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Chike Aguh: People and AI can collaborate to solve problems · aiEDU Studios

• 0:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So yeah, here we are.
• 0:06
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Thank you for joining.
• 0:07
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm Alex Katron.
• 0:09
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm the co-founder and CEO of AIEDU.
• 0:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're here with the pop-up AIEDU studios in Washington DC.
• 0:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm here with Chika Yaga.
• 0:19
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Chika, you have a lot of different roles and titles.
• 0:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm going to let you introduce yourself and tell us more about exactly what you're doing now.
• 0:29
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 0:35
  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?
• 0:43
  Chike Aguh: Sure.
• 0:43
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 0:56
  Chike Aguh: We're based across the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
• 1:00
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:07
  Chike Aguh: 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,.
• 1:28
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:35
  Chike Aguh: Would I think about how many?
• 1:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Have there been chief innovation officers?
• 1:42
  Chike Aguh: at DLO there was one other who's a dear friend.
• 1:45
  Chike Aguh: He was the first, I was the second.
• 1:47
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And was that in the Obama administration?
• 1:49
  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.
• 2:01
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 2:08
  Chike Aguh: So in many ways I say my family is a very classic immigrant story to this country.
• 2:12
  Chike Aguh: My family is from a village in Nigeria that most Nigerians themselves will never see and never visit.
• 2:18
  Chike Aguh: None of my grandparents all of whom were from the same exact village, none of them went past middle school.
• 2:23
  Chike Aguh: My parents were born on streets that were unpaved then, that are mostly unpaved now.
• 2:28
  Chike Aguh: They had Peace Corps volunteers in their classrooms, and what changed life for them was in the mid 70s, early 80s.
• 2:35
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 3:05
  Chike Aguh: I think we also know by the data we don't get it right with enough people in enough places.
• 3:10
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 3:24
  Chike Aguh: And so that's kind of been my theory of change throughout my career.
• 3:27
  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.
• 3:39
  Chike Aguh: And uh, from there, after graduate school, really went through the public, private and social sectors trying to work on these questions.
• 3:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 4:07
  Chike Aguh: In the nonprofit space was a CEO of a nonprofit called Everyone On, focused on closing the broadband gap, particularly for families with kids.
• 4:17
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 4:21
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 4:40
  Chike Aguh: What's been the impact of that, of AI as well?
• 4:43
  Chike Aguh: It's just kind of the economic times that we've been in.
• 4:45
  Chike Aguh: And then also in government, you know, served in the Bloomberg administration in New York City.
• 4:48
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 4:57
  Chike Aguh: And so the other theory of action that I have is this problem or any problem worth solving?
• 5:01
  Chike Aguh: And pick your problem from economic competitiveness to climate change, to nuclear nonproliferation.
• 5:06
  Chike Aguh: No one person, organization or sector can solve the problem by itself.
• 5:10
  Chike Aguh: You need people and actors across sectors working in concert to solve these big problems.
• 5:15
  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.
• 5:23
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 5:31
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 5:37
  Chike Aguh: And again, I you know I I met you when, when, when you were initially conceiving of this project.
• 5:46
  Chike Aguh: And we have to start this thinking.
• 5:47
  Chike Aguh: Frankly, there is no time.
• 5:48
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 5:55
  Chike Aguh: Who's thinking about this?
• 5:56
  Chike Aguh: Frankly, people at the beginning of their journey.
• 6:00
  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.
• 6:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): That was OG right at the beginning.
• 6:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 6:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm really interested in what the parallels might look like.
• 6:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think one of the biggest challenges with artificial intelligence is it's very hard for people to grasp, to wrap their heads around.
• 6:36
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What does this actually mean?
• 6:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): How is this going to impact me?
• 6:39
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 6:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Am I supposed to become an AI engineer?
• 7:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Am I supposed to master prompt engineering.
• 7:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 7:13
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 7:22
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You were in New York City public schools as presumably they were starting to get widespread access to computers.
• 7:28
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I don't even know if students even all had access to computers back then.
• 7:31
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 7:41
  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.
