aiEDU Studios
aiEDU Studios is a podcast from the team at The AI Education Project.
Each week, a new guest joins us for a deep-dive discussion about the ever-changing world of AI, technology, K-12 education, and other topics that will impact the next generation of the American workforce and social fabric.
Learn more about aiEDU at www.aiEDU.org
aiEDU Studios
Chike Aguh: People and AI can collaborate to solve problems
What does the future of work and education look like when AI can accomplish in a few months what electricity took 80 years to achieve?
Chike Aguh (senior advisor at Harvard University's Project on Workforce) takes us through technological revolutions of the past and present, highlighting what makes generative AI fundamentally different – namely, its unprecedented speed of deployment and the fact that even its creators cannot fully predict its capabilities.
Drawing from his experience as a 2nd grade teacher in New York, Chike offers practical visions of how AI can transform education not by replacing teachers, but by creating more space for students to develop "timeless skills" like leadership, collaboration, and conflict resolution that cannot be learned from books alone. Such skills (unlike the technical "just-in-time skills" that AI is starting to effectively handle) are developed through practice, coaching, and real-world experience.
Chike also says that our AI future isn't predetermined. With demographic trends pointing toward a shrinking workforce, he argues we'll need "all the people and all the AI" working together. But that requires intentional decisions about how we deploy these technologies. Educators play a crucial role in this process – not necessarily as technical experts, but as guides helping students develop frameworks for using AI tools purposefully and ethically.
Want to understand how to prepare yourself or your students for an AI-transformed world? Listen as Chike offers specific, actionable guidance for educators and parents who are navigating this uncharted territory alongside their students.
Learn more about Chike and the Project on Workforce:
aiEDU: The AI Education Project
So yeah, here we are. Thank you for joining. I'm Alex Katron. I'm the co-founder and CEO of AIEDU. We're here with the pop-up AIEDU studios in Washington DC. I'm here with Chika Yaga. Chika, you have a lot of different roles and titles. I'm going to let you introduce yourself and tell us more about exactly what you're doing now. I don't know how many hats you're wearing at this particular moment but I know you're a juggler of hats With that.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Chika, can you just tell us more about who you are, what are you up to now and anything you want to share about your journey to getting there?
Chike Aguh:Sure. Currently, I serve as senior advisor at the Project on Workforce at Harvard University, where a research project focused on these big questions around technology, the future of work and how it impacts education. We're based across the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I also serve as a senior advisor at Accenture it's one of the biggest technology and services firms in the world on future of work and innovation. And then, lastly, I'm a senior advisor, actually, where we first met at the McChrystal Group, which really works with organizations on, frankly, how they manage their people, particularly in times of change and tumult, and then a bunch of other roles where I get to spend time Previous to that, from 2021, day one of the Biden administration to mid-2023,. I served as the chief innovation officer at the US Department of Labor, where I worked for, at that time, secretary Marty Walsh and then, after that, secretary Julie Hsu. Would I think about how many?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Have there been chief innovation officers?
Chike Aguh:at DLO there was one other who's a dear friend. He was the first, I was the second.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And was that in the Obama administration?
Chike Aguh:Yes, Okay, the role was unfilled in the Trump administration and then was brought back with me during the Biden administration, and so when I think about this work and kind of what brought me to it, I'll go back a little bit in time. I think I'll talk about kind of why I care why, how I've approached it and maybe some things I think that I've learned that inform how I come to this discussion. So in many ways I say my family is a very classic immigrant story to this country. My family is from a village in Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never see and never visit. None of my grandparents all of whom were from the same exact village, none of them went past middle school. My parents were born on streets that were unpaved then, that are mostly unpaved now. They had Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms, and what changed life for them was in the mid 70s, early 80s. They got a chance to come to the United States of America for higher education, public higher education, and they had actually meant to go back, and at that time there was a change in government violent change in government in the country, and that was not an option, and so they stayed here in the United States of America and I am the first person in the entire history of my family born in America and I got the chance to serve an American president, and so what I take from that is, in many ways, the small example of my family is what happens when America gets it economically right. I think we also know by the data we don't get it right with enough people in enough places. Enough of the time, and I've tried to kind of devote myself to that prospect and I think one of the theories of action that I've always had is that the right type of education, the right type of economic opportunity, leads to generational change in families and, I think, in the life of countries. And so that's kind of been my theory of change throughout my career.
Chike Aguh:I think I started off and I know you have you'll have teachers and superintendents listening I started my career in the in the new york city public schools, initially as a policymaker and then as a teacher in that system uh, god, almost now 20 years ago. And uh, from there, after graduate school, really went through the public, private and social sectors trying to work on these questions. So in the private sector, places like the advisory board company which works with higher education with the McChrystal Group really with General McChrystal as it came out of the military trying to apply these lessons to large organizations private mainly, but also now starting to be public sector and nonprofits mainly, but also now starting to be public sector and nonprofits. In the nonprofit space was a CEO of a nonprofit called Everyone On, focused on closing the broadband gap, particularly for families with kids. We connected about half a million people in 48 states to the internet during the time that I led there and they are now getting towards 800,000 people across the country. Also went to a place called the Education Design Lab where I helped launch their community college growth engine fund during this, during the pandemic, really trying to work with community colleges to help upscale, rescale folks who either lost their jobs during COVID or, frankly, were probably underemployed before COVID and we can talk about higher education.
Chike Aguh:What's been the impact of that, of AI as well? It's just kind of the economic times that we've been in. And then also in government, you know, served in the Bloomberg administration in New York City. I served under Governor Patrick's Secretary of Education when I was a graduate student and then served in the Biden administration, as I've talked about. And so the other theory of action that I have is this problem or any problem worth solving? And pick your problem from economic competitiveness to climate change, to nuclear nonproliferation. No one person, organization or sector can solve the problem by itself. You need people and actors across sectors working in concert to solve these big problems.
Chike Aguh:And so those are some of the lessons I think that I've learned as I've approached this work, and I'm glad we're having this conversation, because I don't know if there's a more important one right now. I'm glad we're having this conversation because I don't know if there's a more important one right now in terms of what do we make of this technology and, frankly, how do we use this technology to solve some of the problems that we have? And then, frankly, how do we also mitigate some of the problems that this technology may create, and do it all at the same time. And again, I you know I I met you when, when, when you were initially conceiving of this project. And we have to start this thinking. Frankly, there is no time. That's too early to have this conversation with adults, and definitely not with students, and so I'm glad to have this conversation, particularly with you. Who's thinking about this? Frankly, people at the beginning of their journey.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I think it's because I actually literally I remember exactly where we sat at the McChrystal Group's office in Alexandria About seven years ago almost. That was OG right at the beginning. I remember there was almost an immediate resonance as I was talking about the problem statement, Because you had seen this in an earlier wave of innovation around the internet.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I'm really interested in what the parallels might look like. I think one of the biggest challenges with artificial intelligence is it's very hard for people to grasp, to wrap their heads around. What does this actually mean? How is this going to impact me? Maybe they've used chat, GPT, but the amount of noise and even just like DeepSeek being an example of one of the flavors of the day this dominating media headlines, I think it's very hard for someone who is extremely deep into the rabbit hole to come up with some actionable steps. Am I supposed to become an AI engineer?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Am I supposed to master prompt engineering. There's a lot of parents who might be watching this, where their kids might be 3, 5, 11, and they're thinking their first job might be over a decade away. It's very hard to predict what might come when you think back to the work, sort of like the way the internet changed education. You were in New York City public schools as presumably they were starting to get widespread access to computers. I don't even know if students even all had access to computers back then. Are there any similarities to the way that they were thinking about the internet or computing in terms of how we're talking about artificial intelligence?
