Emotional skills may matter more than STEM in an AI era

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 33:32

   And I feel like education is like at the center of AI. It's like, is it going to usher in a new era where everyone has amazing tutors and education is supercharged? Or are public school students, especially perhaps, just going to have AI slop constantly? As a philanthropist who's invested a lot here and sort of studied the education, especially in the United States. How do you think AI is going to affect education? Well, there's two kind of big questions, which is one, what are we educating kids for? What kind of society are we educating them for? What skills should they have? So the kind of goal state, you know, in the past was passed a lot of AP exams. Sure. Okay. And that's probably not the right goal state for the future world. So there's a big discussion to have, which is what are the skills that you're trying to

2. 34:24

   target for your kids? And then second is implementation, which is can we use AI tutors to whatever we decide is important, to teach more of that, to make teachers' lives better, to have kids learn more. So there are two different discussions that get kind of mushed together. I would say on the second, like how to teach more, then there's some relatively clear paths of doing, you know, different kinds of AI tutors and, you know, just like we're going to have AI doctor, AI lawyer, there'll be AI teacher and that will come along. And it'll be easier in private schools. It'll be easier in charter schools.

3. 35:00

   It'll be harder in school district schools because of all the regulations they have. It'll be easier outside of the U.S. where they're more willing to do some of these things. So, you know, that will happen. It's unclear, the first question, which is, if you have a three-year-old or a five-year-old, what do you want them to learn? Totally. Because the hard skills, like we used to value STEM, okay, that's probably like coding.

4. 35:29

   like we you know we spent 25 years saying learn the code learn the code oops don't learn the code don't learn the code so it's probably true that like all the hard facts of you know biology chemistry physics will be extremely specialized and not necessary general knowledge um and and probably not that valuable let's say if you had an ap result in this the things that are more emotional how you read people how you work with them probably are quite valuable because they're much harder for the computers to do and humans like doing them with other humans more often so i think we'll see a kind of shift of the value you know stem practically took over stanford university okay and now maybe what we'll see is a rotation you know back to the humanities into understanding combination of history and literature,

5. 36:28

   but also kind of the physiology of the brain and, you know, how we interact with each other. If I had a three-year-old today, I would be like doubling down on the emotional skills. There's some great middle schools. One's a charter school, Valor. Another's a private school, Flourish. And, you know, they really focus like in seventh grade on these emotional circles where you sit around and talk about your feelings And because they feel like this kind of skill and knowing yourself, interact with other human beings is going to be the thing that sustains those kids, you know, through their working life.

6. 37:03

   Do you, I feel like when people talk about AI and education, alpha school always comes up. We had McKenzie on the pod a few months ago.