AI Is Not the Problem

My nephew is graduating from high school in June. I've been witness to his secondary education for the last two years. When he talks about his classes, what I hear him say sounds way too much like when I was in high school in the days before the Internet.

Things like:

Teaching to the test.

Making sure kids get the right number of hours of “seat time.”

Widespread standardization.

Squashing innovation and ingenuity in favor of “we need to graduate you on time and move you along.”

You have to remember, I'm a former public school teacher, I'm a former college professor. I was inside the system. It blows my mind that here we are in 2023 with massive advancements in technology like Chat GPT that are allowing people to get things done in rapid time and they are being banned.

Banning technology that frees us up to pursue other things like physical fitness or community service or building a business or making things. Banning technology that can literally give us time back. Which is one of the reasons I think artificial intelligence is absolutely phenomenal.

Yet a hole the width of the grand canyon exists between what is being taught in schools and what’s required to succeed in the modern workplace. “School” in this country is still being delivered on an industrial revolution platter to the majority of young people when they desperately need to be gorging themselves at the critical thinking and innovation buffet.

Fear of the unknown continues to drive decisions. It’s easy to point fingers at AI tools like Chat GPT as being “The Problem.” But despite the mountains of fear-mongering flaring up all over the Internet these days about AI, artificial intelligence is not the problem.

And. . .

More New AI Tools Launched Every Day with More on the Way

The slew of artificial intelligence tools flooding the marketplace right now is staggering, with no end in sight. Naturally young people in school, particularly high school and college, have been going crazy for these AI tools because they can sit down and give it a prompt and it spits back a five paragraph essay or a three page exploration of Romeo and Juliet or the history of the Pythagorean theorem in less time than it takes to watch the latest TikTok video.

Ummm, who wouldn’t want that?

Especially when writing papers is still a mandatory part of making it through required classes like English.

You may be a parent of students using AI for their homework. You may be interacting with artificial intelligence in a number of ways, with your kids or perhaps at your workplace. I recently had a conversation with a dear friend who has a son in high school. He's 16, a junior, and he was showing her how he's writing papers for his English class using artificial intelligence.

I said, “Of course he is! And so are all of his friends. New tools come along like Chat GPT -- why wouldn't you use them? Our generation had calculators. Remember all the uproar over whether calculators should be allowed in math class?”

Tools aren’t the problem.

The problem, as usual, is staring back at us in the mirror each morning. The problem is our belief systems, our paradigms, our status-quo ways of thinking. Any time something big and new comes along that threatens to tear apart the cozy cocoon we’ve built around ourselves, we freak out. We look to blame something outside ourselves for the inevitable fall of humanity as we've known it:

• Comic books in the 50s.
• Books like Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22 in the 70s.
• Calculators in the 80s.
• The World Wide Web in the 90s.
• Social Media in the 2000s.

Each has been the target with the same basic message: life should not change. New=bad. 

But none of these targets were the problem in their time.

Nor is AI the problem now.

Input is.

I’ll address that in the next blog post.

Until then, remember -- we are not here to be average.

Go create something magnificent with that beautiful brain of yours.