Chike Aguh:The way I think about this question is I think about there are lessons from history that we can learn about how technology has rolled out and affected education and society overall. Whenever you look at history, you have to basically always ask the question what is the same and what is different? Because, uh, you know, not looking at history at all is always, uh, fraught, because there are lessons there. Also, assuming that the future looks like the past is also fraught, and so being able to look at history and look at it in nuance, and so this challenge of technology as a society and normally I wouldn't go this deep, but we're having a long conversation, so let's have the long conversation. Let's go all the way back to the steam engine, all the way back to the steam engine. Let's go all the way back to that telegraph, to telephony, to electricity, to kind of beginning wide-scale automation and probably the late, the late, uh, 1880s, uh, going into the 20th century. Let's go into at that at the application of commercial computing. Initially, back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, computing was not a consumer activity, it was done by universities and corporations. And then, of course, in the 80s, with the Apple II at home, and then, when I was 12, 13,. You know initially Netscape, then AOL, and for those of you who are too young, you don't remember a bunch of the all these other search engines, hotbot, sg's, so on and so forth. And so I say all this to say this kind of widespread application of technology, that kind of strikes like a meteorite and affects everything, has happened to us repeatedly throughout American and human history. Think about the impact of the printing press way back when. And then society has to figure out how do we use this? How do we not Go back to the printing press? One of the big objections to the printing press way back when was that you have now made information available to everyone and society is not ready for it. The only people who should have access to all this widespread information are the clergy and nobility. One can argue. We have, frankly, a large conversation about this. Now, with social media, there is information everywhere no moderation of it, by the way, so on and so forth, and we have the same, similar debates Again. I argue that they're different in some ways. One can argue in the 1400s it was a little more about control, I think. Today we worry about people yelling fire in a global way, which happens, I feel like every single second, but we have to look at what is the same and what is different. So I think that's one, and I don't mean to start so globally, but I think it's really important. I think two, what is the same and what is different? There are two things that I look at that are the same and different, and I'll talk about this a little bit and I'll leave on some of my personal experiences.
Chike Aguh:Is one, the speed. So if you look at take electricity electricity, at-home electricity it took ChatGPT a number of months to reach the level of adoption that. It took electricity 80 years. That is a level of speed of deployment that we have never seen. If you look at the internet, the internet basically took about 12 years, 12, 13 years to reach 80% of the American population. It took electricity 80 years to reach that.
Chike Aguh:So the speed that these technologies are being deployed is really, really it's different and that is, I think, part of why it seems so disorienting. We're used to having more than even the internet. I mean, I remember this as a kid and we didn't have these types of conversations. Now that we're having, now, that kind of wish we had, which we had the same types of conversations now that we're having now, then I kind of wish we had. I wish we had the same types of conversations about social media back in the mid-2000s that we're having now about AI. So the speed.
Chike Aguh:The second thing is this is one of the first technologies, the first technology that I can think of where. So I used to. When I used to work at the advisory board, we used to sell SaaS tools. I was a product manager, so literally I would work with sales teams, I would work with engineering teams to figure out what this thing should look like. So when I went to go sell something, I knew what it could do and my job was to convince you that it could do what I told you and then we'd build it for you and it would hopefully do that thing. Generative AI, by the way, that is the new part of ai.
Chike Aguh:Ai has been with us and before that, machine learning for 15 to 20 years, you know. For example, if you look at bank loans, no, no human being has made a decision about whether you get a loan or not in more than 15 years. That's been done by a multivariate regression machine learning tool. The new part is the generative. So if you look at generative AI and there's a great article in Wired magazine and it talks about the development of Microsoft Copilot and it gives this great example so Microsoft Copilot is effectively the open AI powered AI tool within Microsoft Word where you can ask it questions and it gives you answers or it can generate you an image or a video or something like that.
Chike Aguh:So someone had a document and they asked their co-pilot please summarize this document? And the AI produced a summary and then they asked the question differently and they said hey, as a friend, could you really do a careful job creating a summary of this document? It would be so important to me if you could. And they got a different product and the people who made it can't tell you why. And was it better? I don't remember, but it was different.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Interesting.
Chike Aguh:And the question is why? Why would an emotional, peer-like plea to a machine produce a different product? I don't know the answer. And so the thing here is that the people who build it don't totally know what it all does. In fact, that's why they did so much beta testing. Beforehand, they would give it to companies and say, hey, just try it out and tell us what happens. This is new.
Chike Aguh:Generally, when a new technology has come about not to say that we always know how it's going to be used, but we know its limits, we know its extent this is different, and in some ways, it's why the work that you're doing is so important, because it requires, frankly, more creativity, more agility, more practice than other technologies that we have used in the past. The thing that I think the most about is less my time as a teacher. The most about is less my time as a teacher, just to be candid. Um, I think during the time that I was teaching I don't know if we were teaching in much of a different form factor than they taught in 19, in the 1920s we used a lot of white. We used I used to say we, instead of using blackboards, we use whiteboards and smart boards. But one can argue, the form factor of instruction was the same students listened, teachers talked, um. I think we had a great classroom, but I think we were at the very beginning, if even then, of how can education look different, the work that Sal Khan has been doing for more than 10 years. At this point, and many other unnamed heroic educators are thinking through how can this be different to fit the, the, the, the modern age. I think about my time as the CEO of everyone on is one of the biggest projects that we were engaged in was was sprint, to basically deploy tablets and wireless internet to underserved schools across the country. We probably deployed this was this would have been the year 2015 to 2018. And we would say a lot. You know, hey, this is critical. If you don't give kids access to a broadband and a device, you don't have access to education.
Chike Aguh:And then the pandemic happened and then everyone understood very painfully. The biggest thing that I remember was going into classrooms and you generally see a bell curve. You would generally see there were some teachers and families who didn't know how to use it, didn't want to use it, it was too new. That was a minority. Then you had a majority who were using these in the same way. They had used everything and effectively.
Chike Aguh:Again, instead of reading a book, I'm reading a tablet, and then you had a small collection of folks called Two Standard Deviations Above, who were reimagining how, how do I help students get this information and get the 19th invention, this learning? Because what they also intuitively realized is the information is actually commoditized because, effectively, whether it was google then, or open ai or claude or gemini, now, the information is at my fingertips. The question is can I reason, can I take that and use it in ways, um, that are novel or and can I sense, make? Can I see all this disparate information, whether it be an ai, you know, a hallucination or a deep fake on social media, and say, okay, there's a kernel of truth there, but the rest of this is nonsense? Uh, actually, that's actually fairly correct. I disagree with that thing. Um, that, I think, in a microcosm, was a challenge that we see, which is how do we not take the same tech like new technology and use it in the exact same ways? We use the old technology but and maybe we get incremental gains in efficiency, but not these quantum leaps in impact and and uh and achievement? I think we're beginning to see that now, because what you have on the generative side is so.
Chike Aguh:For example, I think about when I was a teacher I thought second grade the amount of time I spent prepping my lessons and not doing anything crazy, but making worksheets trying to find. You know we had. I think we had. We didn't have a smart board. I had a projector and a speaker where I could project things, finding the right video At that time. This is in 2006,. Youtube is still a fairly nascent platform with nowhere near as much content. If I'd had chat GPT, then I could have cut that time in half, by half or two thirds In terms of preparation for my student. I could have used that time actually more with my students. So I think what's really interesting, I think the first impact is how does this not actually impact the student, but how does it impact the educator? Yes, and how can they do their work better and differently? And they're basically just efficiency gains.
Chike Aguh:Then there is the and if you make the assumption that everyone has a device, everyone has internet, okay, now I can reimagine how I do this, for example, in math class, if we were asking kids a question and we wanted like all right, what's four times two?