• 7:50
  Chike Aguh: Whenever you look at history, you have to basically always ask the question what is the same and what is different?
• 7:56
  Chike Aguh: Because, uh, you know, not looking at history at all is always, uh, fraught, because there are lessons there.
• 8:03
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 8:18
  Chike Aguh: Let's go all the way back to the steam engine, all the way back to the steam engine.
• 8:29
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 8:36
  Chike Aguh: Let's go into at that at the application of commercial computing.
• 8:41
  Chike Aguh: Initially, back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, computing was not a consumer activity, it was done by universities and corporations.
• 8:47
  Chike Aguh: And then, of course, in the 80s, with the Apple II at home, and then, when I was 12, 13,.
• 8:56
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 9:10
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 9:21
  Chike Aguh: Think about the impact of the printing press way back when.
• 9:26
  Chike Aguh: And then society has to figure out how do we use this?
• 9:30
  Chike Aguh: How do we not Go back to the printing press?
• 9:32
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 9:41
  Chike Aguh: The only people who should have access to all this widespread information are the clergy and nobility.
• 9:47
  Chike Aguh: One can argue.
• 9:49
  Chike Aguh: We have, frankly, a large conversation about this.
• 9:53
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 10:02
  Chike Aguh: I argue that they're different in some ways.
• 10:05
  Chike Aguh: One can argue in the 1400s it was a little more about control, I think.
• 10:07
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 10:17
  Chike Aguh: So I think that's one, and I don't mean to start so globally, but I think it's really important.
• 10:20
  Chike Aguh: I think two, what is the same and what is different?
• 10:24
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 10:39
  Chike Aguh: Is one, the speed.
• 10:39
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 10:49
  Chike Aguh: It took electricity 80 years.
• 10:50
  Chike Aguh: That is a level of speed of deployment that we have never seen.
• 10:55
  Chike Aguh: If you look at the internet, the internet basically took about 12 years, 12, 13 years to reach 80% of the American population.
• 11:01
  Chike Aguh: It took electricity 80 years to reach that.
• 11:05
  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.
• 11:15
  Chike Aguh: We're used to having more than even the internet.
• 11:16
  Chike Aguh: I mean, I remember this as a kid and we didn't have these types of conversations.
• 11:20
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 11:24
  Chike Aguh: I wish we had the same types of conversations about social media back in the mid-2000s that we're having now about AI.
• 11:31
  Chike Aguh: So the speed.
• 11:32
  Chike Aguh: The second thing is this is one of the first technologies, the first technology that I can think of where.
• 11:39
  Chike Aguh: So I used to.
• 11:39
  Chike Aguh: When I used to work at the advisory board, we used to sell SaaS tools.
• 11:41
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 11:49
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 11:58
  Chike Aguh: Generative AI, by the way, that is the new part of ai.
• 12:03
  Chike Aguh: Ai has been with us and before that, machine learning for 15 to 20 years, you know.
• 12:08
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 12:17
  Chike Aguh: That's been done by a multivariate regression machine learning tool.
• 12:22
  Chike Aguh: The new part is the generative.
• 12:24
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 12:48
  Chike Aguh: So someone had a document and they asked their co-pilot please summarize this document?
• 12:53
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 13:04
  Chike Aguh: It would be so important to me if you could.
• 13:06
  Chike Aguh: And they got a different product and the people who made it can't tell you why.
• 13:11
  Chike Aguh: And was it better?
• 13:13
  Chike Aguh: I don't remember, but it was different.
• 13:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Interesting.
• 13:17
  Chike Aguh: And the question is why?
• 13:18
  Chike Aguh: Why would an emotional, peer-like plea to a machine produce a different product?
• 13:25
  Chike Aguh: I don't know the answer.
• 13:27
  Chike Aguh: And so the thing here is that the people who build it don't totally know what it all does.
• 13:32
  Chike Aguh: In fact, that's why they did so much beta testing.
• 13:35
  Chike Aguh: Beforehand, they would give it to companies and say, hey, just try it out and tell us what happens.
