Speaker 1: What does AI mean for the future of education?
Speaker 2: How should we be rethinking schools to meet the future?
Speaker 2: And what does this have to do with the invention
Speaker 2: of the printing press in fourteen forty or the calculator
Speaker 2: or the spread of Google? And how is this connected
Speaker 2: to the eighteenth century German writer Gerta or a digital
Speaker 2: replica of the philosopher Aristotle or the two lasting bequeaths
Speaker 2: that we should give our children. Welcome to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 2: with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author
Speaker 2: at Stanford and in these episodes we dive deeply into
Speaker 2: our three pound universe to uncover some of the most
Speaker 2: surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is all about
Speaker 2: the future of education. After all, we're still running our
Speaker 2: school systems essentially as we have since the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 2: but now we're in a world of AI. And the
Speaker 2: question is are we optimally educating our children for the
Speaker 2: future or are we mostly reiterating what we did mispreparing
Speaker 2: for a world that will quickly be unrecognizable. After all,
Speaker 2: the price of knowledge has dropped precipitously and is rapidly
Speaker 2: approaching zero.
Speaker 1: We are so used to having.
Speaker 2: Lots of jobs where you're paid to have specialized knowledge,
Speaker 2: like in medicine or law, or engineers or actuaries or
Speaker 2: patent examiners or whatever. But with AI that absorbs everything
Speaker 2: that we've written and can do an increasingly precise job
Speaker 2: of knowing things better than we can.
Speaker 1: In a world where AI.
Speaker 2: Aces the SATs and the MCATs and the LSATs without
Speaker 2: breaking a sweat, this is an open question.
Speaker 1: What the future is going to look like.
Speaker 2: I think it would be madness to assume that it's
Speaker 2: going to look much like our present in a decade
Speaker 2: or two from now. This is what many of us
Speaker 2: around Silicon Valley and the world are talking about all
Speaker 2: the time. But how does this affect how we are
Speaker 2: training the next generation? So for the next two episodes,
Speaker 2: we're going to dive deeply into this and we'll see
Speaker 2: some very cool directions and surprises. In today's episode, I'm
Speaker 2: going to lay the groundwork for how we can think
Speaker 2: about brains and education and the two important things that
Speaker 2: we need to be doing for the future. And in
Speaker 2: next week's episode, I'm going to interview Salkn, the creator
Speaker 2: of the con Academy, which is an extraordinary endeavor, which
Speaker 2: educates about one hundred million people in the world every year,
Speaker 2: and specifically Salini are going to talk about what the
Speaker 2: future of education looks like from his point of view
Speaker 2: and what tools he's building to meet the moment. So
Speaker 2: for today, let's start at the center of the issue,
Speaker 2: which is the human brain. The most remarkable thing about
Speaker 2: the brain is what we call neuroplasticity, which is the
Speaker 2: brain's ability to rewrite itself, to be flexible, to absorb
Speaker 2: the experiences of the world and etch them directly into
Speaker 2: the circuits of the brain. So brains come into the
Speaker 2: world half baked, and they absorb the world around them.
Speaker 2: This is how you come to master all the details
Speaker 2: of your language and your culture and the knowledge and
Speaker 2: the mores of your generation. And human brains are more
Speaker 2: plastic than any others in the animal kingdom. They pop
Speaker 2: out uniquely unfinished, and this is why a baby giraffe
Speaker 2: can walk within forty five minutes. But if you've ever
Speaker 2: seen a baby Homo sapiens get born, you know that
Speaker 2: it takes.
Speaker 1: Years to figure it out.
Speaker 2: So we have these massively extended infancies because we are
Speaker 2: wiring ourselves to the world as opposed to dropping in
Speaker 2: more pre programmed. Now, at first blush, it would seem
Speaker 2: that having a very long infancy would be a disadvantage,
Speaker 2: and in some ways it is, But the end result
Speaker 2: is that humans gain capacities that our neighbors in the
Speaker 2: animal kingdom just don't have. This is why a giraffe
Speaker 2: is doing the same thing giraffes were doing a million
Speaker 2: years ago. But humans launch satellites and compose symphonies, and
Speaker 2: erect skyscrapers and build quantum computers. No other species builds
Speaker 2: a fraction of what we build. And that's because although
Speaker 2: most others tend to be tougher than we are, they
Speaker 2: don't have the capacity to absorb the world around them
Speaker 2: to the degree that we do. In each generation, they
Speaker 2: just run the program of being a giraffe. But we
Speaker 2: drop into the world and in a handful of years
Speaker 2: we have learned almost every important insight and discovery of
Speaker 2: the billions of humans before us. We get that, and
Speaker 2: then we springboard into the next generation.
Speaker 1: So what does that mean for the way we.
Speaker 2: Think about educating our children. It means our responsibility is
Speaker 2: to shape this malleable brain.
Speaker 1: Each child has a forest of tens.
Speaker 2: Of billions of little neurons that are spending every moment
Speaker 2: changing the strength of their connections, and plugging and unplugging
Speaker 2: and seeking new locations. Whatever they learn in their childhoods,
Speaker 2: it's stored in the brain, and it's coded in a
Speaker 2: reconfiguration of the network. That's how brains absorb the world.
Speaker 2: So our job with education comes down to one main thing,
Speaker 2: which is to feed the brains of our children as
Speaker 2: rich a diet of high calorie information as we can.
