Will AI Destroy or Reinvent Education?

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, is AI going to destroy, or on the other hand, completely reinvent event education. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Hello friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzy, and Banta. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash ai daily brief. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, shoot us a note at sponsors at ai daily brief dot AI. All right. Well, as we speak, millions and millions of students and millions and millions of parents all across America are getting ready for back to school.

0:41For some of us, the late August-early September return to school still decades after our formal education ends feels more like New Year's than New Year's in some ways. It's a moment for reinvention and for considering the future. And as this new school year begins, the future that many parents and students are considering has to do with AI. For this long read slash big think episode, we actually are going to read excerpts from a few different pieces. And afterwards, I will make an argument that core to the question of AI's impact on education is what we think the point of education actually is.

1:19But let's read some excerpts from these pieces first. The first comes from opinion columnist David Brooks. His piece is called, Are We Really Willing to Become Dumber? David starts by establishing his AI optimist credentials. He says I'm generally optimistic about all the ways AI is going to make life better. Scientific research, medical diagnoses, tutoring, and my favorite current use case, vacation planning. But it also offers, he writes, a malevolent seduction. Excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work. And I'm sorry, but that's not possible.

1:54David then gets into a study, which is actually at the core of two of the three of these essays. He points out that it's a small sample size and that it hasn't been peer-reviewed, but that there is something intuitive about it that inherently strikes us as true. He writes, A group of MIT researchers recruited 54 participants to write essays. Some of them used AI to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines, and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used AI to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years, and definitions.

2:24The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 % fewer references to these things. So far, so good. But the essays written with AI were more homogenous, while those written by people relying on their brains created a wider variety of arguments and points. He then goes on to point out that people didn't have very good recall when they had written their essay with AI. He writes they hadn't really internalized their own writing and little of it had sunk in. But where it gets really interesting was EEG measurements of people's brains. Brooks writes, The subjects who relied only on their own brains showed higher connectivity across a bunch of brain regions.

2:59Search engine users experienced less brain connectivity and AI users least of all. He then talked about another method called dynamic directed transfer function, or DDTF, that also showed the brain-only writers with the highest connectivity and the AI group with up to 55 % lower connectivity. The conclusion of the researchers was that, collectively these findings support the view that external support tools restructure not only task performance, but also the underlying cognitive architecture. Now, Brooks points out that the researchers are not trying to overstate the implications of this. Instead, it's really the obvious point that gets people's attention.

3:35As Brooks puts it, Thinking hard strengthens your mental capacity. Using a bot to think for you, or even just massaging what the bot gives you, is empty calories for the mind. You're robbing yourself of an education and diminishing your intellectual potential. Now this brings us to another essay, this time from Megan O 'Rourke, executive editor of the Yale Review and a professor of creative writing at Yale University. Her essay begins with an attempt. She wrote, We need a coherent approach grounded in understanding how the technology works, where it is going, and what it will be used for. As a teacher of creative writing, I set out to understand what AI could do for students, but also what it might mean for writing itself.

4:12My conversations with AI showcased its seductive cocktail of affirmation, perceptiveness, solicitousness, and duplicity, and brought home how complicated this new era will be. And the TLDR of her experience at first was that while it didn't overly impress her when it came to writing in her field, it did surprise her in many other parts of her life. As she puts it, tasks I might otherwise have avoided or agonized over suddenly became manageable. It didn't just format documents, it asked helpful follow-up questions. ChatGPT helped me conserve energy for higher-order thinking and writing. It didn't diminish my sense of agency, it restored it.

4:48As a working mother of two young children running a magazine as well as teaching, I always feel starved for time.

4:58She continues to talk about how she became more and more engaged with ChachiBT, leading up to the pivot point. In many ways, she discusses the same thing that Brooks was discussing, albeit with no disrespect to Brooks, in slightly more engaging prose. She continues,

5:22any of its values. That may be, from the humanist's perspective, the most pernicious thing about AI, the way it simulates mastery and brings satisfaction to its users who feel, at least fleetingly, as if she did the thing the technology performed. At some point, knowing that the tool was there began to interfere with my own thinking. If I asked it to research contemporary poetry for a class, it offered to write a syllabus. If I said yes, to see what it would come up with, the result was different from what I'd do, yet its version lodged unhelpfully in my mind. What happens when technology makes the process all too available?

5:54She then references the same study that Brooks talked about, and said, While some critics of the study have questioned whether EEG can meaningfully measure engagement, the conclusions echoed my own experience. When ChatGPT drafted or edited an email for me, I felt less connected to the outcome. Once, having asked AI to draft a complicated note based on bullet points I gave it, I sent an email that I realized retrospectively did not articulate what I myself felt. It was as if a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain, controlling my fingers as they typed. For her, this is incredibly personal.

