 3: or even some people you know in my family who
Speaker 3: might not have the full context of what they're searching for.
Speaker 3: They're doing very superficial searches. They don't know the right
Speaker 3: questions to ask. Same thing with AI. AI is like
Speaker 3: can be an intelligent partner with you. Imagine trying to
Speaker 3: have a philosophical conversation with Aristotle without having read any
Speaker 3: of Aristotle, or without having read any philosophy, or at
Speaker 3: least without having talked about it. Or imagine you know,
Speaker 3: being able to meet Isaac Newton, but you don't. You
Speaker 3: haven't gotten the basics of physics or calculus down. You
Speaker 3: can't just tell them like, what's going to happen to
Speaker 3: this rock? If you should say, hey, does Newton's third
Speaker 3: law apply here? Because this seems like an edge case,
Speaker 3: and then you're going to be able to go much
Speaker 3: much further. So I think content knowledge is actually more
Speaker 3: important now because if you want to leverage AI, if
Speaker 3: you want it to amplify your intent, you have to
Speaker 3: hang with the AI.
Speaker 2: And there's still going to be work, human centered work.
Speaker 3: There's going to be taking care of seniors, things that
Speaker 3: are very more manual or more human driven hospitality. But
Speaker 3: I think the knowledge economy where AI is going to
Speaker 3: become a big part of it, you have to be
Speaker 3: able to hang with it, and content will matter more.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, although I do wonder about memorization
Speaker 1: versus critical thinking. So how do you think about teaching
Speaker 1: children critical thinking?
Speaker 2: At this point here, I'll also sound a little traditionalist.
Speaker 2: I think it's both.
Speaker 3: I think it's become very I definitely disagree, like I
Speaker 3: don't like pure like Victorian era memorize everything like that's
Speaker 3: not good. But I do think in like Western school systems,
Speaker 3: it's become fashionable to say any type of memorization is
Speaker 3: not good, and we're only going to focus on critical
Speaker 3: thinking and skill development. And the reality is is that
Speaker 3: I'll speak for myself, A lot of the connections that
Speaker 3: have formed in my mind are because I knew something
Speaker 3: and then my brain at some point, Like you know,
Speaker 3: I every American kid learns about the Louisiana purchase in
Speaker 3: eighteen oh three, and then later most American kids don't
Speaker 3: learn about the Napoleonic Wars, even though that was a
Speaker 3: much more important thing.
Speaker 2: But if you do learn about the Napoleonic Wars, and
Speaker 2: they're normally.
Speaker 3: Not connected for anyone right, But at some point you're like, oh, wait,
Speaker 3: in that other class, I learned like he's sitting here
Speaker 3: fighting all of these other European powers, and eighteen oh
Speaker 3: three he actually his navy was defeated. I wonder whether
Speaker 3: that has anything to do with the Louisiana purchase. And
Speaker 3: even though they never teach us you in history class,
Speaker 3: has everything to do with the Louisiana purchase. Napoleon sold
Speaker 3: it because there's no way he could defend it. It turns
Speaker 3: out Thomas Jefferson could have just taken Louisiana and Napoleon
Speaker 3: had no navy to send out because the British had
Speaker 3: just destroyed it. And that's critical thinking. But in order
Speaker 3: to create those connections, you had to put the Napoleonic
Speaker 3: Wars in time and space with the Louisiana purchase, and
Speaker 3: you have to know where these things are. You have
Speaker 3: to know where Napoleon is, where England is, where the
Speaker 3: navy was defeated, where Louisiana is. You're like, oh, critical thinking,
Speaker 3: I'd be awfully hard to defend Louisiana if I'm sitting
Speaker 3: here battling all these Europeans and I don't have no
Speaker 3: navy anymore.
Speaker 2: Well, let me see two.
Speaker 1: Things from the brain point of view, which is four
Speaker 1: plasticity to happen. For knowledge to stick, it has to
Speaker 1: be relevant in some way. And so one of the
Speaker 1: ways that knowledge becomes relevant for us is when we
Speaker 1: are curious about something. So if you think, hey, wait,
Speaker 1: did the employee ack wars have anything to do with it?
Speaker 1: Then you're curious and you look it up and then
Speaker 1: it sticks the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 1: But how do we, as educators and using AI, how
Speaker 1: do we make things relevant to kids? And how do
Speaker 1: two AI tutors play part in that? Yeah, That's what
Speaker 1: I'm excited about.
Speaker 3: And I'll keep giving display because I don't want to
Speaker 3: make it sound like AI to mar Is is going to
Speaker 3: make everything perfect. But we're on a path and we've
Speaker 3: already seen once again that fifteen twenty percent of students
Speaker 3: who are let's call it proactive and showing more of
Speaker 3: that curiosity. I've seen it in front of my eyes
Speaker 3: where they're learning about the amendments of the Constitution. But
Speaker 3: now with generative AI, they could say, hey, why is
Speaker 3: this relevant now? And then the IA says, well, actually,
Speaker 3: back just recently in twenty twenty there was this Supreme
Speaker 3: Court case and actually that makes a big difference on
Speaker 3: like executive power, the Chevron doctrine, and.
Speaker 2: Are like, oh wow, this is a big deal. I
Speaker 2: never realized.
