Powerful Learning Podcast
This is a podcast about evidence-based teaching and the science of learning. I’m your host, Luke Rowe, and I’m a lecturer and learning scientist in Melbourne, Australia. I’m extremely passionate about the education and the learning sciences, and I started this podcast with the hope of sharing this passion with you! The mission here at Powerful Learning is to help you know more, do more, and be more. Come join me and my guests on a learning journey into topics such as feedback, metacognition, memory, intelligence, health and wellbeing, emerging and established educational technologies, and motivation – as we explore their broader implications for educators and students. The current plan is to post shows at least once per month. If you have any comments, suggestions, or ideas, I welcome your feedback by sending me a DM on Twitter / X, posting a comment in one of my YouTube clips, or following me on Instagram. May you enjoy listening to the Powerful Learning Podcast!
Powerful Learning Podcast
AI vs Human Intelligence: Who Wins and Who Loses in the Future of Education?
Are we entering an age of Artificial Intelligence… or Human Stupidity?
In this provocative recording, Dr. Luke Rowe takes us on a tour of the most pressing questions in education today. With clarity and balance, he explores how AI is not just transforming how we teach—but threatening how we think. AI poses both risks for stupidity and opportunities for intelligence like we've never seen before.
This is an audio-version of the original video presentation found on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/XFMX9RSodwg
What You’ll Learn:
• How standardisation and mass production could undermine teaching (and our humanity)
• What the “Cognitive Couch Potato” effect means for your brain and learning
• How AI accelerates production at the expense of creativity and individuality
• Whether AI will complement or replace our experience of reality—and why that matters
• Why the future belongs to educators who make AI their slave, not their master
• And the most important choice an educator will ever make: to combine their own intelligence with AI, or risk defaulting into human stupidity by sticking our heads in the sand.
Whether you're a teacher, policymaker, parent or curious learner, this session will challenge your assumptions and invite you to reflect on the choices we face.
00:00 - Introduction: AI or Human Stupidity?
02:00 - Technological Revolutions
06:50 - AI vs Human Intelligence: Key Differences
16:18 - Job Markets in 2030: Created, Destroyed, or Transformed?
24:00 - The Bokanovskification of Education: Mass Production of Knowledge (and Teachers)
35:20 - The Cognitive Couch Potato Effect: Outsourcing Thinking
42:30 - The Sludgification of Education: Ranganath’s Funnel to Mediocrity
51:15 - The Rise of Anti-Reality: When Virtual Replaces Real
59:50 - When Does More becomes Less? Expectation Creep and Jevons’ Paradox
1:03:35 - The Wisdom Era and Fulfilling Promises: Are we the 'Homo Sapiens' (Wise Species)?
1:05:47 - Final Reflections: The Three-Peak Principle and the Future of Education
🎓 About Me:
I'm Dr. Luke Rowe, a university lecturer and learning scientist in Melbourne, Australia. My mission is to empower people through powerful, evidence-based education—whether on YouTube, at university, in classrooms, or conferences.
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