Speaker 2: The problem is that schools are largely being run the
Speaker 2: same way we've done it for hundreds of years, when
Speaker 2: we needed to train children for particular jobs, careers that
Speaker 2: we could reasonably assume would be around and lucrative and
Speaker 2: solid in twenty years from now. But we're entering a
Speaker 2: new world now, a world where previously unimaginable technology, artificial
Speaker 2: intelligence that can answer any kind of question this is
Speaker 2: available the way that running water is available. Just imagine
Speaker 2: if you were Mark Twain or President Garfield, or Ada
Speaker 2: Lovelace or Florence Nightingale, the thought of running water would
Speaker 2: have seemed insane to you. But in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 2: there was suddenly a pivotal decade where most of America
Speaker 2: got running water, and suddenly, for the next generation of kids,
Speaker 2: it was just like background furniture, such that by the
Speaker 2: time you were born, you don't even devote a single
Speaker 2: neuron to the fact that you can produce a clean
Speaker 2: little river at whatever temperature you want, the second you
Speaker 2: want it. That's what artificial intelligence is going to be
Speaker 2: for this next generation. Of course, you can open an
Speaker 2: app that has read everything ever written by humans, and
Speaker 2: of course you can ask it anything at all in
Speaker 2: plain English and it will generate an absolutely beautiful answer.
Speaker 2: Of course, it can synthesize pieces of data that would
Speaker 2: take you lifetimes to read, and it does it instantly
Speaker 2: and brilliantly, and soon, of course, you can tell an
Speaker 2: AI to act as an agent and go out into
Speaker 2: the world and do tasks for you. So here's the
Speaker 2: thing I want to emphasize. This world of AI is
Speaker 2: going to require different skills than what we were raised
Speaker 2: with and it will offer extraordinarily different opportunities. So this
Speaker 2: is what we're diving into today. How does current technology
Speaker 2: change the future landscape and how can we leverage it
Speaker 2: to rewrite our school systems. So first we know that
Speaker 2: children are growing up in a different world than the
Speaker 2: one that many of us did from their first moments.
Speaker 1: They're in a world of technology.
Speaker 2: News of the pregnancy is posted on TikTok or Instagram,
Speaker 2: the news of the birth is spread on WhatsApp and X.
Speaker 2: Relatives anywhere on the planet immediately see their pictures. And
Speaker 2: they grow up in this world where control all delete
Speaker 2: is as basic as ABC. They have no idea why
Speaker 2: that key on the keyboard is labeled return. Some of
Speaker 2: you may remember typewriters where you had to return the
Speaker 2: carriage to the other side of the page.
Speaker 1: All our kids grow up in.
Speaker 2: A world where photographs are instant, whereas when many of
Speaker 2: us were children, we had to get the film processed
Speaker 2: and it took three days. In the space of a generation,
Speaker 2: things change fast, and the world of very young people
Speaker 2: now consists of millions of podcasts, billions of web pages,
Speaker 2: trily of videos.
Speaker 1: They spend tens.
Speaker 2: Of thousands of hours on mobile phones, video games, texts, emails,
Speaker 2: social media. And this is to say nothing about the
Speaker 2: continental plate shifts that AI is starting to make, which
Speaker 2: will return to in a moment. So as a result,
Speaker 2: by the time they're in high school, they have a
Speaker 2: different world than many of us grew up with. So
Speaker 2: does this change how their brains wire up and how
Speaker 2: they view themselves compared to, say, their parents.
Speaker 1: Of course it does.
Speaker 2: Their exposure has been to fast paced, shortened, interactive information,
Speaker 2: and what that means is the ways that students learn
Speaker 2: and communicate are different. You've probably heard the term digital
Speaker 2: immigrants for those teachers who carry old world traditions and assumptions.
Speaker 2: The idea is that you couldn't live and teach in
Speaker 2: another country unless you learned the language. For many teachers,
Speaker 2: the digital world is a second language that was learned later,
Speaker 2: and any teacher who was a little behind the technology
Speaker 2: ball is now really behind now that AI is here.
Speaker 2: So what does all this mean for the brain of
Speaker 2: a digital native? Well I mentioned that we come into
Speaker 2: the world with brains half baked, and we absorb the
Speaker 2: world around us. And the way this works is that
Speaker 2: in the brain of a newborn baby, the neurons are
Speaker 2: only starting to communicate with one another, but then over
Speaker 2: the first two years of life, those neurons begin connecting
Speaker 2: extremely rapidly, so by the time you hit two years old,
Speaker 2: you have hundreds of trillions of connections and this is
Speaker 2: where you max out. You have as many connections as
Speaker 2: you're ever going to have, and after that it's all
Speaker 2: about pruning.
Speaker 1: Like an overgrown garden.
Speaker 2: Your brain is encoding what it experiences out there. That's
Speaker 2: what those connections represent. Whatever you encounter in the world
Speaker 2: strengthens some pathways, while other pathways eventually go away. And
Speaker 2: that means the process of becoming who you are isn't
Speaker 2: about what you gain in the brain, but about what
Speaker 2: you lose. Think about it like Michelangelo carving away at
Speaker 2: the marble to find the statue inside. That's what your
Speaker 2: brain is doing by keeping those connections that resonate with
Speaker 2: the world. So how your brain turns out depends upon
Speaker 2: what you are exposed to. So given all this is
Speaker 2: of course no surprise that technology affects the brain, and
Speaker 2: that the current generation carries out tasks in different ways.
Speaker 2: With different technologies. They have increased use of some pathways
Speaker 2: and decreased use of others, and that gears today's students
Speaker 2: towards a different kind of learning. Now, I want to
Speaker 2: take a one second tangent, which is that it's very
Speaker 2: difficult to do a rigorous scientific study about growing up
Speaker 2: digitally and how that affects the brain. Why is it difficult,
Speaker 2: It's because you never really have a good control group.