Speaker 3: So there's apps or like hey, I'm studying entroped, why
Speaker 3: does this matter? And it's like, no, it actually matters
Speaker 3: a ton because if you go into this or there's
Speaker 3: just a study recently, or if you're trying to and
Speaker 3: so I think that's one of the really powerful things
Speaker 3: that it. You know, the classic question for every kid,
Speaker 3: when am I going to need to use this? I
Speaker 3: consider myself better than most people and being able to
Speaker 3: answer that question, but even I'll fumble sometimes. But the
Speaker 3: AI is very good at that, and it's very good
Speaker 3: at like on conmego, if a student literally asked why
Speaker 3: do I need to learn this? The first thing that
Speaker 3: the AI typically does is is, well, what do you
Speaker 3: care about? And the students I want to be a
Speaker 3: professional athlete, I want to do this, and it'll actually
Speaker 3: the I will remember that there's ways to reset it
Speaker 3: and clear it and so it's not creepy. But like
Speaker 3: then in the future, it can proactively say, well, you know,
Speaker 3: since you said you want to be an athlete.
Speaker 2: This molecule, you know, ATP is crucial.
Speaker 3: You know, you want to maximize your ATP if you're
Speaker 3: about to you know, run a marathon or something.
Speaker 2: So that's the hope.
Speaker 3: And as AI gets better and better, as it gets multimodal,
Speaker 3: as it gets you know, we can completely imagine ten
Speaker 3: years in the future, for sure you're going to You'll
Speaker 3: put on augmented reality glasses or virtual reality glasses and
Speaker 3: travel to ancient Rome and try to stop, you know,
Speaker 3: the assassination of Caesar, or travel into the human brain
Speaker 3: and try to, you know, diagnose whether this is a
Speaker 3: you know, an Alzheimer's case, or you know, are there
Speaker 3: ways that you might be able to address it. So
Speaker 3: I think that relevance question AI will help. It's not
Speaker 3: solved it now. I'll say one other thing though, you know,
Speaker 3: I in my first book, I gave the example of
Speaker 3: you know, people always talk about relevance, but I was
Speaker 3: this I don't know. I used to think I was
Speaker 3: five nine, but I now realize probably closer to five
Speaker 3: to seven.
Speaker 2: Five eight.
Speaker 3: But I was this that tall kid in high school.
Speaker 3: But when I was in Pe, I never said, why
Speaker 3: am I going to have to take an orange ball
Speaker 3: and have to put it into a ten foot hoop,
Speaker 3: and this has no relev It had no relevance to
Speaker 3: my but I was engaged because my friends were there,
Speaker 3: I was having fun. I didn't feel disengaged. I do
Speaker 3: think that sometimes the relevance question is missing the mark
Speaker 3: a bit like math to some degree, the real beauty
Speaker 3: of math isn't in its ow implication. It's in its
Speaker 3: inherent beauty in it. It's the thought process of it.
Speaker 3: And I think the reason why a lot of kids
Speaker 3: start saying, oh, when am I going to learn this
Speaker 3: is they have so many gaps that they've disengaged, so
Speaker 3: they're just protecting their self esteem if you can fill
Speaker 3: in those gaps. I saw this with my cousins. Some
Speaker 3: of my cousins were saying, I'm not a math person.
Speaker 3: I hate math.
Speaker 2: Is that. But once they started getting that personal attention
Speaker 2: and I'm like, Hey, isn't this cool? Isn't this cool?
Speaker 3: You can do it this way or this way? Isn't
Speaker 3: this amazing that this can be described or predicted? They
Speaker 3: started becoming math people. And not that they thought that
Speaker 3: they were going to use it in their life, but
Speaker 3: they just started seeing the beauty in it and they
Speaker 3: start feeling confident in it.
Speaker 2: That's great. You know.
Speaker 1: Another thing is we as humans are so sensitive to
Speaker 1: story as opposed to let's say, a bulleted list of points.
Speaker 1: And so this is one of the things I'm enthusiastic about
Speaker 1: with AI is can it take complicated things, whether it's
Speaker 1: history or math or whatever and tell you a story
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I can create a story. It could create a poem,
Speaker 3: a song. It can. I think it can create simulations
Speaker 3: for you where yes, it becomes like the ultimate choose
Speaker 3: your own eventure. I mean, right now, it could be
Speaker 3: text based, it's soon going to be a video and
Speaker 3: visual based. But as we said in the not too
Speaker 3: far off future, let's call it five ten years, it's
Speaker 3: going to be able to create a lucid dream for
Speaker 3: you that puts you in the middle of it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I want to come back to this point about
Speaker 1: what this means for teachers. Tell us your thoughts on that.
Speaker 3: I've been saying this for years because even when I
Speaker 3: started making videos and software, some people said, oh, on
Speaker 3: demand video does this replace teachers? And my response is
Speaker 3: I don't think it does. If all a teacher is
Speaker 3: doing is going up, giving a lecture and leaving. Then yes,
Speaker 3: maybe on demand video could replace that. And you see
Speaker 3: that happening in a lot of colleges. They've you know,
Speaker 3: no one goes in med schools, no one goes to
Speaker 3: the lecture anymore, because that's what the lectures were. People
Speaker 3: are watching the recordings of the lectures on double speed,
Speaker 3: and now they can ask questions to an AI.
Speaker 2: So that's that.
