AI is here. So, what do we teach?

Over the past few months, I have been forced to admit something that I refused to for the last decade, even as I saw machines continually gain abilities that I vehemently posited that they would never be able to: computers will soon be able to do any cognitive work that we humans can do. The profundity of this advent is hard to overstate and will affect every aspect of the economy, our social relationships, political structures, and much more. Fortunately, I do not have a say in how large-scale societal changes will take place, but I have been pondering how my life will change, and what my role in such a world will be.

Particularly, as an educator, I have been thinking a lot about what the role of teachers will be in an age of AGI. Society has long sold the narrative that education is about preparing for a job. It is a narrative that educators have embraced in a capitalistic economy where our worth, and even our place in society, is often defined by monetary metrics. But this narrative will surely fail in a world where anything that we teach students to do, a computer will soon be able to do at a fraction of the cost. While the dominant strategy to confront this involves moving the goal posts for AI, to reserve critical thinking, creativity, dexterity, or care giving as innately human abilities, doing so is living on borrowed time. I cannot, with good conscience anymore, tell students that anything that I teach them to do will lead them to a higher likelihood of being employed in five years.

This is where, as both a lifelong student and a teacher, I find myself wondering what the value of the classroom is for me. I must confess, I do not remember how to do most of what I saw my teachers do in the classroom. But I do remember the awe I experienced when my teachers presented how deceivingly simple yet profound concepts such as quantum mechanics and evolution are. This awe, bewilderment, and joy has led me to seek even more learning and curiosity has become the lens for everything in my life, even processing emotions (why is my limbic system acting this way?!) and doing taxes (what design choices influenced these tax policies?). The classroom hasn’t taught me to do nearly as much as it has taught me to be - in my case, a humble explorer in a wondrous world.

So, if the doing part of our lives becomes increasingly automated, then perhaps the being is what education must truly champion. What does it mean to be human? Perhaps it means being curious. Or perhaps, being human means seeking purpose. Life can feel wonderfully, terribly absurd sometimes, and we are meaning-making creatures, driven to weave narratives – personal, cultural, cosmic – to make sense of it all, to give ourselves a reason to persist. This quest for meaning, this very act of being human, can often feel like Sisyphian rock – a continuous, challenging, yet essential endeavor. Or perhaps it is our capacity for fascination – the deep, almost childlike joy in discovery. Whether it is the elegance of a mathematical proof, the incisiveness of a poem, the vastness of the cosmos, or the emotional power of a piece of music.

Humanity has forever been drawn to the edges of its knowledge, to the realm of what we might call the “supernatural” – not in the sense of ghosts, but as that which lies beyond the current explanatory power of our established theories. We have always crafted mythologies to illuminate the unknown. Consider the ancient Aboriginal stories of the Rainbow Serpent shaping the landscape of Australia, or the Greek tales of Titans and Olympians battling for control of the cosmos. While we now think of them as fables or metaphors, they truly were profound attempts to give order and meaning to a world that often seemed chaotic and inexplicable. The frontiers of science too live in this “supernatural” realm. The Big Bang is every bit as mystical as a cosmic egg. When astrophysicists posit the existence of dark matter and dark energy to account for the vast majority of the universe’s mass and its accelerating expansion, they are acknowledging enormous gaps in our understanding, pointing to forces and substances that are, for now, invisible and profoundly mysterious. The bizarre workings of quantum mechanics, the theoretical underpinnings of the holographic principle suggesting our reality might be a projection, or the concept of a multiverse with infinite parallel existences – these are our modern grand narratives. They are the stories we are telling now, pushing the boundaries of comprehension, revealing vast territories of the unknown, and it is precisely in this confrontation with the limits of our understanding that our deepest fascination is often found.

And now, AI itself feels like it is part of this “supernatural” frontier. We’re creating intelligence, something we’ve always considered uniquely our own. It’s like holding up a strange new mirror. What is this thing we call “intelligence” or “consciousness” if it is not confined to biological brains like ours? Perhaps by trying to understand AI, we’ll stumble upon deeper truths about ourselves, about the human spark we’ve always taken for granted.

So, what does this mean for our classrooms, for our shared journey of learning and teaching? I believe it means we need to make them places where learning to be is the central goal. And this may indeed be the most employable trait to instill in students, as even as humans outsource doing, we will always be. And as long as we humans drive economic activity, understanding what it means to be human will be the key to unlocking and accessing economic opportunities.

The thought of an AGI that could one day be fascinated by its own existence? That is a thought that gives me pause, a truly humbling and somewhat unsettling idea. But every time ChatGPT says something is fascinating, I probe further and realize that it has no conception of wonder - it has just learned to use platitudes that reveal its lack of distinction between the profound and the trivial.