Speaker 2: You can't just look at a bunch of students now
Speaker 2: and run a comparison against a previous generation, because there
Speaker 2: are one hundred other differences between them, including food and
Speaker 2: politics and air quality and on and on and on.
Speaker 2: And you can't easily find another group of students who
Speaker 2: grew up in this moment without being digital, unless they're
Speaker 2: amish or deeply impoverished.
Speaker 1: But then there are one.
Speaker 2: Hundred other differences in how they're being raised, and you
Speaker 2: don't know what you can attribute to the digital technology
Speaker 2: versus something else. So whatever people say are the differences
Speaker 2: with this generation, it's difficult to know which of those
Speaker 2: has to do with growing up digitally and which has
Speaker 2: to do with other issues like politics or pollution, or
Speaker 2: changes in sugar intake or less secondhand smoke or legalized
Speaker 2: marijuana or whatever, none the less. We can point to
Speaker 2: a few things that people have noticed when comparing pre
Speaker 2: Internet and post Internet patterns of reading a page of text.
Speaker 2: For example, so digital natives tend to make slightly different
Speaker 2: eye movements that are essentially f shaped meaning they're more
Speaker 2: likely to quickly scan headlines and then the first few
Speaker 2: lines of paragraphs before moving farther down the page to
Speaker 2: do that. Again, readers from older generations tend to be
Speaker 2: more thorough in they're reading and don't skip.
Speaker 1: Around as much.
Speaker 2: Digital natives are also more accustomed to taking in content
Speaker 2: that has text and images and videos and interactive sliders
Speaker 2: and buttons or whatever, and presumably as a result, it's
Speaker 2: tougher for a digital native to concentrate on a long
Speaker 2: book that is only walls of text, and so digital
Speaker 2: natives seem to be more prone to distractions, as measured
Speaker 2: by them moving their eyes off the text entirely. The
Speaker 2: cool part is that these details of eye movements can
Speaker 2: be tracked, and they're all totally unconscious. In other words,
Speaker 2: it's not a signal that can be easily faked because
Speaker 2: people don't even know they're doing it. I mentioned this
Speaker 2: to illustrate the bigger point that the digital generation is
Speaker 2: exposed to different stimuli and that strengthens different pathways in
Speaker 2: their brains, and that changes how they learn.
Speaker 1: Fastest and most efficiently.
Speaker 2: So for many of us, when we were growing up,
Speaker 2: we got a lot of information taught to us just
Speaker 2: in case we ever needed it. So the Battle of
Speaker 2: Hastings was in ten sixty six, because you might need
Speaker 2: to know that someday, or you might need to do
Speaker 2: geometry later in life, or you might need to know
Speaker 2: the capital of Indonesia. But education has been transforming because
Speaker 2: of the Internet. It's gone from just in case information
Speaker 2: to just in time information. Now young people increasingly pull
Speaker 2: information on demand. New skills are acquired as needed. Do
Speaker 2: you need to understand how to change a bike tire,
Speaker 2: you look it up. You need to understand how this
Speaker 2: math problem works, or what chemicals to use in this situation,
Speaker 2: you look it up.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The reason this new just in time learning is important
Speaker 2: is because the learning is not out of context with
Speaker 2: the question. When you want to know how something works,
Speaker 2: you have the right cocktail of neurotransmitters present, and that
Speaker 2: makes all the difference as far as the neuroplasticity goes.
Speaker 2: When you are curious, the information sticks and in fact
Speaker 2: without any of the neurotransmitter knowledge. The spirit of this
Speaker 2: observation reaches back to the ancient Greeks who loose dated
Speaker 2: seven levels of learning, with the highest level being when
Speaker 2: you're curious about something, then it really sticks. So when
Speaker 2: a child asks Alexa or Siri a question and gets
Speaker 2: the answer, their curiosity allows the information to have a
Speaker 2: better chance of getting edged in than if you simply
Speaker 2: stopped the child and said, hey, I need you to
Speaker 2: memorize this fact that has nothing to do with your
Speaker 2: life right now, and I'm going to ask you about
Speaker 2: this later.
Speaker 1: So when you follow some.
Speaker 2: Rabbit hole on Wikipedia, you click on this link because
Speaker 2: you're curious, and then the next because you want to
Speaker 2: understand that word that you've heard once, and then the
Speaker 2: next because there's some fascinating distinction you've never even thought of,
Speaker 2: and so on, and eventually you end up twenty clicks
Speaker 2: away from where you started. That's an amazing way to
Speaker 2: learn because you are maximizing your curiosity at every step.
Speaker 2: So each successive generation gets the opportunity for more self direction,
Speaker 2: and not surprisingly, our comfort zones come to be different.
Speaker 2: Back in the day, most of what we learned was
Speaker 2: by text or lecture. It was for the most part sequential,
Speaker 2: and one topic was tackled at a time, and most
Speaker 2: of our learning was done independently. Now learning has a
Speaker 2: very different character. There's way more multitasking, and we learn
Speaker 2: from pictures and sound and video, which makes everything a
Speaker 2: lot more engaging. A lot of our learning is interactive
Speaker 2: with websites or games, and we're often networked with other learners.