Speaker 3: But and I've been saying this for years, the ideal
Speaker 3: classroom has always been, and this go back to Socrates
Speaker 3: and Plato and Aristotle, is if human beings are getting
Speaker 3: together in a room, make them interact with each other,
Speaker 3: have a Socratic dialogue, have a simulation. Have students go
Speaker 3: into groups and tackle the problem a little bit. Yes,
Speaker 3: you could give a little bit of a mini lecture,
Speaker 3: but then make it interactive or maybe out of the
Speaker 3: thirty students, ten of them really need help with this concept,
Speaker 3: while the other twenty can actually learn at their own
Speaker 3: pace or keep working on their project, or work on connuiccuting, whatever.
Speaker 3: So do the focus intervention with these ten, and then
Speaker 3: you don't have to bore or lose the other twenty.
Speaker 3: And then do another focus intervention with the other ten
Speaker 3: and that type of work. I think most people go
Speaker 3: into the teaching profession because they actually want to be
Speaker 3: that teacher that unlocks little sal or, little David, makes
Speaker 3: them believe in themselves. You know, we all can list
Speaker 3: five to ten teachers at every stage of our life.
Speaker 3: It's like that was the teacher that made me believe
Speaker 3: in myself or made me see wonder in the world,
Speaker 3: and they change my trajectory. And every teacher wants to
Speaker 3: be that teacher. And I think whether it's video, whether
Speaker 3: it's software, and it's AI, if it's used well and
Speaker 3: the AI is acting as assistant but not trying to
Speaker 3: replace the teacher, which I don't think it should. I
Speaker 3: think it could actually free up the teacher to do
Speaker 3: a lot of that more human element to work.
Speaker 1: And I know one of the things that you've been
Speaker 1: looking at is how AI could improve debating, as in,
Speaker 1: I'm going to take a point.
Speaker 2: And the AI is going to give you the opposite
Speaker 2: point and tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's you know, there's actually two projects on
Speaker 3: the debating let's call it debate, and one is very
Speaker 3: AI and one is very non AI. But I think
Speaker 3: they might actually converge. So on Conmigo, we actually have
Speaker 3: an activity where you can get into a debate with
Speaker 3: an AI on anything, you know, should the government cancel
Speaker 3: student debt, should the US maintain military bases around the world,
Speaker 3: or should it you know, kind of become more isolationist
Speaker 3: and you can pick either side. The AI will have
Speaker 3: a polite debate and then actually give you feedback and
Speaker 3: then you can switch side. So that's where we've got
Speaker 3: a lot of positive feedback. Students enjoy that it's a
Speaker 3: safe environment to test ideas without being embarrassed.
Speaker 2: Now we have another project.
Speaker 3: There's a sister nonprofit to Kind Academy that we still
Speaker 3: during the pandemic called Schoolhouse dot World. Schoolhouse dot World
Speaker 3: is all about free live tutoring from other human beings.
Speaker 3: The way that we're able to give people free live
Speaker 3: over zoom tutoring from other human beings is through volunteers,
Speaker 3: and anyone listening can go be a volunteer, and there's
Speaker 3: a whole mechanism to certify yourself or you can get tutoring.
Speaker 3: But one of the things we realize a lot of
Speaker 3: universities and some of the top universities you, Chicago, MIT, Brown, Yale, Caltech.
Speaker 3: There's thirty others said, Hey, if someone is tutoring on
Speaker 3: Schoolhouse dot World, so they've certified that they say no
Speaker 3: physics or they know biology, and they're tutoring other people,
Speaker 3: we want to know about that for college admissions. And
Speaker 3: so they have been using it for college admissions. But
Speaker 3: on top of that, when we went last year, they're like, hey,
Speaker 3: is there any way that we could leverage this platform
Speaker 3: to foster like civil dialogue between people, civil debate to
Speaker 3: your point, And we're like, okay, let's try something a
Speaker 3: little bit wild. Let's have real people fill out a
Speaker 3: survey on all the hottest button issues Israel, Palestine, abortion,
Speaker 3: affirmative action, free speech, gun control, gun control, go down
Speaker 3: the list, the stuff that people are afraid to talk
Speaker 3: about because they don't want to lose friendships.
Speaker 2: Students fill it out.
Speaker 3: You get paired, either one on one, sometimes two on
Speaker 3: two with someone with a diametrically opposite point of view.
Speaker 3: Now what happens on this dialogue project is you're not
Speaker 3: supposed to it's not a debate, but you're supposed to
Speaker 3: listen to each other. And at the end of it,
Speaker 3: you have to with the form represent the other person's
Speaker 3: point of view. You also have to reflect on whether
Speaker 3: you think they heard you and represent and then any
Speaker 3: other reflections on the interaction that you had. And what
Speaker 3: happens then is you get a rating on your ability
Speaker 3: to engage in hard conversations. And these colleges are very
Speaker 3: interested in this as they don't carry your point of
Speaker 3: view on these issues. They care that they like that
Speaker 3: you have a point of view, but that you were
Speaker 3: able to engage in a respectful and thoughtful and you're
Speaker 3: able to steal man the other person's argument, you're able
Speaker 3: to represent it. Now, those are both ways to have
Speaker 3: dialogue in a world where it's getting increasingly polarized, increasingly
Speaker 3: hard to have these conversations and feel safe. Over time,
Speaker 3: these might converge a little bit. We are imagining ways
Speaker 3: that AI. We are already using AI on schoolhouse to
Speaker 3: give the tutor's feedback after the fact to saying, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, you probably didn't ask enough questions, or you
Speaker 3: ignored this one student, or they were actually asking this.