6:23She wrote, I've spent decades writing and editing. I know the feeling of reward and hard-won clarity that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what's missing when an LLM delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who've never experienced the reward of pressing towards an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax? What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being. The pleasure of invention. The felt life of the mind at work. I'm a writer because I know of no art, form, or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

6:54As I write this, my children are building Legos on the floor besides me, singing improvised parodies of the Burger King jingle. They're inventing neologisms. Gomology, my older son announces, it means thinking you can do it all by yourself. The younger one laughs. They're riffing, spiraling, contradicting each other. The living room is full of sound, the result of that strange, astonishing current of attention in which one person's thoughts lead to another, creatively multiplying. The sheer human pleasure in inventiveness is what I want my children to hold on to, and what using AI threatens to erode.

7:21Which brings us lastly to our third essay, this one from John Craycraft, a third-year student at the University of Minnesota. It's called, We're Losing Our Love of Learning and AI is to Blame. He begins, When was the last time you felt genuinely excited to deep dive into a topic just because it fascinated you? When did you last spend hours exploring an idea not because it was assigned, but because you couldn't stop thinking about it? If you're struggling to remember, you're not alone. As a third-year student at the University of Minnesota, I've watched something troubling unfold in classrooms across campus.

7:50We're losing our love of learning. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this decline in ways that should alarm every student, professor, and administrator. Now what John adds to the conversation is a view from the ground floor. As he writes, statistics only tell part of the story. What I witness in daily campus life is far more concerning than any research paper can capture. I watch classmates approach every assignment with the same question. How can I get this done fastest? They don't ask, what can I learn from this or how does this connect to bigger ideas? The focus has shifted from understanding to completion, from curiosity to efficiency.

8:22Let me ask ChatGPT has become our default response to intellectual challenge. Most telling is the language students use. I regularly hear peers say things like, Why do I need to learn this when AI can do it for me? Or, I don't need to understand the process if AI gets the right answer. He concludes, We need to remember why we came to college in the first place. Learning isn't about accumulating facts or completing assignments. It's about developing the capacity to think, question, and discover. It's about becoming the kind of person who can navigate complexities, solve novel problems, and contribute meaningfully to the world.

8:54What if AI wasn't just a buzzword, but a business imperative? On You Can With AI, we take you inside the boardrooms and strategy sessions of the world's most forward-thinking enterprises. Hosted by me, Nathaniel Whittemore, and powered by KPMG, this seven-part series delivers real-world insights from leaders who are scaling AI with purpose, from aligning culture and leadership to building trust, data readiness, and deploying AI agents. Whether you're a C-suite executive, strategist, or innovator, this podcast is your front-row seat to the future of enterprise AI. So tune in at www.kpmg.us slash AI podcasts to start transforming possibility into performance.

9:34You can with AI, you can with KPMG. Again, and that's www.kpmg.us slash AI podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, the enterprise autonomous software development platform with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise-scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Enterprise engineering leaders start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80 % plus of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20 % of human development work required to complete the sprint.

10:16Public companies are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their pre-IDE development tool, pairing it with their coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI-native SDLC into their org. Blitzy is providing a limited-time, 30-day free proof-of-concept for qualifying enterprises. The team will provide a 5x velocity increase on a real development project in your org. Visit blitzy.com and press book demo to learn how Blitzy transforms your SDLC from AI-assisted to AI-native. That's blitzy.com. As a founder, you're moving fast towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

10:54But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher earlier than ever. Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long. With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit-ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infra, and customers evolve. Fast-growing customers like Langchain, Writer, and Cursor trusted Vanta to build a scalable foundation from the start. And look, as someone who lives in the world of enterprise procurement, I love how Vanta makes it easy to get compliance right.

11:27The last thing you need when you're trying to win that big deal is to have it scuttled by something that Vanta has solved for over 10 ,000 companies. Go to vanta.com slash NLW to save$1 ,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10 ,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash NLW to save$1 ,000 for a limited time. And this, I believe, is what gets at the core of the issue. Is that, in fact, what education is actually about? Is that why we came to college in the first place? For John, it seems that that is absolutely the case. For Yale professor Megan as well.

12:08However, for centuries now, what we call education has actually been about two totally different things. On the one hand, learning how to think and more broadly to be in the world. And on the other, learning how to do economically productive things. The competition between these interpretations of the purpose of education is not a phenomenon that is new to AI. It is embodied in famous aphorisms and quotes. Oscar Wilde's education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Or the even more precise and more famous quote from Mark Twain, don't let schooling interfere with your education.