Speaker 2: Much of our learning now is random access like Wikipedia
Speaker 2: or Google or chat GPT. We connect ideas ourselves. Learning
Speaker 2: is far more hands on than it ever used to be,
Speaker 2: so the way brains seek information has changed, and this
Speaker 2: leads me to a one second tangent about the question
Speaker 2: of ADHD. Current students are used to constantly changing input
Speaker 2: and information sources. They're switching from WhatsApp to instead a
Speaker 2: chat GPT. Does that make a student struggle to concentrate
Speaker 2: in class? Yes, almost certainly it's a factor. But is
Speaker 2: that ADHD in many or most cases? Probably not. This
Speaker 2: is a normal response of their brains to the world.
Speaker 2: The way they scan and multitask means that sitting down
Speaker 2: and being taught from a boring textbook or a droning
Speaker 2: lecturer is not sufficiently interactive or engaging for them. It's
Speaker 2: more difficult to concentrate on, so the onus becomes on
Speaker 2: the educator to meet them halfway. Now, what does that
Speaker 2: look like? Well, now, we have the table set for
Speaker 2: us to move into the world that we find ourselves
Speaker 2: in in twenty twenty five, and specifically the world of
Speaker 2: AI as we all know, modern AI is blowing everyone's mind.
Speaker 2: Every day we see large language models lms pull things
Speaker 2: off that no one programmed them to do or even
Speaker 2: really expected them to be able to do, including all
Speaker 2: the stuff we're now taking for granted, like summarizing books
Speaker 2: or making a video from a text prompt or crushing
Speaker 2: the SATs or LSATs or MCATs. And this is why
Speaker 2: we find ourselves in an era of discovery more than invention.
Speaker 2: And I want to point out that a lot of
Speaker 2: the arguments people have been making about AI not being
Speaker 2: so good at this or that these have been changing
Speaker 2: really rapidly. For example, just a year ago people were
Speaker 2: arguing that AI would make silly mistakes about certain things,
Speaker 2: and couldn't add thirty two digit numbers with each other,
Speaker 2: and sometimes would get the wrong answers in a word problem.
Speaker 1: But in a shockingly.
Speaker 2: Brief amount of time, these shortcomings have all been mastered.
Speaker 2: So it's yet to be seen what challenges will remain
Speaker 2: and for how long we are in for fit a
Speaker 2: ride and it's going to move faster and faster. So
Speaker 2: what does this mean for our school systems? Our students
Speaker 2: are now in a world where the entirety of humankind's
Speaker 2: knowledge has been digested and any piece of information or
Speaker 2: any sophisticated analysis is available to you instantly. What does
Speaker 2: that mean for the next generation? How will the future
Speaker 2: change and what should we be doing about it now? So,
Speaker 2: first of all, let's put this in historical context, because
Speaker 2: in times like these, it's always useful to remember that
Speaker 2: there have always been times like these. So in fourteen forty,
Speaker 2: when the printing press was invented in Europe, there were
Speaker 2: many thinkers who asserted that this was going to ruin
Speaker 2: the next generation. Why because now the answers were just
Speaker 2: sitting there.
Speaker 1: They were right there. You don't have to remember much
Speaker 1: of anything.
Speaker 2: You just needed to remember where to get the information,
Speaker 2: and you could pull it right off the shelf.
Speaker 1: A lot of it.
Speaker 2: Educators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lamented what was
Speaker 2: going on here. They were certain this was going to
Speaker 2: make everyone intellectually lazy. What they overlooked was the way
Speaker 2: that knowledge would continue to explode and the way that
Speaker 2: society could springboard off the top of this new technology
Speaker 2: of books. Memorizing things was not, in fact the important
Speaker 2: part of education. Instead, it was about storing pointers to
Speaker 2: where the information could be obtained. Twenty five years ago,
Speaker 2: I was having a similar conversation with educators as we
Speaker 2: transitioned into a world of the Internet, and a teacher
Speaker 2: would ask a question and the kids would just go
Speaker 2: home and look up the answer. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you remember those days, but everyone's concern was that it
Speaker 2: was cheating.
Speaker 1: So what happened.
Speaker 2: It's not that students got dumber, It's that educators got smarter.
Speaker 2: We changed our approach to posing the questions to obviate
Speaker 2: copy and paste homework. We just stopped asking simple memorizable facts,
Speaker 2: and we started doing other things like getting students to
Speaker 2: present out loud to the class, or grading each other's
Speaker 2: work what new things did they learn, or getting students
Speaker 2: to grade the quality of information from different websites, and
Speaker 2: generally anything that made the questions an active exploration instead
Speaker 2: of a simple fill in the blank. Well, now we
Speaker 2: are faced with a new challenge from AI, and the
Speaker 2: question is is this the same kind of challenge we've
Speaker 2: always had, or is something different this time, and if so,
Speaker 2: what and how do we as a society best prepare
Speaker 2: ourselves and our students for this future. So let's start
Speaker 2: with a prediction about AI that I heard from Steve
Speaker 2: Jobs in the nineteen nineties. Jobs was giving a talk
Speaker 2: where he imagined that computers could reach this point where
Speaker 2: they would be able to understand everything that the great
Speaker 2: philosopher Aristotle knew and would be able to simulate his mind,
Speaker 2: and you could have a conversation with him. You could
Speaker 2: ask Aristotle anything, just like Alexander the Great did. And
Speaker 2: I have to say, when Steve Jobs talked about this
Speaker 2: in the nineties, it seemed like a full fledged computer
Speaker 2: world fantasy.
Speaker 1: On the AI mountain.
Speaker 2: We hadn't even gotten our boots strapped on at the
Speaker 2: bottom yet, and yet.
Speaker 1: Here we are.
Speaker 2: Now, We're so far up that mountain that now having
Speaker 2: a simulacrum of Aristotle just seems like part of the
Speaker 2: background furniture.