Speaker 3: Over time is going to be real time. We also
Speaker 3: imagine this dialogue project the AI might be able to facilitate.
Speaker 3: We actually haven't had any where people started yelling at
Speaker 3: each other or got on out. But maybe it can
Speaker 3: make sure that the conversation. Oh oh, David, you know
Speaker 3: I can tell your feeling a little sensitive about what
Speaker 3: Sala said. Sal, is there another way that you might
Speaker 3: have said that that you know might be a little
Speaker 3: less triggering?
Speaker 2: Or David, can you tell sal a way.
Speaker 3: That he might have said that that you would have
Speaker 3: appreciated things like that? I could imagine AI facilitating that
Speaker 3: type of thing.
Speaker 1: Oh great, And what do you think is the future
Speaker 1: of AI in terms of assessments instead of taking standardized tests?
Speaker 1: What's the future in five years?
Speaker 2: Like everything?
Speaker 3: It's I mean, if if we're living in a science
Speaker 3: fiction book and standardized tests I have historically defended because
Speaker 3: I've said, look, to get good at anything, you have
Speaker 3: to measure it, And would you prefer unstandardized measurement you
Speaker 3: want to be able to benchmark. Now, the problem that
Speaker 3: most people have with sanitized tests, which I also agree with,
Speaker 3: is if you want something that's consistent and standardized and scalable,
Speaker 3: it's got to be you know, fairly narrow in what
Speaker 3: it can measure. So most standardized tests are multiple choice
Speaker 3: or just numeric entry. They don't let you do a
Speaker 3: lot of open ended things. And unfortunately, yes, they do
Speaker 3: measure some things that are of value, but they can't
Speaker 3: measure how well you could write a longer paper, or
Speaker 3: how well you can design something, or how well you
Speaker 3: can problem solve things. What's exciting about generative AI is yes,
Speaker 3: I do think in the next in fact, we're working
Speaker 3: on this kind of the future of assessment. We can
Speaker 3: incrementally add layers on top of traditional standardized assessment. So
Speaker 3: you can ask a student, Okay, you picked C. Can
Speaker 3: you explain your reasoning? Why do you think you pick C?
Speaker 3: Or even after you you actually got this one wrong,
Speaker 3: do you think it was a careless mistake or do
Speaker 3: you think you know there was an error?
Speaker 2: What was your error?
Speaker 3: And if you can give some of that subjective insights
Speaker 3: to teachers, it becomes more actionable. Then they know what
Speaker 3: to do with it. Reading comprehension instead of what was
Speaker 3: the author's intent? You know ABCD, you could say, before
Speaker 3: you see the choices in your own words, what do
Speaker 3: you think the author's intent was?
Speaker 2: Now look at the choices.
Speaker 3: Now if you fast forward five years, ten years, I
Speaker 3: think it's going to feel very much like a job
Speaker 3: interview or like an oral thesis defense at a university.
Speaker 3: And I know people's alarm bells start going off of
Speaker 3: a bias and this and that and a it can
Speaker 3: be creepy and data and all that, But I always
Speaker 3: point out, like job interviews and these rich assessments like
Speaker 3: thesis defense oral exams are rich, but they're incredibly biased,
Speaker 3: and they're incredibly inconsistent. Right now, you know, even if
Speaker 3: you're getting interviewed by the same person, depending on their mood,
Speaker 3: depending on the day of the week, you could get
Speaker 3: a completely different experience with that person. If we can
Speaker 3: get AI, and if we can benchmark AI and test
Speaker 3: AID and make sure, okay, two people equivalent, one is
Speaker 3: African American, one is Asian, is giving the same signal
Speaker 3: because other than race, these two simulated candidates are completely identical.
Speaker 3: So you can benchmark an AI in ways that you
Speaker 3: can't benchmark a human being. But if you can do that,
Speaker 3: I think AI is going to You're going to be
Speaker 3: able to have standardized assessments that feel a lot like
Speaker 3: a job interview, that feel a lot like a simulation
Speaker 3: or a game or a problem solving that I think
Speaker 3: can really broaden the oppertunity. I mean even things like
Speaker 3: sense of humor, or communication skills or body language.
Speaker 2: I think the AI could give feedback.
Speaker 3: Now, I'm a big believer you shouldn't just say, oh,
Speaker 3: that person's body language was off, never give them a job.
Speaker 3: It should be like, hey, you know what your body
Speaker 3: language right now? You were a little bit you weren't
Speaker 3: making eye contact, et cetera. I'd give you a three
Speaker 3: out of five. Here's tips. Come back to me tomorrow
Speaker 3: and take the assessment again. Mastery learning.
Speaker 1: Oh great, so you've touched on a few things about
Speaker 1: what the world might look like five ten years ago.
Speaker 1: When I think of five years ago, I mean, the
Speaker 1: only people who even knew these llms were working was
Speaker 1: you know, some researchers that could will whatever.
Speaker 2: But it hadn't burst onto the world yet.