Chike Aguh:We'd give them all whiteboards and they would write with their marker and they'd put it up and I could see really quickly, but I never recorded that. If I had a device and I could do a version of that and then actually record those responses in real time because they would be on the same platform, so on, so forth, that's data that I could. That's that's what, what, what we would call um, uh, formative assessment data that I could use to actually get a real-time kind of understanding check. Or I could say, um god, I remember we did like. I taught social studies as well and I remember we had to do basically what we call. I forget what we call it. I almost said like geolocation, basically it's the teaching a seven-year-old that you live in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country, in a world.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Do you have Google Maps?
Chike Aguh:Nascent at that time time, but less the geography, but more so like that concept, yeah, that you live in this thing that you can see, and then there's this bigger entity that you're also a part of, that you can't totally see. And then, of course, now getting to to this, and so we asked we had them like make a country. So like, hey, we're, you're gonna get to make your own country. And so I remember like, and the kids love this, they love this, they got to make a flag, like make it whatever you want. And of course they did it with crayons and stuff and and and. What I would have loved to do is because I put them in groups and they had to agree on what the flag you know look like. So getting five, seven year olds to agree on what their flag should look like challenging. Usually one kid just grabs the, grabs the crayon, it goes from there. But what I would have done was I would have said each of you on your tablet with chat, gpt, make your own flag. And then I basically would have brought those all together for each group and say chat, gpt, combine these into one coherent flag, and I would have gotten something that either would have been awesome or an absolute mess, but it was their flag. So these are these just small examples of how I would have used this differently as a teacher to change how I taught.
Chike Aguh:I had another friend. He was a math teacher. Actually, he still teaches this very day. He's almost 20 years and he turned his class on its head. So in most classes you walk in, they tell you what you're about to learn and then they show you how to do it. You try it yourself, you screw up the first time and then you work it out together and hopefully by the end you get it.
Chike Aguh:He did the exact opposite. He would put a problem on the board that the students had not seen. He had not taught them the background. They would walk in and he would say solve that problem, you have 15 minutes and the kids would just get together and try and figure it out and what invariably happened was like one or two kids kind of got it most struggled, and then they would walk through okay, what is it? What are you missing here? What don't you understand? And then from there he would back into the concept and then so on and so forth.
Chike Aguh:Unbelievably powerful, had some of the highest math scores in his school, in the state he was doing that in 2006. And I think about what he could have done with tools like this to turbocharge that and, if anything, go even faster and better. So that's how I think about how this strikes in schools, but one we've been here before. What's different is the speed, and what's different here is the impact on the helpers, and I think our challenge is how to use this to do this. Not just the same that I did before, but faster, but actually in an entirely different way. That gets you quantum leaps, not incremental leaps.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, this is my producer's in the room and I'm kind of I'm grinning because it's such a validation of this format, because I absolutely this is absolutely the the level of depth that you know I don't think we get to when I, when I think about the primary way that thought leadership happens in, in my space at least, you know, K-12 education leadership it's it's panels at conferences, maybe a fireside chat at a roundtable, and even then it's. I've done many You've done many.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And for various reasons, you often will have five or six panelists once you're getting ten minutes of time, just enough time for somebody to be able to give you their headlines.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think this is really what teachers need to hear, because what you've actually described to me is, in the abstract, precisely how we. This is really what teachers need to hear, because what you've actually described to me is um sort of in the abstract, precisely how we envision, you know, the future of education with ai. Everything you've described none of this is like ai is going to automate or replace the role of the teacher, or like supercharge and and allow teachers to, like you know, completely skip all this work that they're doing. It like what you're actually describing. Actually describing is still very teacher-centric.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You're talking about this as efficiency that creates more space for the teacher to do what they do best, which is actually not just knowledge transfer, but skills development, durable skills development, and that's why we you know when, when, when we look at, we were asked, you know, like, how can I use chat gpt to do xyz in the classroom? Or how, like, what are the prompts that I should learn as a teacher? Uh, so I can do a better job teaching? We really try to move, push, you know, push back from like don't think too much about the prompts themselves. Like, think about what your ultimate end goal is. Some of the things you described, I think, is what we would describe as those end goals. It's like okay, how do you encourage more student collaboration? You described an example of where ChatGPT is a tool, not the only tool. The flag activity you described could absolutely work without students having access to ChatGPT. Chatgpt could make it faster, maybe more interesting and maybe a level of depth. Maybe they're not just creating a flag, maybe they're also creating the constitution and the charter.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):The work product might change, the process is still the same and I'm sure you saw this in New York City public schools. We've worked in New York City public schools. We also work in. Prince George's County actually just down the street, these really large districts. The teachers are brilliant. They just don't have the bandwidth. So you go in and you say, oh, we need more project-based learning, we need to build critical thinking skills and these poor teachers are like I'm bought in. You don't need to convince me need to convince me.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):We've done surveys of teachers. Like 95 plus percent of teachers agree but one critical thinking, communication, right when. And also, I'm not measured as a teacher on whether my students are building collaboration skills. I'm not measured as a teacher on, you know, critical thinking skills specifically. Now there are certain standards that you might argue connect, and that's what we try to do is actually say, okay, look, we can't change the standards you know, as quickly as we'd like to. We we have in some states, but a lot of the stuff that you're describing, there are some connection points who teachers are already having to do. So anyways, this is just a tip of the hat to what you just described. I want to talk more about education. I do want to go back to this journey through history. You went as far back as the 15th century. I hadn't really thought of the printing press in my narrative of this, but I love that I've really thought about the first industrial revolution the loom the steam engine.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You talked about the telegraph. It is interesting. I wasn't. I obviously didn't. I wasn't around in those times. I was around. I remember the first time I used a computer. I remember the first time I had access to the internet, the first time I printed a Dragon Ball Z photo and it was the wildest thing that I could take something that was virtual and just like a physical manifestation of that manifestation, without I taped in my bedroom.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, I certainly as a child, my parents, my teachers, there was never really this meta conversation about this moment that we're in, nope, and it feels different now and I wonder if that's just because we've had a lot of revs or or the velocity. But but I am kind of curious, like what? What do you see? Is the reason that now society is there seems to be a lot more self-awareness about like this is going to impact a lot of things. We don't even know exactly what it looks like. There's a lot of you know, even just this, this steering committee that I'm a part of, and we were thinking through these big picture questions about, like, how is AI going to change? Will AI dramatically transform education, you know, in the next five years? I'm just reflecting now that I wonder if those questions were asked.
Chike Aguh:No, they were not. I can answer that for you. The answer is no. A couple reasons, actually, someone brought this up at another conference that I was at. It was actually a powerful point One this is the first transformative technology of this sort that did not come from some initial research from the government. If you think about every other one of these technologies, maybe short of the printing press, maybe the steam engine, but I would even say there I can find you a piece of government, which is the internet, obviously. Um telephony, obviously, because, uh, that that came out of bell labs, uh, which is part of at&t, which was a government sanctioned monopoly. Um radar, which one can argue is the most important invention of world war ii after the atom bomb. Right, everything came out of government, so there was some visibility by somebody. I was in government when chad chibouti hit and we all were like what is this? That?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):is that to say in government, as an institution, is oriented towards longer term thinking?
Chike Aguh:or no, I would say. For some of these other technologies, people were surprised when they came out, or dazzled, but there was a bigger collection of society that was aware it was coming. Shia Jabeti caught everyone and again, as someone who sat in government, again, people in government were not surprised by the Internet. Folks have been working on the Internet since the early 80s, late 70s, no one was surprised by computers we've been working on computers since world war ii, with, you know, the turing machine and things like that.
Chike Aguh:So, number one this truly came out of nowhere, or so it seemed, even though you know shit. You know open ai has been around since 2014. So I think that's one. I two its capability shocked a lot of people. And again, think about early chat. Gpt got a lot of stuff wrong, produced things that were unusual, but it was doing things that you know.