Speaker 1: You can do this with any LM.
Speaker 2: You just feed in all the books by someone and
Speaker 2: then you have a full, rich conversation. Now, why did
Speaker 2: Steve jobs suggestion of having a personalized tutor matter? Well,
Speaker 2: it matters because every classroom goes too fast for half
Speaker 2: the kids and too slow for the other half. So
Speaker 2: a tailored individualized education is a dream that many think
Speaker 2: in the education space have had for a long time,
Speaker 2: having an expert who could teach you with passion and
Speaker 2: patience and in every possible language. That's something that hasn't
Speaker 2: existed before, and now it's here. But here's the question
Speaker 2: I want to pose. If students were able to sit
Speaker 2: and have a conversation with Aristotle, would they or would
Speaker 2: they rather be hanging out with other students and making
Speaker 2: jokes and getting dates and so on. So I asked
Speaker 2: my thirteen year old boy this question of whether he
Speaker 2: would use a digital twin tutor, and he found it
Speaker 2: not that interesting because he was aware that he would
Speaker 2: run out of things to ask pretty quickly, because in fact,
Speaker 2: he wants to be with friends and play video games
Speaker 2: and run around. Also, there's what I call the problem
Speaker 2: of the mismatched internal model.
Speaker 1: A typical student.
Speaker 2: Simply doesn't have in his or her head the same
Speaker 2: questions or concepts that Aristotle had in his head, so
Speaker 2: there's not much of an interface there. They wouldn't think
Speaker 2: to ask him about his notion of four different causes
Speaker 2: that underlie everything, or his distinction between substantial properties and
Speaker 2: accidental properties of objects, or his theories about virtue or
Speaker 2: teleology or the unmoved mover. So if you were a
Speaker 2: student lucky enough to sit down with Aristotle, you just
Speaker 2: might not know what to ask. You're not that likely
Speaker 2: to probe him with really terrific questions. But I think
Speaker 2: the dream of a tutor isn't lost. It simply has
Speaker 2: to be cast correctly. There's a different way to think
Speaker 2: about the concept of tutor, and I think one of
Speaker 2: the best examples of this is coming out of the
Speaker 2: con Academy. It's called con Migo. Con Migo doesn't tell
Speaker 2: you what it knows. Instead, it challenges you to think
Speaker 2: critically and to solve problems without ever giving you direct answers.
Speaker 2: So you can learn algebra or programming or essay writing.
Speaker 2: But the key is that, unlike chatchpt, con migo does
Speaker 2: not tell you the answer. It guides you to find
Speaker 2: the answer yourself, and it does so with limitless patience.
Speaker 2: I won't say more about this now because next week
Speaker 2: we'll have Saul Khn of the con Academy on Intercosmos
Speaker 2: to talk with us about this, how it came about.
Speaker 1: And where it's going.
Speaker 2: But the thing I want us to note for now
Speaker 2: is that this is not a tutor that replaces a teacher,
Speaker 2: but one that works with the teacher, and that leads
Speaker 2: me to the role that AI is going to be
Speaker 2: great at, which is AI as Tha.
Speaker 1: In other words, as a teaching.
Speaker 2: Assistant, AI can do more than just help with the teaching.
Speaker 2: It can also help with the job of teaching. There
Speaker 2: are all kinds of ways that teachers can use AI
Speaker 2: to help with grading, with creating schedules, with tracking attendance
Speaker 2: that gives the teachers more time and energy to spend
Speaker 2: with the students. AI is super helpful a teacher needs
Speaker 2: to write comments to parents on an individual student performance.
Speaker 2: If it saves the teachers fifty percent of their time,
Speaker 2: that's an incredible win. Or when a teacher has to
Speaker 2: make multiple versions of the same test because kids are
Speaker 2: going off to debate tournaments, or writing teacher letters of recommendation.
Speaker 2: All these are things that AI helps with to reduce
Speaker 2: the burden on educators. And the effect of all these
Speaker 2: efficiency gains is that it gives the teachers more time
Speaker 2: to have real human relationships with the students, and AI
Speaker 2: is also going to improve the structure of teaching. A
Speaker 2: lot of researchers feel that the big end of semester
Speaker 2: exam is going to go away in place of AI
Speaker 2: monitoring every problem along the way, so the teacher knows
Speaker 2: exactly how a student is doing on the fly. In
Speaker 2: other words, with the enormous amount of data available to
Speaker 2: collect about learners, I can process and translate that to
Speaker 2: provide useful insights to everybody, to teachers, to students, to parents,
Speaker 2: and it can give in the moment formative feedback to
Speaker 2: the students, so even before they turn things into the teacher,
Speaker 2: the AI can differentiate the learning experience based on that
Speaker 2: student's need, in other words, tailored education. The main thing
Speaker 2: is it can digest all this data on the fly
Speaker 2: and make it understandable to everyone. Okay, so what should
Speaker 2: we do next in our classrooms. Let's return to what
Speaker 2: I said about teachers having to change the way they
Speaker 2: gave assignments when Google appeared.
Speaker 1: What do we do with chat GPT?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, last week I was giving a
Speaker 2: talk at a different university and I talked with several
Speaker 2: of my colleagues on the faculty there and I asked them,
Speaker 2: how are you changing the way that you do assignments
Speaker 2: to prevent students from using chat GPT, and many of
Speaker 2: them said, well, I changed my assignment up. Instead of
Speaker 2: just asking them to tell me the answer, I told
Speaker 2: the students to do something new, like compare two ideas
Speaker 2: or come up with three different ways of doing something.