12:48Part of the student debt crisis right now can be attributed to the uncomfortable mashing together of these two interpretations of the purpose of education. The classic liberal arts idea, it's not about what you learn, it's about learning how to think. And yet, when learning how to think comes with debt that is totally not commensurate with the economic opportunity that comes out of that learning how to think, the system is in a fundamental way broken. This is why there have been so many experiments over the last couple decades around new types of vocational and practical education. Coding boot camps while looking a little insane now in the context of AI were such an explosive force because they offered an alternative approach to learning how to do this incredibly economically productive thing that didn't require you to go$80 ,000 to$200 ,000 into debt to get the skill.

13:39The tension that's inherent in all of these pieces, and especially John's, is that as much as he doesn't want to admit it, as much as he thinks that his interpretation of what the purpose of education is for, his peers who are asking the question, why do I need to learn this when AI can do it for me, have a legitimate claim to that being a reasonable question in the context of the education that they're seeking. If they are there to learn how to do economically productive things, it is hard to argue that there's anything more valuable than learning how to use these new AI tools. And yet, I feel like an LLM that's trying to nicely divide the difference between two opinions rather than just pick one side.

14:18But as you might have already guessed or suspected the entire time, I don't actually think that either of these interpretations is wrong. I think learning how to think, and more broadly how to be in the world, as a core emphasis of education, is incredibly important. I am of the school that thinks that learning how to write is not just a means to an end of communicating ideas, but is in large part about how to construct thoughts and arguments in one's own head. The purpose of a five-paragraph essay that has a thesis and supporting statements isn't to parrot a convention for winning arguments. It's because that sort of structured thought helps us process the incredible array of stimuli all around us.

14:59My favorite writing of all time, of any genre, is David Foster Wallace's Kenyan commencement speech from 2005, which has become popularly known as This is Water. In it, he writes, let's talk about the single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.

15:30He continues, though, I'm going to posit to you, the liberal arts cliche turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education and thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice to what to think about. 20 years after my own graduation, I've come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

16:08Man, I buy it. I buy it entirely. And that's why I think these studies about what AI and writing and learning does to our brain are significant. But I do not believe that they lead to the simplistic conclusion old way good, AI bad. Because for as much as education is, yes, about teaching us how to think or to use the DFW construct, how to exert control over what we think about and to construct meaning from experience, it is absolutely undeniably also about learning how to do economically productive things. And right now, we are failing students on both fronts. And blaming AI for the failure of one half of it, and choosing not to use AI for the other half of it, is going to do nothing but dig us deeper into that hole.

16:56I of course do not have the answers, but I have thought a lot about this. And it seems to me that the obvious answer set is going to start with some version of rejecting the idea that education is only about one or the other of these things. It's going to be about designing for both of these types of outcomes that we want and understanding what parts of the educational experience are for the one versus for the other. When it comes to learning how to think, how to construct meaning from experience, I think that folks whose instincts that AI could be a major detriment might be right. But that does not mean that we shouldn't be using AI to help people learn how to do economically productive things.

17:35In fact, it's the opposite. We should be empowering people to explore endless journeys of how to use AI to do interesting things, to create more, to build more, to start businesses, to produce code, to speak in languages that they didn't know were possible before, literally and metaphorically. One of my greatest sources of optimism in all of this is that AI's impact is so dramatic and profound and frankly unarguable that it is going to force us to have a conversation and to change education in ways that we really should have been doing decades ago. It would be a mistake to view the problems of education and the mismatch between the education that we give and the world that people are graduating into as somehow a byproduct of the post-November 2022 ChatGPT era.

18:18The student loan crisis didn't start when ChatGPT started. We have been stuck in old modes of education for far, far too long. and there is something about the utter dismantling of them that AI implicates that feels positive but only because we will have no choice but to rebuild and reconstitute what education means from the ground up. There are promising signs that even those concerned are starting to grok that this is the right way to think, the productive way to think. The essay from the Yale professor has, for example, this section, the conscientious path forward is to create educational structures that minimize the temptation to outsource thinking.

18:55Perhaps we should consider getting rid of letter grades in writing classes, which could be pass-fail. The age of the take-home essay as a tool for assessing mastery and comprehension is over. Seminars might now include more in-class close reading or weekly in-person writing labs, during which students can write without access to AI. I don't know if any of those solutions are right, but I'm quite sure it's the right idea to start asking and thinking about those types of solutions. The inescapable reality right now is that whether you think the goal of education is learning how to think and be in the world, or whether you believe the goal of education should be learning how to do economically productive things, we are failing on both fronts.

19:32AI is so clearly an accelerant in all ways, good and bad, but it is not the core problem. And it does offer really interesting paths forward. I'm excited that this is the conversation we're having now, although candidly, I'm very glad my kids are four and six, so we have a little bit of time to figure it out before they get to college but ultimately, I'm optimistic. I can't help but be. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time, peace.