Chike Aguh:As a kid, I watched Star Trek. I love Star Trek. I've watched every episode of the original Star Trek, the Next Generation Star Trek, deep Space Nine, star Trek, voyager, literally every single episode. These are things that in a science fiction show, they would ask the computer to do. When it did and we thought this was oh, that's crazy. It's science fiction, but it's doing it imperfectly, but getting better, so on. So that's number two.
Chike Aguh:And then, I think three, the generative piece, the ability to. The same way, when you printed something for the first time, that was a big deal for you. The fact that I could say, make me a cat wearing an orange hat, you know doing ballet in the street, and it could make that, you know, pick Dali or pick Gemini, that was astounding. It was something that we did not think was possible and even for and I would say the other thing is, lots of companies are doing generative AI, but the fact that it came from not Google, not Microsoft per se, but it came from not written, not, you know, not at first, that also shocked a lot of people. The fact that Google, from everything I read, was caught a little bit flat footed on that score.
Chike Aguh:And, by the way, it's also why people didn't know If this had come out of Google. There's no way someone in a job like I used to have would not know why, because we talked to Google all the time. Most governments would a company of that size. The fact that this came from OpenAI, which people were aware of, but not to the same extent, just again made it really surprising. But because it could do, it came so fast, it seemed to come out of nowhere and it could do things that we'd previously thought weren't possible. And the last thing, going to the last point of so, when they would go to OpenAI and say, hey, so tell me what this thing does they're like, I can't totally tell you. I mean the model, I mean the new model has what? Eight billion parameters.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Wow yeah.
Chike Aguh:So the issue is like tell me what it does. I don't totally know, and that is. And now, as we get into the, into the age of agents you know, I'm hearing 2025 be the age of the ai agent. There are things that are exciting and things that are disconcerting about that, because I don't know what it can do. The internet I knew, I knew what it could do. Social media I know what it can do. I didn't think about all the applications, but I know what it can do. But this, oh, I actually don't know. And that is, I think, partially why I'm glad we're having this conversation.
Chike Aguh:And the other thing I'll say is um, and and this is a credit I give to president biden, I think he got he and a number of other public policy leaders on both sides of the aisle actually were like oh, this is not simply the province of the private sector, this is actually a thing that's important to the entire American society. And so I was there when President Biden put out his executive order on AI. We've had a number of governors do the same thing, a number of senators who are trying to get toward what AI regulation should look like. I know there's debate about whether that should exist or not, but I think it was the first technology that I have seen where, at the inception, public policy leaders said no, we actually this is not just about what these companies are doing, it's not just for them to figure it out, we're not going to.
Chike Aguh:And and I think that's partially came from the fact that there have been a bunch of other technologies that we kind of just let go, and it led to some places that we probably don't totally feel great about today. Social media is the one that kind of pops to mind the most, and so I think that's partially why we're in a different conversation than we've been in in past. Can I tell you we'll totally end up in the place it should? I can't, but God, I wish we had had this on social media In 2008,. I wish we'd had this conversation about the internet in the mid-90s or any of these other technologies that were as transformative.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I wonder. So social media is interesting because you almost start to get to a this divergence from, if you think about, maybe the printing press is a bad example, because there actually was quite a lot of disruption to the status quo. But electricity, cars, a telegraph, computers, the early internet I think the innovation was directly coupled with progress, with benefits to society. Social media was, I think, maybe that first time that we started to see sort of very.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I mean, there's obviously a lot of broad externalities, right, we think about global warming and sort of but in terms of this tangible sense of like, wow, this game-changing technology that had so much promise, you know, also had all these sort of like externalities that we hadn't predicted.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):It was very tightly coupled to happen within a matter of, let's say, five to 10 years. And so I wonder if that proximity to you know the everybody sort of looking at all the brain rot, and you know TikTok and Instagram reels and you know increasing rates of childhood depression and self-harm and suicide rates, and there, you know, even before AI, people were starting to feel like I don't know if technology, if social media, necessarily made our lives better. It changed the way we consume media, sure, and then AI comes around and I almost think we were kind of like oriented towards this kind of like, a little bit more of a skepticism about, just because we have this technology, is it really going to live up to the promise? Because social media, when you were launching and when you were launching your work at Always On this, was like 2015.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I mean, that was kind of the heyday, almost like the peak of a lot of those companies.
Chike Aguh:I would say that, from an evaluation point of view, from a social regard point of view, I think your point on that there's this very tangible harm. Now, if we go back we can take and again, I came from the Department of Labor, so I think about some of these. If you think about automation more broadly, you know, uh, the reason that we have OSHA uh is there's a famous uh fire in uh, new York city called the triangle fire. It was a garment factory almost on the lower East side and effectively, um they it. They were basically making garments and they kept flammable stuff too near other stuff and it was an enormous fire and because we didn't have worker rights legislation, they would actually lock the doors on the workers during the day so they couldn't leave. So this fire happened. You can read descriptions of this. You see burning women jumping out of third floor windows to try and get out, and so we had to have a conversation on, ooh, this automated factory thing that we have which has produced all these goods that we all love.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Shoot, there are people who are being exploited and who are suffering.
Chike Aguh:When we think about the thing that I think, this technology, the harm that people are worried about, are a couple One people think about the deindustrialization of the 1970s, where when factories all over this country, whether it be in my home state or around Bethlehem Steel, used to have to have a site right north, right west of Baltimore City, which is not there anymore Now a huge industrial park because Bethlehem Steel is not around that that would come back and increase, I think. Secondly, we'll call it a 1A the people who would?
Chike Aguh:be affected by that are different and more widespread than are used to. So, if you look at it, what's interesting and it says a lot about AI AI generally when we've had technology you think about the people who are quote-unquote harmed or who lose. It's generally people who are doing routine work or work that you do with your strength, generally low-paid work. What's really interesting is that AI is actually not good at simulating that. The reason why self-driving cars are not on the road yet is because it's actually really hard for a car to get all those movements right and then also have the hand-eye coordination to know that's a squirrel versus that's a human, and so on and so forth. What AI is really good at?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):generative AI reading and writing.
Chike Aguh:And the people who do that for a living are under a threat they've never been under before. I just made a website and I did not hire anyone. I had ChatGPT make the mock-ups and I asked it to. I wanted to see if it could do. It Produced me all the back-end code and it did, and that's it. I've heard a lot of nonprofits doing the exact same thing, and so this is a. This is what's different. So it's not only that it's creating a harm. It's creating a harm for people who aren't used to being on the receiving end of harm.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):The people, the people who are actually in a place to drive these conversations. If you're a lawyer who does document, review.
Chike Aguh:This is a challenge for you. If you are an entry-level software engineer, this creates a challenge for you.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Communications manager. I started my career drafting press releases.
Chike Aguh:I've had this conversation with journalists particularly yeah, um, so, so that's also new, I think the other thing is, so that's like a fear we've always had. It's now it's come to life. Then you have a fear of that. Now you start thinking like real, real bad, which is the whole. You have bad actors out in the world and can this turbocharge them too? Uh, whether that be from misinformation to you know. You know, if you look at all these models, if I believe there are parameters in those models that disallow you from doing certain things. So, for example, design for me a pathogen right that would do x, that would create x horrible harm. They're like nope, you can't do that and there's a reason because we have people who don't want to. Um, uh, so that's just one example.