Speaker 2: And I said, wait a minute, they could still just
Speaker 2: do that with their favorite LLM right, And the professors
Speaker 2: seemed to have one of two responses. One was, well,
Speaker 2: that would violate the honor code if they were doing that,
Speaker 2: and the other was I'm pretty sure my students are
Speaker 2: not doing that. But the fact is every student is
Speaker 2: doing it. There's no reason for a student not to
Speaker 2: do it. If you are a student and not using
Speaker 2: the available technology while your competition is using it, your
Speaker 2: chances of success are slim. So I think we should
Speaker 2: assume that all students are leveraging this technology. We need
Speaker 2: to work with that reality. But happily, as far as
Speaker 2: things to do, it's not that hard for an educator
Speaker 2: to modify the assignments. I'll give you an example. This
Speaker 2: is what I'm doing in my current class at Stanford.
Speaker 1: We used to have.
Speaker 2: The final assignment as the writing of a twelve page paper.
Speaker 2: Now the students run a science experiment on their fellow
Speaker 2: classmates and they write up the results. Even if they
Speaker 2: get help refining the question that they want to pursue
Speaker 2: from an LLM, that's fine. They're still optimizing the question
Speaker 2: that they want to pursue and designing the experiment, and
Speaker 2: then they're contacting their classmates and running the experiment and
Speaker 2: understanding what goes wrong in real life and how they
Speaker 2: need to communicate, and finally how to analyze data and
Speaker 2: make charts, even.
Speaker 1: If they use GPT for help with that.
Speaker 2: Anyway, it was an easy change for me to go
Speaker 2: from a final paper to a final experiment. And we
Speaker 2: also have quizzes every class where at the end of
Speaker 2: the lecture there are four sessions on a slide and
Speaker 2: the students write down the answers on paper. A lot
Speaker 2: of teachers are successfully moving in these directions. For example,
Speaker 2: many teachers I talk with say they used to give
Speaker 2: a big take home exam at the end of the semester.
Speaker 2: Now they give a bunch of smaller in class quizzes throughout.
Speaker 2: So I just want to emphasize the importance of being
Speaker 2: one hundred percent aware of the tools out there so
Speaker 2: that educators don't have to pretend that our students are
Speaker 2: not using them. And one way that educators can think
Speaker 2: about this is actually giving AI assisted assignments where the
Speaker 2: students are meant to use AI and couldn't complete it
Speaker 2: without it, and then you have oral defenses about what
Speaker 2: the student just learned. So just imagine the difference between
Speaker 2: having a student making a little diorama or whatever I
Speaker 2: did when I was a kid, versus having them build
Speaker 2: an AI enhanced science fiction world where the student works
Speaker 2: with AI to generate details about the new world, including
Speaker 2: the science, the cultures, the creatures, the technology that comes
Speaker 2: out of that, and then you have the student give
Speaker 2: a performance in front of the class. So it's not
Speaker 2: a matter of simply generating it, but refining it and
Speaker 2: knowing it and believing it and being able to be
Speaker 2: quizzed deeply on the fly about it. You can imagine
Speaker 2: these same concepts with AI assisted spoken word performance, where
Speaker 2: in combination with AI, a student might generate richer content
Speaker 2: to produce on the stage or AI designed next decade
Speaker 2: planning from social structures to technology and education.
Speaker 1: And daily life. This is how you give students a great.
Speaker 2: Education because they are learning how to use the tools
Speaker 2: of the day to build something creative and understand it deeply. Okay,
Speaker 2: so this is a direction where things can go. But
Speaker 2: things I think are even more exciting when we look
Speaker 2: out a few years. A colleague of mine, Rich Branyak,
Speaker 2: runs open Stacks, which is a service that provides textbooks
Speaker 2: in eighty five subjects for free. Now I just spoke
Speaker 2: with him, and he's put years into this project, but
Speaker 2: they're no longer certain that textbooks are the optimal way
Speaker 2: to carry information. So open Stacks is trying out many
Speaker 2: different things. And by the way, we are in a
Speaker 2: long period of discovery here, so some things will work
Speaker 2: well and some things won't. One of the things they're
Speaker 2: trying is this. Imagine that you need the students to
Speaker 2: read chapter seven of this book. You click a button
Speaker 2: to pass chapter seven to Google's Notebook LM, or even
Speaker 2: better now Google Illuminate, which turns the book into a
Speaker 2: podcast with two artificial podcasters having a conversation about the content.
Speaker 1: And you can set.
Speaker 2: All the parameters like which age group this is for,
Speaker 2: and the level of difficulty, and so on. I'll play
Speaker 2: a brief clip for you from one of Google Illuminates podcasts.
Speaker 2: Here it's absorbed Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, and you
Speaker 2: can learn about the book in a conversation.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about it. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: This is a classic foundational work in the field of
Speaker 3: evolutionary biology. It's amazing to think that it was published
Speaker 3: way back in eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 1: Eighteen fifty nine, that's quite a while ago. Can you
Speaker 1: tell us a bit about what makes this work so important?
Speaker 3: You bet, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was
Speaker 3: a total game changer.