Speaker 1: And so five years hence, what else do you think
Speaker 1: it's going to be different about, for example, what you're
Speaker 1: doing with con migo or whatever is next.
Speaker 2: What does it look like for students? It's hard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you said five years ago. Even five years ago,
Speaker 3: the AI researchers themselves didn't even appreciate I remember when
Speaker 3: Greg and Sam gave us access to GPT four in
Speaker 3: the summer of twenty twenty two, and my first question
Speaker 3: before I even tried it out, I was like, does
Speaker 3: this work in other languages? And they said, oh, we
Speaker 3: don't think so. And then I barely speak Bengali, which
Speaker 3: is where my family. My family comes from Bengal, and
Speaker 3: I said some it wrote back to me to Bengali,
Speaker 3: and I took a screenshot I sent to say They're like, oh,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, we just figured that out when you asked,
Speaker 3: so they didn't even know. And then one of my
Speaker 3: friend's parents as a researcher at another AI firm, and
Speaker 3: he's like, you know what, we didn't realize that you
Speaker 3: guys did Kin Academy did.
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh wow, what's our role here?
Speaker 3: He's like, we didn't realize the power of prompting that
Speaker 3: A lot of the AI researchers, if you go five
Speaker 3: years ago, four years ago, three years ago, they were
Speaker 3: just like going to make a better model with more parameters,
Speaker 3: better training data. And I think one of the breakthrough
Speaker 3: that happened both with GPT four and chat GPT to
Speaker 3: some degree one was a chat interface that unlocked a
Speaker 3: lot and then the other was that you can actually
Speaker 3: and GPT four in particular was very steerable, which means
Speaker 3: you could prompt it and have it take on personas
Speaker 3: as a tutor or as a poet, or as a
Speaker 3: rapper or whatever you want to make it do. And
Speaker 3: they I don't think the researchers had the time to
Speaker 3: even sit there and prompt it. So it is amazing
Speaker 3: even they didn't realize how far you could get with
Speaker 3: something like that five years in the future. You know,
Speaker 3: there's some people are arguing that, you know, we're hitting
Speaker 3: some type of an asymptote. You know, the jump from
Speaker 3: GPT three to GPT four was massive. The jump from
Speaker 3: GPT four now two years later to GPT four Omni
Speaker 3: one reasoning model three or whatever, or Gemini three or
Speaker 3: Claude three point five.
Speaker 2: It's better.
Speaker 3: I mean, the hallucinations are way down, the math errors
Speaker 3: the way down.
Speaker 2: It is getting better at reasoning.
Speaker 3: But it's not as much of a you know, we
Speaker 3: thought GPT five would be around by now, and that
Speaker 3: you know, maybe it would be approaching you know, something
Speaker 3: even more mind blowing or even transcending human intelligence that
Speaker 3: hasn't happened yet. So I think there's two scenarios. I
Speaker 3: think there's a world where in the next five years
Speaker 3: we do and then that's a wild world. I think
Speaker 3: you're going to see massive acceleration. I mean in your world,
Speaker 3: understanding the brain, understanding complex systems, drug developments.
Speaker 2: Science.
Speaker 3: I've heard people say we're gonna have one hundred years
Speaker 3: of science breakthroughs in the next ten I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I think that's at least true.
Speaker 1: I've actually made the argument that A is going to
Speaker 1: help in science in several ways. The main way it's
Speaker 1: going to do it is simply by pulling together facts
Speaker 1: that I couldn't possibly know because I couldn't have read
Speaker 1: all those journal articles. But the thing I'm really looking
Speaker 1: forward to now, which current lms cannot do, is scientific
Speaker 1: discovery of the type that humans do, which is extrapolating
Speaker 1: thinking of a new framework, saying what if I were
Speaker 1: writing on that photon of light, what would the world
Speaker 1: look like? Oh? That leads me to special theory of relativity.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of thing the current llms are incredible
Speaker 1: at interpolating, but not at extrapolating. So that's what I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to in science. But actually, let me ask
Speaker 1: you a question on this, And actually you mentioned hallucinations
Speaker 1: a moment ago, and I always think about what I
Speaker 1: like about hallucinations in MS, which is that you can
Speaker 1: also think of it as hypotheses, which is to say,
Speaker 1: and this is what scientists do all the time.
Speaker 2: Is hey, what if? What if?
Speaker 1: You know, we're trying things out all the time. Most
Speaker 1: of them don't lead anywhere. Occasionally you can build a
Speaker 1: bridge to that and say, oh my gosh, I just
Speaker 1: made real progress.
Speaker 2: So what do you think is the effect.
Speaker 1: Of AIS in education on creativity in students.
Speaker 3: I read a lot about it in my book Brave
Speaker 3: New Words, and I think it's going to be a
Speaker 3: creativity amplifier. You know, some people would argue like, oh,
Speaker 3: if this thing can create a lazy student's just not
Speaker 3: going to create themselves. And look, lazy students are going
Speaker 3: to figure out ways to be lazy. There's ways to
Speaker 3: police them. We're working on that too. But I always
Speaker 3: point out the most creative moments in my life have
Speaker 3: been when I'm in a room with other creative people.
Speaker 3: If you look at all the creative moments in history,
Speaker 3: you know, Florence during the Renaissance, or some of the
Speaker 3: you know beat nicks in you know, different cities in
Speaker 3: the world, or Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2: Right now, it's there.