Chike Aguh:And then I think the last piece and I think this is where it does tie to social media is one of the things that I worry about, and I think we saw this after particularly the 2016 election is. I worry about and I think we saw this after the 2016 election is can technology dissolve civic bonds and increase the distance between us as people? We saw this in social media. You know where I used to say, the Internet has the ability to divide and to unite, and I think we've seen both. And for AI it can be the same thing, and I think there's a huge worry about that. If I, for example, don't need to hire someone to do that website, that is a social interaction that does not need to exist anymore.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I hadn't thought about the fact that work is going to become more automated, even if humans are augmented. I see what you're saying. Actually, it's breaking down these built-in social interactions that are a part of your day. I guess you don't really think about working with your designer as a social interaction, but it very much is Again.
Chike Aguh:we see this with e-commerce. Again, for those who are of a certain age, amazon, when I was a kid, only sold books.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You could have Best Buy. You could have Radio Shack.
Chike Aguh:Yeah, these are places that some of you who are too young will not remember at all, but yeah, that was a social interaction that in many ways doesn't have to exist anymore, or from the beauty of it. So there's the other piece that we worry about and, by the way, it's compounded by the others. If you have kind of economic dislocation, if you have bad actors that you're trying to mitigate and you have increasing social distance, the recipe potentially is fear and polarization, and in some ways we're living parts of that now.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I mean this is Because the other thing that I'm thinking about when you describe, you know, the world before amazon. You know I've been to a best buy recently, um, and the there's still lots of folks working there. But it's a very different experience because when I used to go to, like radio shack, the people who worked there were like truly knowledgeable, like oh, you're trying to film a podcast. When you're like come over.
Chike Aguh:Let's look at things they would tell you all like. And now?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):it's like like why would you ask me? You have the internet, I mean you have chat gbt, like I like, and so there's almost um, even the people who are still working in roles that the the level of expertise decreases or the the demands of their expertise. Um, I want to sort of start steering us. I want to. I want to stay on sort of historical frame.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I want to start steering a little bit back to education. So the lens I want to use is so for for teachers, parents, ad leaders, who are listening to this. They're like, well, what are we supposed to do? What am I supposed to tell my kid or my students? Yep, the one thing that I see, that that I'm hearing from you and that I've heard from every other credible expert and economist that I've talked to on this topic, is we really just don't know. We can't say in 15 years, these are the jobs that you need to go towards. Five years ago I think we could say credibly computer science, stem, data science, those hard sciences. You're going to be set Lawyer, doctor If you can get onto one of those paths. And a lot of the conversation in the social sector was how do we get more students?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):onto those pathways. But you're talking about knowledge work, you're talking about some of the things that AI can do, and I think there's this first question of is STEM still the be-all, end-all? And so, before you answer that question, I still want to zoom out, but that's sort of the meta thing we're trying to get to. So let's go back to the, the first industrial revolution. You talked about this, the triangle fire, yep, um, because the interesting thing is prior to the invention of the loom and the steam engine and, like you know, mechanistic automation, you have these seamstresses who are working in cottage industries and they were like they were true experts. I mean, they were creating entire garments for clients. They were working from home, like OG work from home. They had this rounded expertise. They could create the entire dress or the entire suit. Team Engine Loom comes along and they lose their jobs. But the story about the first industrial revolution is not one of job loss. It's one of job creation. All of these jobs were created.
Chike Aguh:And I think that's often. It's the same conversation around the ATM and the banking industry.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, and so a lot of times there's a bit of a waving away of the worry about AI-driven job loss, because we just don't know what jobs are going to be created. And I actually believe net-net, there's probably going to be created. I actually believe, net-net, there's probably going to be more jobs created than lost. What I worry about is, I don't think it was an upgrade if you were a seamstress working from home, if you're now in a factory where the doors are locked and there aren't any windows and it's filled with smoke.
Chike Aguh:Not the case anymore, or at least mostly Not the case anymore.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):But I wonder if AI is simply learning how to use the factory, learning how to pull the lever, push the button. Is that sufficient? Is that what we want kids to orient towards? Because what I'm trying to understand is what are the skills that will command economic value in a world where expertise is commodified, where the ability to write code or create a website or design something AI can do that, and what is the value that humans can add, so that they're not just the person sitting behind the cell driving car making sure that it doesn't hit the squirrel?
Chike Aguh:So let me try and bring all this together and I'm thinking about again your parents, your education leaders and you said it really well the job, and I'll use an anecdote to why I think their job is so important. When I was in graduate school, I gave my master's in education. We had a. I had a Pav. Pav was from Singapore and he had been in the Ministry of Education, had been a teacher, became a principal and now was in the Ministry of Education. We were in a class on teacher education.
Chike Aguh:It was in 2009. We asked him just one day hey Pop, how do you all do this? He said well, if someone wants to become a principal in Singapore, here's what we do we put them in a year-long apprenticeship with a senior principal. During that year, we have them write two papers. One of those papers is tell me what you believe the world will look like in 50 years and talk to all the economists, the political scientists, all that as best as you can. And the second paper is what is the school that would prepare your students for that world? And that, ideally, is the school that you should create. And so, when I think about what every educator is tasked to do, it is to prepare your kids for the future and have as clear an idea of that as you can.
Chike Aguh:Let me bring a couple of these things together and let me just say maybe some paradigms first to think about and then how do you make that concrete? The first paradigm it is important to understand and it's why talking about ai is like I would argue, by itself is not helpful. You want to talk about it with a bunch of other economic trends and let me just say the biggest. The biggest is that the size of the american workforce over the between now and the end of the century will stay the same or shrink. Why? Because Because in America right now the average couple has 2.1 kids. Excuse me, needs to have 2.1 kids to keep population level. The average couple right now has 1.6. That's just math, that's one.
Chike Aguh:Secondly, because of that means we're going to have a tighter workforce. We call it tighter labor market, meaning there's just not as much flex. There's people who are not working, which in many ways is good, but it actually leads to shortages. It actually leads to jobs not being filled, even if we hired. Just to give you a sense of the data right now in America there are nine people looking for every 10 jobs open. Currently, in my state of Maryland, we have one person looking for every two jobs open. In my state of Maryland, we have one person looking for every two jobs open. And when you borrow into certain industries, ones that would particularly need filled, like healthcare, semiconductors, quantum parts of AI, the ratios get crazy in terms of the amount of jobs that are open and will be open versus who we have and are going to have.
Chike Aguh:That's one which means a couple of things. One I always say we need all the people and all the ai. We actually need to hire everyone, and even because we hire everyone, I need to make each of them factors more productive to fill the people that I don't have. Um, ideally, the way that most countries solve that issue is immigration. I'm not sure if you've watched, um, what's happening down the street from where we are here in Washington DC. That's not going to get solved anytime soon. That is a shame, by the way, partially because of my own background, and it's an. It's an economic opportunity missed, but, candidly, I don't expect us to solve that anytime soon. Therefore, we have what we have, which means we need all the people and all the AI. That's number one.
Chike Aguh:Number two, when we think about and actually let me go back to number one 1A and the way that I think about this is, when I was in the private sector, we used to talk a lot about doing more with less meaning, let me make incrementally more revenue with less people, less resources. The paradigm that I have said that we want to move to is doing a lot more with a lot more, and the first a lot more is quantum leaps more impact, quantum leaps more revenue. And the second a lot more is that combination of people and machines. We're talking about AI here, but there will be other technologies that come down the pike. That is the choice that we need to make.
Chike Aguh:Secondly is we're talking about skills, lots of skills that we can talk about, but I just put them in two buckets. First bucket is what I call just-in-time skills. These are these technical skills that you learn to do your job. It is the new procedure, the new software, the new protocol, the new regulation, the new tool that you need to do, and those skills change really fast. But they're also ones that you can learn in a very didactic, very classic classroom way. As time goes on, AI will do more of those things. It can't tell you how many more, it can't tell you at what speed, but they will do more of that, which makes the second bucket of skills as important.