• 13:39
  Chike Aguh: This is new.
• 13:41
  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.
• 13:58
  Chike Aguh: The thing that I think the most about is less my time as a teacher.
• 14:01
  Chike Aguh: The most about is less my time as a teacher, just to be candid.
• 14:07
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 14:13
  Chike Aguh: We used I used to say we, instead of using blackboards, we use whiteboards and smart boards.
• 14:18
  Chike Aguh: But one can argue, the form factor of instruction was the same students listened, teachers talked, um.
• 14:24
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 14:38
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 14:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 14:56
  Chike Aguh: We probably deployed this was this would have been the year 2015 to 2018.
• 15:00
  Chike Aguh: And we would say a lot.
• 15:02
  Chike Aguh: You know, hey, this is critical.
• 15:05
  Chike Aguh: If you don't give kids access to a broadband and a device, you don't have access to education.
• 15:08
  Chike Aguh: And then the pandemic happened and then everyone understood very painfully.
• 15:13
  Chike Aguh: The biggest thing that I remember was going into classrooms and you generally see a bell curve.
• 15:20
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 15:27
  Chike Aguh: That was a minority.
• 15:28
  Chike Aguh: Then you had a majority who were using these in the same way.
• 15:31
  Chike Aguh: They had used everything and effectively.
• 15:34
  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?
• 15:50
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 16:03
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 16:11
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 16:21
  Chike Aguh: Uh, actually, that's actually fairly correct.
• 16:23
  Chike Aguh: I disagree with that thing.
• 16:24
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 16:33
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 16:41
  Chike Aguh: I think we're beginning to see that now, because what you have on the generative side is so.
• 16:48
  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.
• 16:59
  Chike Aguh: You know we had.
• 16:59
  Chike Aguh: I think we had.
• 17:00
  Chike Aguh: We didn't have a smart board.
• 17:01
  Chike Aguh: I had a projector and a speaker where I could project things, finding the right video At that time.
• 17:06
  Chike Aguh: This is in 2006,.
• 17:07
  Chike Aguh: Youtube is still a fairly nascent platform with nowhere near as much content.
• 17:13
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 17:22
  Chike Aguh: I could have used that time actually more with my students.
• 17:25
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 17:33
  Chike Aguh: Yes, and how can they do their work better and differently?
• 17:37
  Chike Aguh: And they're basically just efficiency gains.
• 17:41
  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?
• 17:57
  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.
• 18:03
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 18:10
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 18:19
  Chike Aguh: Or I could say, um god, I remember we did like.
• 18:23
  Chike Aguh: I taught social studies as well and I remember we had to do basically what we call.
• 18:30
  Chike Aguh: I forget what we call it.
• 18:31
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 18:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Do you have Google Maps?
• 18:44
  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.
• 18:56
  Chike Aguh: And then, of course, now getting to to this, and so we asked we had them like make a country.
• 19:01
  Chike Aguh: So like, hey, we're, you're gonna get to make your own country.
• 19:04
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 19:10
  Chike Aguh: And of course they did it with crayons and stuff and and and.
• 19:12
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 19:18
  Chike Aguh: So getting five, seven year olds to agree on what their flag should look like challenging.
• 19:22
  Chike Aguh: Usually one kid just grabs the, grabs the crayon, it goes from there.
• 19:25
  Chike Aguh: But what I would have done was I would have said each of you on your tablet with chat, gpt, make your own flag.
• 19:30
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 19:40
  Chike Aguh: So these are these just small examples of how I would have used this differently as a teacher to change how I taught.
• 19:48
  Chike Aguh: I had another friend.
• 19:50
  Chike Aguh: He was a math teacher.
• 19:51
  Chike Aguh: Actually, he still teaches this very day.
• 19:53
  Chike Aguh: He's almost 20 years and he turned his class on its head.
• 19:57
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 20:04
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 20:09
  Chike Aguh: He did the exact opposite.
• 20:10
  Chike Aguh: He would put a problem on the board that the students had not seen.
• 20:13
  Chike Aguh: He had not taught them the background.
