Academia and AI

The future of learning is on the horizon. It’s GenZ’s worst kept secret that LLMs have already changed the way we learn, work, think, and attend. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. heterogenously interrupted how we engage with schooling. Targeting the nature of this heterogeneity is vital for our education system to develop alongside AI rather than force itself into obsolescence. That is, education should observe the ways that students are already using AI in ways unique to their own learning needs to inform AI-use in the future.

When professors talk about the use of AI in the classroom, it’s clear they envision a student lying in bed, lazily uploading an assignment to ChatGPT, scrolling TikTok until the agent finishes, then copying and pasting the result directly into their own document and hitting submit. Many professors expect that all their students who have ever opened ChatGPT have used it to shortcircuit the learning process entirely. And while there certainly exist students like these and circumstances under which otherwise committed students may utilize AI as such, many students are using AI to learn more content faster. There is an unexplored, strong correlation between students who excel academically and students who are likely to be early adopters of hyper-powerful learning tools. Driven, high-agency students don’t want their brains to be replaced by AI, but they are aware that if they don’t “get really, unbelievably proficient with these tools” 15:50- Demis Hassabis, Google Deep Mind Chief Executive of Alphabet Inc., they could be.

The institution of academia now faces a crossroads. Research and education will fundamentally change when AI is smarter than any human. This essay focuses on education, as the returns to research have already been thoroughly explored by, for example, Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace. AI has the potential to democratize education on two levels: personal access to learning, and broader exposure to knowledge. Formal academic institutions will need to reevaluate their added value to continue charging expensive premiums for knowledge that is widely available. Perhaps accreditation from elite schools will become more valuable as it becomes more difficult to stand out in labor markets, but the opportunity cost of formal schooling rises when the “next best” option is really good. Formal higher education simply cannot afford to be technologically primitive in comparison to lower-cost options. To be clear, as the daughter of a college professor and a teacher, I believe that human teachers are invaluable to the world. Teachers and professors are indispensable role models for skills both hard and soft. Throughout all youth, though especially younger children, we will always need humans to guide us. AI will never stand in for moral guidance because it can never truly empathize with the struggles of being human. Educators deserve to have powerful learning tools to help them lead young people to their potential.

In the short run (the next 10-20 years), knowledge acquisition will become a commodity in the post-thinking world. There is a reasonable argument that the transition to an AI-economy will speed up the increasingly pre-professional nature of college. Increased competition for entry-level jobs may push students who continue to pursue higher education to do so with the explicit goal of stable employment upon graduation. It’s not even clear what preparing oneself for the workforce means anymore. Aditya Aggarwal, 10th employee of Facebook, recently reflected on X about the realization that his skills were being replaced by this technology. While humans have always faced existential uncertainty, the threat of the loss of purpose and fulfillment received from intellectual work is a potentially species-wide psychologically traumatic event.

Here, in the long term (20+ years), I see hope for the future of education. A lot of things could go very wrong, but assume for a moment that humans get the AI Revolution right. Returning to Machines of Loving Grace, imagine that we cure disease, heal the climate, end war, solve poverty, and distribute wealth. What will our species’ driving purpose be? I believe it will remain what has gotten us to this point: curiosity. Given the new frontiers of knowledge that are inevitably about to be discovered, analyzed, understood, and explained by powerful agents, humans could spark a renaissance for the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. What would “curriculum” look like in a world where our economy may run mostly for us? Would AI-created syllabi focus our attention on ecological literacy to protect our planet and improve our stewardship of the Earth? Would there be a growing focus on understanding our own individual biological markers to master our health? Will our children be learning about subjects that do not currently exist? I don’t have the answers, and that’s the point. Genuine intellectual curiosity will drive us forward in these strange new times.