Chike Aguh:Some people call them 21st century skills, some people call them employability skills. I call them 21st century skills. Some people call them employability skills. I call them timeless skills. These are the skills that human beings have been doing for thousands of years, from leadership to communication to conflict resolution, and the thing about those skills is that you don't learn them reading a book. I analogize them to being an athlete. I don't care what your sport was Basketball, football, field hockey, hockey, soccer, shooting a jump shot, throwing a football, uh, hitting a baseball. You didn't watch a video about it solely, you didn't like go to a class about it. You did it. You did it first in practice with a coach, and you did it in a risk-free environment, and initially you you sucked, and then you got better through practice and coaching and then you got good enough where the coach is like, okay, I trust you to do that during a game where there are stakes. Then during the game, you weren't as good as you were in practice and the coach still watched you when you went back and forth. You do that cycle over and over and over again. That is how human beings get good at the timeless skills.
Chike Aguh:You don't learn conflict resolution from a book. You don't learn conflict resolution from a book. Yes, you read some things. You hopefully get some practice and then you get into a conflict and you have to resolve it. Probably not perfectly the first time, but over time you get better by doing learning and coaching, which makes the last thing I say, I think, really critical, which is right now the biggest problem in education. It is too much students listen and teachers talk.
Chike Aguh:What makes me hopeful? In other countries I'm seeing more and more schools, say from K-12 to higher ed work where students are actually out there in the world doing a thing tied to an academic purpose is becoming more and more of what schools are doing. I think about the Bloomberg Philanthropies funding a quarter billion dollar initiative schools are doing. I think about the Bloomberg Philanthropies funding a quarter billion dollar initiative where they're working with 10 high school districts around the country, where students will spend part of their week in classrooms, part of their week on site at a hospital, and so when they graduate high school, they are literally graduating with a diploma, a certification and a job. And, by the way, they're not just learning, for example, about nursing or phlebotomy. They're actually learning what you learn in a class, which is I don't like my supervisor, or how do I deal with that, or this patient's really mad at me. How do I resolve that conflict for them? Or I have to give a presentation. How do I do that when it really matters?
Chike Aguh:And when you bring all that together, there is a world and maybe this will be the last thing that I say you talked about. There are these two worlds, potential futures. One of them is this future where the AI takes all the jobs. There's no use for human beings anymore, and that's not a world necessarily that most of us want to live in. There's another world where it's all techno-optimism and it's all great.
Chike Aguh:I think the world that we actually are going to live in is one that we have to choose, and that choice is we make the choice that we want to live in a world where the ai and machine work together, reuse the ais to optimize the people so that we get the what I believe is the most gain possible. But it is a choice. It is not one that will be kind of a fait accompli. I think the one place where I kind of ding my technical optimist friends is where I say you kind of assume this will happen. I don't assume anything. If this world that you want is going to happen, it's going to happen because we choose it and, by the way, it is not an easy choice to make because, candidly, the people who are lucky and have capital and money, they will make money even from outcomes that actually are not great for everybody.
Chike Aguh:We actually have to make a choice, and by we I mean truly the royal, we, business, government, the nonprofit space and everyone in between. This is the future that we want and therefore this is what we have to create. And part of what we have to create is this paradigm, which you've been working on again for getting close to a decade of. We have to put these tools in the hands of everyone, strategically, but also soon. One thing I say to schools when we're at tour think about this, and now let's get tactical. If you're a school, this means a couple things for you.
Chike Aguh:One start something simple soon with AI with your kids. Don't do it everywhere, because even businesses are learning that. Oh, I shouldn't apply these tools everywhere because it doesn't make sense everywhere. But you cannot say school will be an AI-free zone. That is a mistake. You disserve your kids and particularly I worry about, you will disserve the kids who have the most challenges in front of, because the kids who are doing fine, they will get exposed, but the kids who don't are not going to. So that's one. And then again, let me say a 1A here. If you were hiring someone you, alex, you, anyone else you wouldn't hire someone who couldn't use Microsoft Office, you wouldn't do it. You wouldn't hire someone who couldn't use Google Search. These tools in the next 12 months will be as ubiquitous as those and you will be expected to do that. And if you don't prepare kids for that, you are disserving them. That's number one. Number two how, as a school, are you integrating AI in the classroom with work and experiential learning outside the classroom?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Right, because, while it's absolutely the case, I would not hire somebody who doesn't know how to use Google Search or doesn't know how to use Microsoft Word. If someone showed up to an interview and I was like, well, why should I hire you? And they said, well, I know how to use Google, I know how to use Microsoft.
Chike Aguh:Word.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I mean that would be the end of the interview. It's like well, it's necessary, but not sufficient.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):So what you're describing is the tools are absolutely critical, but they're just one ingredient and what's more important is sort of what do you do with those tools? And that's the role I think that teachers play right. It's like actually using those tools as sort of like force multipliers for that experiential learning, things that build student agency, things that get students to do the type of skills that you can't just read a book. I love that paradigm because you don't learn how to ride a bike by reading a book. You could read 10 books about riding a bike and you're still going to have to do what all of us did, where you put the training wheels on and figure it out.
Chike Aguh:I've read a lot of books on how to do a jump shot. I do not shoot. I do not shoot like Luca. I don't because I don't do what he does on a regular basis, but continue.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):No, I think we're landing at sort of a frame that educators can use, that maybe parents can use, which is, um, how can I make sure that in the educational experiences that I'm creating, that at least a component if not the majority, but at least a component is is? Is goes beyond knowledge transfer, goes beyond just sort of like building that, um, uh, like sort of rudimentary set of skills, things that could be sort of like built into an algorithm is? Well, it may be very hard for someone to intuit what AI can or can't do today, let alone 10 years from now. I think it's, you know, this sort of like more meta perspective of you know what, what are the types of things that are kind of innately human? And I guess the challenge is that the answer to that question has changed your point about sort of generative AI and, you know, creating art, and so Something else you said a little earlier is the velocity of how fast things are changing.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):It demands everybody that's a part of this equation to be kind of like on the ball, to use the basketball analogy again. How does, how can educators and folks that really care about the next generation, how do you keep up with all the stuff that's happening, because I, I I'm like, literally, my job is to teach people about ai, and I find myself um consistently overwhelmed and feeling uh like I have no sense of what's going on, and so, um, yeah, I mean what, do you have any? It's a great question recommendations.
Chike Aguh:I see a couple things. One, uh, again, because of the nature of the tool, I find exploration is helpful. Um, I got to work with a few companies who got early, uh, beta tests of microsoft, co-p, of GPT or Claude, and one of the things was just for them to push it, see what it can do, ask it a question that you don't know if it can answer, and see what it and see what you get back. But that consistent and again, it's like it's almost like exercising, pushing it to its limit and see, starting where it starts to break. Really important because you'll begin to learn. Okay, actually it's not good at this. We need to ask it this way.
Chike Aguh:Secondly, you know I hate saying reading, but yes, reading, um, you know, I have a google search feed where I, just when I see ai news, so on, so forth, I kind of spend a couple minutes a day on that, as well as another, a bunch of other emerging technologies, the, the. The third thing is these tools are actually great for learning and I would would argue one can argue that the best skill that you can give someone is how do you teach someone to teach themselves things? And so I just came up with. There are a bunch of great prompts around. So, for example, I need to learn in the next two weeks, I need to learn the ins and outs of quantum computing. Can you create me a syllabus and a set of videos and articles that I should read? That would make that possible, that I could have a reasonable conversation with a quantum researcher? Go and it will do it. You will actually have a great list. So actually use these tools to help do that.