Speaker 3: There is this effect of people meeting other creative people
Speaker 3: and then collaborating with them, and the power of AI
Speaker 3: is you know, like I remember being in middle school
Speaker 3: in high school and I was a curious kid, but
Speaker 3: I had to suppress that curiosity in the classroom otherwise
Speaker 3: I would get beat up. But I had no one
Speaker 3: to talk about this stuff with, and you just kind
Speaker 3: of sit been by yourself. It's like, I wonder, I
Speaker 3: wonder if this is different, and I wonder if I
Speaker 3: could do this. But now, if young sal had had
Speaker 3: chat GBT or Gemini or something, I.
Speaker 2: Could have played around. I was like, well, what do
Speaker 2: you mean by that? Or how does this?
Speaker 3: And I do think you know, to your point, some
Speaker 3: of the big breakthroughs are naive thinking, and some of
Speaker 3: the best naive thinking is coming from people who haven't
Speaker 3: been indoctrinated yet. And every couple of weeks I do
Speaker 3: get an email from a student saying, Oh, I watched
Speaker 3: your video on this, but I have a new theory
Speaker 3: that disproves you know Newton, And I'm like, okay, whatever, whatever,
Speaker 3: But you know, one out of every thousand of those
Speaker 3: kids is going to be right if they can start
Speaker 3: to validate or fine tune their ideas with an AI
Speaker 3: that could even bring what's already known out there. One
Speaker 3: of them is like, wait, I think I'm onto something,
Speaker 3: and maybe the AI says, you know, you might be
Speaker 3: onto something that might reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: It feels to me like the two most important things
Speaker 1: for educators is, you know, roots and wings. This was
Speaker 1: something Gerta said two hundred and fifty years ago that
Speaker 1: that's our job is to give kids roots and wings,
Speaker 1: meaning all the content knowledge as you mentioned, and the
Speaker 1: wings being the creativity part. So if students have a
Speaker 1: partner with which they can do it, great, that makes
Speaker 1: things better. How do we make sure that kids are
Speaker 1: using it as a partner as opposed to being the
Speaker 1: lazy kid and just letting let me do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I wrote about a whole in my book.
Speaker 3: I wrote a whole chapter about cheating, and I always
Speaker 3: like to start like, you know, everyone's concerned about cheating
Speaker 3: because of chat GEPT and it can cheat. I was like,
Speaker 3: but what was the state of cheating before, and it
Speaker 3: turns out there's been a lot of cheating, in fact,
Speaker 3: even since you and I were in school. Unfortunately cheating,
Speaker 3: you know, I think the internet, there's services online that
Speaker 3: a human being will write your paper in Kenya, a
Speaker 3: PhD in English will write your paper for five dollars
Speaker 3: a page, write your term paper for you. And that's
Speaker 3: arguably and that's been around for twenty years. So and
Speaker 3: sorority A sororities sisters and fraternity brothers are you know, sharing,
Speaker 3: So that's always been there and so our solution to
Speaker 3: it is, yeah, you're right, chat GPT could be used.
Speaker 2: In fact, I'm sure people are using it.
Speaker 3: And anyone who says that there's tools that can detect
Speaker 3: AI cheating is it snake oil. In fact, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of FA accusations happening right now, especially in higher education.
Speaker 3: But I think the real solution is and it doesn't
Speaker 3: just solve the cheating problem from AI. I think it
Speaker 3: solved the cheating problem generally, but it can also support
Speaker 3: students and teachers better is have the students have the
Speaker 3: teacher signed through the AI, have the students work with
Speaker 3: the AI on the paper, and then have the AI
Speaker 3: make the entire process transparent to the professor or to
Speaker 3: the teacher, because then and we're building this. But then
Speaker 3: if the AI could say, yes, professor, we worked on
Speaker 3: this for four hours. David had some trouble coming up
Speaker 3: with a thesis statement. This is where we worked. You
Speaker 3: can see two hours into it. We had a lot
Speaker 3: of back and forth on this part. You can see
Speaker 3: his edit history, but you know, three hours into it,
Speaker 3: he just copy and pasted this paragraph into this. I
Speaker 3: do not know where it comes from. It actually doesn't
Speaker 3: look like his writing. We should look into this. Don't
Speaker 3: accuse him, ask him about that paragraph. I think that
Speaker 3: could be healthy. Or if the whole thing just appears
Speaker 3: or it just comes linearly on, and you know, it
Speaker 3: doesn't look like something that someone worked on, then yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the red flag. But that would have flagged even
Speaker 3: the situation where you hired someone in Africa to write
Speaker 3: your paper for you and.
Speaker 2: It can quiz you on it. Yes, that's excellent.
Speaker 1: One question just to push back on that is will
Speaker 1: teachers want to look through the scrolls of data about
Speaker 1: this paragraph appeared and so on?
Speaker 2: Or is that too much work for them? Well, it
Speaker 2: is true.
Speaker 3: Well, That's why it's useful for the AI, because the
Speaker 3: AI could say so right now, our product manager, who
Speaker 3: leads what we call writing coach, she used to be
Speaker 3: an English teacher, and she used to have one hundred
Speaker 3: seventh grade students on her docket. She assigns one paper
Speaker 3: to grade. Those hundred papers would take her seventeen hours.