Speaker 2: Now I'm only playing a bit of this, but it
Speaker 2: goes on to mention the key ideas and to break
Speaker 2: those down even further, such that in a short podcast
Speaker 2: you get a really good summary of the key ideas. Now,
Speaker 2: the thing I want to emphasize is that by this
Speaker 2: clever trick of turning it into two people talking, it
Speaker 2: becomes more interesting than a bulleted list of facts about
Speaker 2: the book. Why because it gets closer to a story,
Speaker 2: and we have a story shaped hole in our brain,
Speaker 2: and that's what allows things to go in rather than
Speaker 2: simply bullet points of facts. Now, it's not necessarily easy
Speaker 2: to turn everything into a story. But this technology that
Speaker 2: turns a book into a podcast gets us part way
Speaker 2: there because instead of somebody writing, here's a fact, here's
Speaker 2: a fact, here's a fact, now you have someone saying, wait,
Speaker 2: I'm confused, and the other person says, ah, hang on,
Speaker 2: this is amazing, and the first person says, wow, that
Speaker 2: really blows my mind. And now suddenly you're recruiting parts
Speaker 2: of the brain that we study in a subfield called
Speaker 2: social neuroscience, which is just to say, when other people
Speaker 2: are involved, we care more. And that's a big part
Speaker 2: of why we care about story. So this quick trick
Speaker 2: of converting a chapter into a podcast dialogue with a
Speaker 2: click allows story to be approximated and gets you part
Speaker 2: way there. And it's instant and free. And that's not all.
Speaker 2: If you, as a teacher, want to emphasize some aspect
Speaker 2: of the chapter in particular, you just steer the prompt
Speaker 2: that way. So open Stax is experimenting with saying, here's
Speaker 2: chapter seven of this textbook, but I really want my
Speaker 2: kids to concentrate on this aspect of it and not
Speaker 2: spend much time on.
Speaker 1: This other aspect.
Speaker 2: And even better than that, Open Stax wants to make
Speaker 2: it so the teacher can add his or her own voice,
Speaker 2: so that one of the voices on the podcast is
Speaker 2: the teacher saying the words.
Speaker 1: All of this is.
Speaker 2: Easily done with the current technology, and it allows this
Speaker 2: story shaped hole to be hit. It's not a Kloak
Speaker 2: and Dagger mystery about Darwin, but it's a heck of
Speaker 2: a lot better than.
Speaker 1: Reading a long list of facts.
Speaker 2: All this leads to the big question, which is what
Speaker 2: is it we want our students to learn in school. Well,
Speaker 2: one of the most important aspects of school is this
Speaker 2: social education, learning all about other people and how to
Speaker 2: deal with them, and that's obviously much more than simple
Speaker 2: fact gathering. Beyond this, there are two fundamental things we
Speaker 2: need them to learn and to get there, I'll step
Speaker 2: back to the great German thinker Gerta, who in the
Speaker 2: eighteenth century suggested that children need two things from their parents,
Speaker 2: roots and wings. That is the ability to know what
Speaker 2: has come before them that's the roots, and the courage
Speaker 2: to move into the future and create something new that's
Speaker 2: the wings. So what does this mean in the context
Speaker 2: of our future world? We need to be thinking about
Speaker 2: what this translates into for our students, because lots of
Speaker 2: jobs will get outdated, just as always happens. Think about
Speaker 2: buggy drivers and phonograph makers and telephone operators. There's always
Speaker 2: been no point in teaching towards particular vocations, but that's
Speaker 2: especially true now. In ten years, it is really difficult
Speaker 2: to know what jobs are going to exist. Twenty years
Speaker 2: from now, it's probably impossible. Our students of today are
Speaker 2: going to have job titles we can't even imagine right now,
Speaker 2: and the question is how do we prepare them for it. Well,
Speaker 2: in this context, my interpretation of the Gerta quote about
Speaker 2: roots and wings translates to this, for schools, everything is
Speaker 2: going to change. So the roots we want to teach
Speaker 2: our children that's critical thinking, and the wings we want
Speaker 2: to give them that's creativity. And I'm going to argue that,
Speaker 2: even as everything else changes rapidly around us, these are
Speaker 2: the two finest gifts that we can bequeath to the
Speaker 2: next generation. So let's concentrate on critical thinking first. The
Speaker 2: idea of writing an end of term paper, or memorizing
Speaker 2: a bunch of formulas or dates, all of that is
Speaker 2: becoming less important because AI can take care of that instead,
Speaker 2: the central job for us is to focus on how
Speaker 2: to think, how to critically reason, how to make good decisions.
Speaker 2: And let me tell you what I think is a
Speaker 2: beautiful example of how AI can be leveraged.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: One of the things I'm going to discuss with Saul
Speaker 2: Kahan next week is the issue of teaching critical thinking
Speaker 2: by debate. So, without giving that discussion away, I'll just
Speaker 2: say we're all interested in teaching students not to pipe
Speaker 2: off with opinions that they believe are incontrovertible, but instead
Speaker 2: to teach them how to think by being challenged. Now,
Speaker 2: somehow our schools have gotten less good.
Speaker 1: At that training.
Speaker 2: How can we make sure that our students are given
Speaker 2: that challenge, that training such that they're able to understand
Speaker 2: the other side of an argument well enough to steal
Speaker 2: man it. Steel manning is the opposite of straw manning.
Speaker 2: It's where you hear someone else's opposing argument and then
Speaker 2: you try to reproduce it and possibly even strengthen it
Speaker 2: to demonstrate your understanding of it. So, in this way
Speaker 2: of using AI, a student takes a hot button topic
Speaker 2: and debates it with the friendly but firm AI, and
Speaker 2: the student is graded on how well she defended her
Speaker 2: position with logical arguments as well as how well she
Speaker 2: was able to steal man the computer's argument, and then
Speaker 2: the sides are switched. Now, to my mind, this is
Speaker 2: one of the most powerful approaches to how AI can
Speaker 2: be leveraged in leveling up education. A student can get
Speaker 2: the time and patience and practice to meaningfully learn how
Speaker 2: to think this way. As I said, we're going to
Speaker 2: come back to this in more detail next week, and
Speaker 2: now let's turn to creativity in theory. The aim of
Speaker 2: the National curriculum is to prepare children for life, right,
Speaker 2: but many worry that it has drifted into the realm
Speaker 2: of teaching for the next test, and we sometimes miss
Speaker 2: the fact that the content of those tests isn't in
Speaker 2: the right aim, because we're still training kids for what
Speaker 2: was important in the last generation, not the upcoming one.