Chike Aguh:And now I believe, at least with a GPT I know it does this a clotting Gemini, but you're going to begin to give it notifications. So, for example, with GPT-TAS, for example, cloud has, I think, a similar feature. Hey, can you ping me anytime an article that I should learn on AI? If you have it on your phone it can send you notifications. But that last one, I think, is really important because, again, let's use the tool tool which actually can um be used for for things like that. Because I think if I were a teacher today, that is the number one thing I would be teaching my kids to use that tool for.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, it's like, it's like you. You almost insulate a bit from the power of the technology. Uh, by giving, by giving kids the ability to actually use it as a tool for their own self-improvement, because what you just described in terms of this syllabus for quantum computing, what you can also do is say here's my starting point, I'm a high school student who's actually behind and I actually struggle with linear algebra, and it will actually tailor the syllabus.
Chike Aguh:And this is important.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Because you can spend hours going through. There's plenty of lectures that are online about quantum computing from MIT, from Harvard, and you go sit and watch those lectures and it's like and I've watched some of them it's very, very hard to follow. And so that's the buzzword of personalizing education. I think it really goes beyond the buzzword. I think there is a there.
Chike Aguh:There. The other thing I'll say is how is this Make the tool so? Two other things. I'll add One don't just use one tool. So, like most of us, I started on ChatGPT but I was using Claw Gemini. I use Copilot Because they're different. Do you have a favorite? I have found certain ones are good for certain things, and so there are some. For example, just take the Copilots. I like Microsoft Word Copilot. I like Microsoft PowerPoint Copilot. I think Excel I'm not quite there yet, um, but same thing with all the other kind of dominant tools. I think. Learn to use them all. Um, it's unlike you know, I think, what will happen. Unlike the search engine game from the late 90s, which no one here will remember, but there were. Google was one of them. There were a bunch of other ones that do not exist because vista all theista.
Chike Aguh:AltaVista, hotbot, all these I do not believe we're going to get to like there will be one. I don't believe that I believe we will have because there's just so many companies and so much capital. But the other thing is make the tool ask you questions. So, for example just take that example Make me this curriculum for quantum computing. What else would you need to know about me to create an accurate uh syllabus? And it'll ask you hey, it'll be helpful for me to know your age, your level of knowledge. Like make it ask you questions yeah, and this is the, the.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think, I think the. The. There's a fallacy where people say, well, I want to learn prompt engineering, so what are the prompts that I need to memorize? There's a lot of where people say, well, I want to learn prompt engineering, so what are? The prompts that I need to memorize.
Chike Aguh:There's a lot of snake oil and people actually selling this stuff online, of course, oh here's the prompt Bible, the stuff that you need to memorize.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And when people ask me like, well, how do I start learning prompt engineering, I think what you just described is precisely. It's just like just ask, ask the LLM, ask the LLM, how can I prompt you? And it will literally give you the cheat codes to design that prompt. But what you're pushing for is you just have to get hands-on. You literally have to push yourself, and a lot of the times. I think what you're also alluding to is sometimes it's inefficient. Sometimes it's actually easier to just write the email yourself. Oh yes, sometimes it's actually easier to go and do the research, but that becomes intuitive once you've actually had the revs and experience the hallucinations yourself and experience where it's actually way faster to have chat, gpt or I mean, businesses are learning this.
Chike Aguh:I think so. For example, I was sitting with a with a researcher at MIT, and one thing he said is like, look, if you're a business, um, you have to be careful where you apply this, forget values and all that just literally for effectiveness. Like so, for example, um, if you're applying AI in a, in a um, in a situation where you need 99.99% accuracy, in a situation where you need 99.99% accuracy, ai is actually not the tool for you because the exponential cost to go from 96% accuracy to 99.99, it is exponential. I didn't get that until he literally showed me the cost curve. So that's, I think, and it's the same thing in life. There are some things where, to your point, actually it's just more efficient for you to do it.
Chike Aguh:The other thing and actually we're having this conversation with CJ and I is and now I'm speaking about being a parent, so I'm speaking to educators people who work with kids particularly make this a side-by-side adventure In some ways. You don't want the kids walled off from it, and I also don't want them in the AI wilderness by themselves. You want them with a coach by their side. The same way, if you were an athlete, your coach wouldn't say just go shoot, jump shots and I'll come back and I'll see you in a day. That's not how it works. Be their coach through this process and, by the way, you're going to be learning too and you're going to feel stupid every now and again, and that's okay, but part of your job is to help them make sense of what they are seeing and what they are using and also make that journey a conversation between the two of you.
Chike Aguh:One of the things that the AI cannot do yet, and I don't know if it will ever truly do, is that that relationship between teacher and student and I use teacher in the writ large sense, whether you be a parent, you be a guardian, you be anybody. Teacher in the writ large sense, whether you, you be a parent, you be a guardian, you be anybody is, um, that relationship of like please help me make sense of this and kind of keep me safe and I'm you safe again, and also the broad sense is, I think, really really important and that's a and that's just a critical um job that we all have. I have, I have two kids myself. My son is eight, my son is about to be eight, my daughter's three and, as I think about them in this journey um. That's also part of the job yeah.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):The interesting thing, though, is you're when you describe that side by side. I think in many cases, what what transpires is the student, the kid, is often showing the parent or the teacher absolutely, and I've done, I did a presentation.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I went back to my alma mater, cobbly high school. The two, two assemblies, one for teachers, and I had like all a bunch of my former teachers from from cobbly high school were there. It was very, very wide, it was weird, um, and I did sort of a similar version of this is sort of like a big picture like what is ai? What is? What are language models like? Why should you care about this? And the teachers were like their eyes were like dinner plates and and there were people lining up like oh, my daughter is, you know, majoring in accounting, like what advice should I give her? And the students were pretty checked out and at first I just sort of chalked it up to like, yeah, high school students, you know I never really cared about these assemblies. And then afterward there was some kids, you know sort of approached me. We've seen all this stuff. None of this is new. Can I ask for a show of hands? Who's using ChatGBT to help with homework or to cheat on their homework? A third of the group raised their hand. They were like everybody should have raised their hand. We're all using it. To me that's new.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think that also has created a little bit of a fear among educators because it's like they don't understand it. They feel like it's sort of something that's out of, something they can't control, which you can't um. But I mean, what you're saying and what I feel like we have been pushing is there's only one solution to that and you can't ban it. You can ban in schools. They're going to use it out of school. You can ban it in schools. They're going to use it on their phone.
Chike Aguh:Your only solution is.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You have to learn yourself.
Chike Aguh:And you can't.
Chike Aguh:What I can't remember is how can you ban a thing that the minute they step outside of your environment, like when they step in the workforce, like I always remember, there was this great story, maybe like a year after ChatGPT came out.
Chike Aguh:There was this great story maybe like a year after chat GPT came out and it was a software engineer and basically chat GPT and I think that was the tool he used made him so much more productive that he that he and he was remote, he had three full-time jobs and so he literally made like 350 K over like a year or like a year or two, and he's like and like he paid for his kid to go to college, I think he paid off his house and after a while he starts to feel bad. He was like should I tell them that I have three jobs? And in my head I'm like I don't know about that guy, but, um, that there is a tool that can increase your productivity. Two to three x that you don't use. That's that, that's not tenable. And so I think, one parents, guardians, that broad teacher category, you have to learn these tools.