Speaker 3: That is not a great like that seventeen hours above
Speaker 3: and beyond being at the school for forty like it's incredible,
Speaker 3: and teachers are doing this right now. So imagine this
Speaker 3: new world where those hundred papers are done. And even
Speaker 3: those papers you don't know if Chad Gpt did them,
Speaker 3: you didn't know what happened. Now imagine this new world
Speaker 3: the papers are all done. The AI, first of all,
Speaker 3: can say, you know her name is Sarah Sarah, based
Speaker 3: on our rubric we constructed together, here's my preliminary grade
Speaker 3: and my justification of why. But you should review it.
Speaker 3: So what used to take seventeen hours can now maybe
Speaker 3: take you two hours. You still should review it, but
Speaker 3: like oh this, and in a lot of ways, it
Speaker 3: might be far more consistent because if you're grading one
Speaker 3: hundred seventh grade papers on the great Gatsby that ninetieth paper.
Speaker 3: You know you're not going to be consistent. I wouldn't
Speaker 3: be consistent one hundred percent. But also yes, and I'm
Speaker 3: confident that this is David's work, et cetera.
Speaker 2: It's just giving.
Speaker 3: It can give the synopsis, but then Sarah can ask questions.
Speaker 3: She's like, tell me more. Are there some themes you see?
Speaker 3: But yeah, it turns out a lot of your students
Speaker 3: are having trouble with thesis statements. So Sarah doesn't have
Speaker 3: to read every transcript that's not But once again, this
Speaker 3: acts as a teaching assistant and it can do all
Speaker 3: of that grunt work, but give Sarah way way more
Speaker 3: insights on where the students are, streamline the grading, and
Speaker 3: undermine any kind of cheating that might happen.
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 1: And it's not only grading the individual papers, but it's
Speaker 1: also giving her feedback about how the group did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we should do.
Speaker 3: Let's let's modify tomorrow's lesson plan to be focused on outlining,
Speaker 3: because that's where a lot of students struggled.
Speaker 1: In your experience, how are teachers currently feeling about AAR
Speaker 1: feeling excited? Are they feeling threatened? And what advice do
Speaker 1: you give to teachers. I've been pleasantly surprised. You know,
Speaker 1: when we started working on kon Mega, we had we
Speaker 1: had all these debates inside of our organization, people like
Speaker 1: it's communities for cheating, and had hallucinates and and what
Speaker 1: I what I told the team at the time is like, look,
Speaker 1: we we got to just this is going to be
Speaker 1: a thing.
Speaker 3: It's going to be it's going to improve. We have
Speaker 3: these are real concerns, but we have to turn them
Speaker 3: into features. So we said, Okay, we're gonna create oversight.
Speaker 3: We're going to moderate what students are doing. We're gonna
Speaker 3: cot Migo's not going to give you the answer. It's
Speaker 3: going to be socratic. It's going to ask questions. But
Speaker 3: I was still afraid that when we launched, like there's
Speaker 3: there's gonna be a lot of blowback. Con Academy's going
Speaker 3: all in on AI. It's not perfect, et cetera. We
Speaker 3: were working on that, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 3: and we were all under a non disclosure agreement with
Speaker 3: chat GPT, with open Ai all lawyered up, and and
Speaker 3: then and we were supposed to launch March of twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, November twenty twenty two, the last day of November.
Speaker 2: Chat GPT comes out, and I remember, like, what's going on.
Speaker 3: You guys said you were going to launch anything until March,
Speaker 3: and then I slacked Greg Brock and he's like, oh no,
Speaker 3: we all we did is put it.
Speaker 2: We launched all these apps on our old model.
Speaker 3: Chat GPT was one of them, just a chat interface
Speaker 3: on GPT three point five. We too are surprised. We
Speaker 3: didn't think anyone would care until GPT.
Speaker 2: Four came out.
Speaker 3: We were really wired because that was the moment where
Speaker 3: everyone says, oh my god, this thing has a lot
Speaker 3: of errors, it's bad at math, and it's a cheating tool.
Speaker 3: And then you saw these school districts start to ban it, etc.
Speaker 3: And we're like, oh no, we're working on this thing.
Speaker 3: We're gonna release in March, and everyone's already assuming that
Speaker 3: this is evil. It ended up that that was actually
Speaker 3: a blessing because by the time March came around four
Speaker 3: months later, the school system actually had said or started
Speaker 3: to think, well, you know what, this does have issues,
Speaker 3: but if only someone were to mitigate the risks, but
Speaker 3: this is going to be part of kids' lives and
Speaker 3: it couldn't theory be used to teach them? What if
Speaker 3: we could use it that way? And so when we
Speaker 3: launched Conmego, it had positive reaction. And I think what
Speaker 3: we're seeing from teachers is for some teachers there is
Speaker 3: a little trepidation, but as soon as we make clear, like, look,
Speaker 3: if I harted teaching sistant for every one of you, you
Speaker 3: would love that and you wouldn't feel threatened no matter
Speaker 3: how amazing that teaching assistant is. As long as you're
Speaker 3: in charge, that's what this is. And then Amani like,
Speaker 3: oh wow, yeah, this is really a gift. But and
Speaker 3: the other benefit is teachers are immediately seeing how it
Speaker 3: benefits their lives. I give that example of an English
Speaker 3: teacher having to spend seventeen hours grading one assignment, or
Speaker 3: if you're spending ten hours a week lesson planning or
Speaker 3: writing progress reports, and if you can shorten that by
Speaker 3: a factor of five or a factor of ten, that's
Speaker 3: an immediate benefit for the teacher.