Speaker 2: And I mentioned a moment ago the issue of jobs
Speaker 2: that won't even exist anymore and the unimagined jobs that
Speaker 2: are coming down the pike. So presumably the important thing
Speaker 2: is not to teach rote knowledge, but instead to teach
Speaker 2: the ability to learn to be cognitively flexible, to be creative.
Speaker 2: And AI is extraordinary at helping with this, students and
Speaker 2: all of us can throw the ball farther every time
Speaker 2: by having a thought partner. Fundamentally, what's happening in the
Speaker 2: brain is that creativity happens because we absorb information from
Speaker 2: the world and then remix it by bending it, by
Speaker 2: breaking it, by blending it. If you're interested in this topic,
Speaker 2: please check out my book The Runaway Species or listen
Speaker 2: to episode fifty eight for more on that. And what
Speaker 2: AI gives is plenty of practice with this bending, breaking
Speaker 2: and blending. It's so good at working with us to
Speaker 2: do these remixes. And if we zoom out to AI
Speaker 2: and our technology more generally, what it is extraordinary at
Speaker 2: is giving us the ability to consume a larger diet,
Speaker 2: which gives us the warehouse of materials that we can remix.
Speaker 2: This is now something that students have the opportunity to
Speaker 2: do at a whole new level, to have an incredibly
Speaker 2: expansive storehouse of knowledge, bigger than any generation before them.
Speaker 2: For many of us, when we were young, we'd get
Speaker 2: our information by going down to the library and pulling
Speaker 2: out the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Speaker 1: But now you can get the entirety.
Speaker 2: Of humankind's knowledge from a rectangle in your pocket. That
Speaker 2: makes an enormous difference. And you had whatever homeroom teacher
Speaker 2: you had in your little town. But now students get
Speaker 2: to absorb a larger world due to technology. Our devices
Speaker 2: have flattened the world and zero the distances. I run
Speaker 2: into kids all the time who say something really smart,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 1: Say, how did you know that?
Speaker 2: And they say, oh, I learned that from a Ted
Speaker 2: talk where you've got somebody giving the best talk of
Speaker 2: their lives in fifteen minutes. To my mind, this is
Speaker 2: one of the most beautiful things about AI and technology
Speaker 2: in our lives. It's about consuming a larger diet. Children
Speaker 2: now have an opportunity which we never had. They can
Speaker 2: build whole new worlds with AI. They can figure out
Speaker 2: how to implement anything not on a year's timescale, but
Speaker 2: in a few dedicated hours. As a result of our
Speaker 2: increasingly large diet, we have become a species with a
Speaker 2: runaway imagination. Our innate cognitive software has produced a society
Speaker 2: with increasingly faster innovation when that feeds upon its latest ideas,
Speaker 2: and our students now are on the steepest part of
Speaker 2: the curve that we've ever had in the history of
Speaker 2: the species. There are now more materials than ever for
Speaker 2: them to absorb and remix.
Speaker 1: And the question for us as educators is.
Speaker 2: How do we meet them there on their terms, with
Speaker 2: current technology and with their method of learning.
Speaker 1: We're entering a.
Speaker 2: New world with AI in scientific discovery, AI and art
Speaker 2: and music, AI and social sciences and engineering and legislation.
Speaker 2: And there are patterns emerging that we can't conceive of
Speaker 2: with our twenty twenty five minds, but will look obvious
Speaker 2: enough in twenty thirty five. So to wrap up this thought,
Speaker 2: few endeavors hold as much power for our students of
Speaker 2: today as critical thinking and creativity. Everything is going to
Speaker 2: look very different from the world we know today. There's
Speaker 2: going to be new medical treatments, fl forms of communication,
Speaker 2: new works of art, and the road to that future
Speaker 2: begins in the classrooms of today. So let's do a
Speaker 2: good job making sure that our students have the tools
Speaker 2: to go out and build the next.
Speaker 1: Generation of our world.
Speaker 2: So please join me for the next episode, Part two,
Speaker 2: where I'll be interviewing Saul Khan, founder of the kN Academy.
Speaker 2: As a preview, he's not opposed to teaching, wrote knowledge,
Speaker 2: and he'll argue why that is to some degree a
Speaker 2: really important thing, and he'll talk about the incredible work
Speaker 2: he's done with the con Academy over the years, and
Speaker 2: also where things are going with our new world of technology.
Speaker 2: So until next week, I'll just end by reminding us
Speaker 2: that very little is going to remain status quo in
Speaker 2: our society. There are many fronts on which we'll watch
Speaker 2: and see what happens, but I suggest the most important
Speaker 2: place for us to take action now is with the
Speaker 2: education of our children. As the slope of change increases,
Speaker 2: we need to keep in how we can make the
Speaker 2: right moves now so that we can successfully bequeath to
Speaker 2: our children roots and wings. Go to Eagleman dot com
Speaker 2: slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 2: Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
Speaker 2: with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Speaker 2: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
Speaker 2: to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
Speaker 2: this is Inner Cosmos.