Chike Aguh:One Secondly, your job may not be to teach them technically what to do. Your job is to help them make sense of this. Your job is to help them. What should I use this for? What should I not use this for? Should I write this myself? It produced this answer for me. Do I believe it? And if I don't, how could I cross-check this? That's actually where that teacher category is so useful and so valuable.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I'm going to grasp for a metaphor here. I'm going to grasp for a metaphor here. So it's like, you know, there's this uncharted jungle that you, the teacher, have never been to before, and you have to go through this jungle with your student, with your kids, and you may not be able to guide them through. You don't know what's in store. You can make sure that they have waterproof boots. You boots make sure they have all the equipment that they need can prepare them for what they might encounter. So they're not surprised.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And you yourself should pour over all the information you can find about this, this new land that you're exploring, and um it, yeah, because I think there's a big.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):There's a big difference between someone who is just sort of showing up and flip flops and just like winging it, and someone who's actually, you know, preparing for there are known, unknown, and I think that's sort of like there's there's actually some certainty around what we don't know and it's not completely like. There is a space of like, a gamut of like, what might you know what might transpire, but it's not completely unknowable. Right, it's a, it's a set of potential outcomes and, based on you know how fast the technology develops, based on precisely how good it ends up becoming at coding, how good it ends up becoming at writing, um, but these are things that we can make students aware of, the things that they can pay attention to. And if you want to be a lawyer, like, keep tabs on how law firms are implementing ai, like that should definitely be something you think about when you're about to apply to law school. It's not?
Chike Aguh:yeah, and are and are you going to be a doc review lawyer versus a litigator, versus a pilot, versus? I mean, the thing that I think about is if you're talking to me in that scenario, the analogy that I thought about was I thought about Star Wars, I think about the Empire Strikes Back and again I'm dating myself. But I think about there's the part of the movie where Luke Skywalker goes to the swamp planet to go find Yoda and Yoda starts to train him as a Jedi. And if you watch it, what's really interesting is that and I never thought about this until you literally were just talking you watch that sequence. Yoda never swings a lightsaber. He doesn't do any flips, he doesn't do anything like that. All he does is he just gives like luke habits of mind, like I remember when he tells him like, like, lift the rock. He's like I'll try. He's like there is no try. You do or you do not. There is no try.
Chike Aguh:Um, and in many ways I would argue again for that teacher category. That's what you're doing. You're right, these kids may know this tool better than you. You don't need to compete with them there, but your job is to how should you think about this? And as much you know, like every middle schooler and teenager who thinks they know everything, you kind of know you don't. Even though you act like you do, you kind of know that you don't. And having someone who can help you put structure on how you should think about it and, even more importantly, someone to help give you a values framework for how to use these tools. And I don't just mean the ethical AI stuff, which is super important, but I more think about if you have a young person who is interested in serving just serving, broadly serving their community. I hope, when my kids are old enough, that I can say well, how could TragGPT help you do X thing better? How could you expand your impact with people that you are serving using these tools? I think that is a place that, again, teachers writ large could in many ways help students and and also, candidly, I think that's a a framework in our minds that I wish the country would take as we think about these tools.
Chike Aguh:I I am fortunate to spend time with folks who are thinking about how do I use ai to find cancer markers for drugs or how do I use um? Uh, there's a great group of students at Northeastern where I have an appointment who are working with the governor's office. They used AI to basically find intersections that don't have road signs or stop signs or traffic lights. That should, because we reduce traffic deaths. They've literally mapped this out using these tools. We have an AI for impact cohort using students using this in real time, by the way doing projects at the state either can't afford to do or doesn't have the bandwidth to do. That, I think, is the actual world where there's the doom world, where, again, where we, it's like the matrix. But then there is the world where not only are do we keep our quality of life, but actually we are using these tools to solve problems that we have never been able to solve at scale and at speed that we've never seen before. But that's a choice.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, and to bring it all home. First of all, thank you so much for coming by and I just want to acknowledge how much better dressed you are than me, and I'm not going to ever try to compete with your sartorial skills, but nonetheless it's very refreshing to have someone who has been across all the different vantage points in the space that we're in, like workforce economics. You're an educator on, you know, on the ground, like literally in the front lines, but you also understand the policy policymaker perspective. It's very reassuring that you're, you know, repeating back a lot of these. You know big picture, I think, like sort of instincts that that we've had as as AIEDU in terms of how we talk about this.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I want to close by circling back to what you said about there is no predetermined outcome. It's not that we're on a train track that is the AI train track and we don't know where we're heading. We're sort of charting a course. This is why I'm so passionate about the work of education, because, to me, the only way we get to that beneficial outcome where AI is being harnessed for the betterment of humanity, it's augmenting and empowering workers rather than replacing them or, you know, succumbing them to menial roles and organizations know, uh, succumbing them to menial roles and organizations. Um, you know, education schools are where we build those sensibilities and the mindsets. Um, because I don't, I, I mean, we haven't had the chance to talk about policy and government, but, um, my guess is that you and I would probably agree that government alone can't through policy or dictate. Right, you know, guarantee us, you know anyone, they can create some guardrails, they can orient.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):They can provide resources, but at the end of the day, this is actually very much going to be generated by all the people who are going to be behind the wheel of these technologies, and so where else? Are the front lines, if not in classrooms and in those moments where a parent is sitting next to their kid and having a conversation with them about Gemini and what's actually happening and creating not just that curiosity but also challenging them to think about. How could you use this to help your community, to help your Girl Scouts group?
Chike Aguh:The last two things. I'll say that maybe kind of dovetail there. I think one and it's a phrase that President Biden used to use, particularly when we were in the beginning of the administration, particularly during the pandemic days, and he used to talk about in response to the pandemic we're going to take a whole of government approach and I would always kind of take that a step further and say we need to solve a problem like that or a problem like this is a whole of society approach to your point. It will take all of us everywhere to to figure out how to harness this. I mean, the second thing I say and this is particularly, I think, to the educators this is going to take all of us and I. And when I think about this, I think about a study that Ross Chetty did. Ross Chetty, brilliant economist at Harvard. Chetty did Raj Chetty, brilliant economist at Harvard. He runs the Opportunity Insights Project and he has access to the tax returns of every American since 1950 from the IRS and it allows him to do this amazing longitudinal survey. And he basically did this survey where he took a I'm afraid how large the sample was, but he basically took a bunch of students who took basically a math aptitude test when they were in third grade and he basically looked at it across all racial demographics and he's like I want to find all the kids who were at least like two or three standard deviations above. Then I want to see what happened to them when they were adults. Then I want to see what happened to them when they were adults and again remember they all tested two or three standard deviations above the mean in that math test when they were in third grade. And I want to say, particularly in terms of the filing of patents, I want to see how many of them filed a patent. And what you found was again same aptitude when they were eight. Go 20 years later. Students who were higher income, who were white, far more, three times more likely to file a patent than folks who scored the same but who were African-American, who were Latino. And he titles his paper the Lost Einstein Paper and he said, ok, I've now removed the aptitude question. I've taken all people who have roughly the same aptitude. So that's not the explanation for the different outcomes. It can't be Something happened maybe in their lives, but most likely something more structurally, where these folks did well and these folks didn't. We can argue about that forever, but these folks who didn't do well that was a huge lost opportunity for America.
Chike Aguh:Another book that I think about is the Idea Factory. It's a great book on the history of Bell Labs. If you look at Bell Labs where they created the transistor, undersea internet cables which is why we have the internet today globally satellites, cell phones I can name you 10 other things possibly the most important non-government research lab in the history of the country. If you look at who worked there tens of thousands of people. On one hand they were very ecumenical. They actually made a habit of going to small towns, particularly in the Midwest and out West, to go find just like oh, this is the smart kid in the math class we're going to, we're going to help you go to university, get a PhD and come here to bell labs.
Chike Aguh:But also, if you read the book the entire book literally, that goes from the founding of bell labs in the early 20th century to like the eighties no women, right 80s no women. I can't think anyone who was not white and I don't say that to say that to diminish the greatness of Bell Labs. Again, we wouldn't live in the same country if we didn't have Bell Labs. They held them in radar, which was critical to winning World War II. How much greater could Bell Labs have been if we had used everybody? And so, when I think about why what you do is so important is, how do we not lose the Einsteins? And part of it is making sure that those kids not just those kids who are 213, but every kid has access to these tools that are going to change the world.