Speaker 2: And it's a benefit for the teacher.
Speaker 3: If you have a classroom of thirty kids and they're
Speaker 3: all at different levels, you can't replicate yourself to address
Speaker 3: every one of their needs. So if more of those
Speaker 3: kids are having their gaps filled in and you're getting
Speaker 3: that information and then you can up level the lessons
Speaker 3: and it takes you less time to prepare them. That's
Speaker 3: starting to get to, you know, better and better from
Speaker 3: the teacher's point of view.
Speaker 1: What is the most surprising way that teachers or students
Speaker 1: have used your platform?
Speaker 3: I think early on I write about this in Brave
Speaker 3: New Words. This was I saw my opened the book
Speaker 3: this way when my daughter. This was in the early
Speaker 3: days before we had launched con Migo. We had access
Speaker 3: to GPT four no one else did. I had prompted
Speaker 3: it to just kind of co write a story with her,
Speaker 3: and it was a story about the social media influencer
Speaker 3: Samantha who's stuck on a desert island and she was
Speaker 3: having like a panic attack because she couldn't share how
Speaker 3: beautiful it was with her friends. And then my daughter said,
Speaker 3: can I talk to Samantha. I'm like, I guess you could,
Speaker 3: and so she said, I'd like to talk to Samantha,
Speaker 3: and then the aimedia says, hey, Samantha, here, I don't
Speaker 3: know what to do. I can't share this, and my
Speaker 3: daughter's like, it's okay, you know, just enjoy the beauty
Speaker 3: and like.
Speaker 2: And that was the first one. I was like, this
Speaker 2: is science fiction.
Speaker 3: Like, my daughter is not only writing a story with
Speaker 3: an AI, but now she can actually talk to a
Speaker 3: character that they constructed together in her story. And that
Speaker 3: was some of the idea behind Now we have activities
Speaker 3: on con Migo where you can talk to AI simulations
Speaker 3: of literary figures or historical characters. And you know, we
Speaker 3: have something called con World School, which is a virtual
Speaker 3: high school, and one of there's a student in India
Speaker 3: and she was starting The Great Gatsby. She had a huge,
Speaker 3: long conversation with Jay Gatsby AI simulation of Jay Gatsby,
Speaker 3: And you know, she told me the whole conversation. She's like,
Speaker 3: and I apologize for taking up all of his time.
Speaker 3: And she knew that he's an AI. It's not like
Speaker 3: she's you know, but and it was a pretty meaningful
Speaker 3: conversation about you know, goals and aspirations and never being
Speaker 3: able to reach them, et cetera. You know, I'm a
Speaker 3: Star trek nerd, especially you know, the next generation of
Speaker 3: the Holidack. And I used to think that was the
Speaker 3: most fake part of Star Trek, Like even in the
Speaker 3: twenty fourth century. Surely we're not going to be able
Speaker 3: to have like conversations with Albert Einstein. But literally, that's
Speaker 3: already hap there, that's already happening, and it's only going
Speaker 3: to get better and better.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Saul Khan, founder of the
Speaker 1: Kahn Academy. One of the things I thought was interesting
Speaker 1: is that he's in favor of teaching wrote knowledge. Sometimes
Speaker 1: he argues that it is to some degree a really
Speaker 1: important factor. But of all the things we covered today,
Speaker 1: I have to say that my absolute favorite is the
Speaker 1: project of learning critical thinking by debating with an AI,
Speaker 1: one that is friendly but firm, and the idea that
Speaker 1: we can start doing this right away. We can start
Speaker 1: getting our students to take a side on some issue
Speaker 1: and put forward logical arguments about it, and get graded
Speaker 1: on the quality of their arguments, and then on their
Speaker 1: ability to represent the argument of the other side, and
Speaker 1: then to switch sides and do it all again. That
Speaker 1: feels to me like a place where AI can fill
Speaker 1: a niche that is not currently filled, and it can
Speaker 1: do this with the loving patience that we would devoutly
Speaker 1: wish for when arguing with our classmates. Or our children
Speaker 1: or our students. The AI never gets tired or bored
Speaker 1: or offended. So in the end, as we start each
Speaker 1: school year in a world that changes faster and faster,
Speaker 1: I have high hopes that will continue to discover new
Speaker 1: ways to teach our students things that last, that we
Speaker 1: will give them roots and wings.
Speaker 2: And if we can use AI.
Speaker 1: To help students sharpen their reasoning and engage in deeper
Speaker 1: conversations and see the world from multiple perspectives, then we're
Speaker 1: not just preparing them to take the standardized tests. We
Speaker 1: are preparing them for life. The future of education isn't
Speaker 1: just about what we learn, but how we learn, and
Speaker 1: with the right technology, I have no doubt that we
Speaker 1: can make that future and our students quite bright. Go
Speaker 1: to Eagleman dot com slash podcasts for more information and
Speaker 1: to find further reading.
Speaker 2: Send me an email.
Speaker 1: At podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion,
Speaker 1: and check out and subscribe to Intercosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm Dave Eagelman and this is inner Cosmos.