• 20:15
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 20:29
  Chike Aguh: What are you missing here?
• 20:30
  Chike Aguh: What don't you understand?
• 20:32
  Chike Aguh: And then from there he would back into the concept and then so on and so forth.
• 20:40
  Chike Aguh: Unbelievably powerful, had some of the highest math scores in his school, in the state he was doing that in 2006.
• 20:47
  Chike Aguh: And I think about what he could have done with tools like this to turbocharge that and, if anything, go even faster and better.
• 20:52
  Chike Aguh: So that's how I think about how this strikes in schools, but one we've been here before.
• 20:55
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 21:11
  Chike Aguh: Not just the same that I did before, but faster, but actually in an entirely different way.
• 21:15
  Chike Aguh: That gets you quantum leaps, not incremental leaps.
• 21:18
  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.
• 21:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I've done many You've done many.
• 21:51
  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.
• 21:59
  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.
• 22:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 22:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 22:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It like what you're actually describing.
• 22:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Actually describing is still very teacher-centric.
• 22:27
  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?
• 22:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Or how, like, what are the prompts that I should learn as a teacher?
• 22:53
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Uh, so I can do a better job teaching?
• 22:56
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We really try to move, push, you know, push back from like don't think too much about the prompts themselves.
• 23:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Like, think about what your ultimate end goal is.
• 23:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Some of the things you described, I think, is what we would describe as those end goals.
• 23:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's like okay, how do you encourage more student collaboration?
• 23:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You described an example of where ChatGPT is a tool, not the only tool.
• 23:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The flag activity you described could absolutely work without students having access to ChatGPT.
• 23:21
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Chatgpt could make it faster, maybe more interesting and maybe a level of depth.
• 23:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Maybe they're not just creating a flag, maybe they're also creating the constitution and the charter.
• 23:33
  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.
• 23:42
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We've worked in New York City public schools.
• 23:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We also work in.
• 23:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Prince George's County actually just down the street, these really large districts.
• 23:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The teachers are brilliant.
• 23:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They just don't have the bandwidth.
• 23:53
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 23:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You don't need to convince me need to convince me.
• 24:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We've done surveys of teachers.
• 24:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Like 95 plus percent of teachers agree but one critical thinking, communication, right when.
• 24:07
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And also, I'm not measured as a teacher on whether my students are building collaboration skills.
• 24:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm not measured as a teacher on, you know, critical thinking skills specifically.
• 24:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 24:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 24:36
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So anyways, this is just a tip of the hat to what you just described.
• 24:39
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to talk more about education.
• 24:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I do want to go back to this journey through history.
• 24:46
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You went as far back as the 15th century.
• 24:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 24:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You talked about the telegraph.
• 25:01
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It is interesting.
• 25:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I wasn't.
• 25:06
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I obviously didn't.
• 25:06
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I wasn't around in those times.
• 25:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I was around.
• 25:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I remember the first time I used a computer.
• 25:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 25:22
  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.
• 25:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But but I am kind of curious, like what?
• 25:40
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What do you see?
• 25:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 25:48
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We don't even know exactly what it looks like.
• 25:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 25:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Will AI dramatically transform education, you know, in the next five years?
• 26:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm just reflecting now that I wonder if those questions were asked.
• 26:11
  Chike Aguh: No, they were not.
• 26:12
  Chike Aguh: I can answer that for you.
• 26:16
  Chike Aguh: The answer is no.
• 26:16
  Chike Aguh: A couple reasons, actually, someone brought this up at another conference that I was at.
• 26:24
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 26:34
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 26:47
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 26:55
  Chike Aguh: Um radar, which one can argue is the most important invention of world war ii after the atom bomb.
• 27:00
  Chike Aguh: Right, everything came out of government, so there was some visibility by somebody.
• 27:05
  Chike Aguh: I was in government when chad chibouti hit and we all were like what is this?
• 27:12
  Chike Aguh: That?
• 27:13
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): is that to say in government, as an institution, is oriented towards longer term thinking?
• 27:20
  Chike Aguh: or no, I would say.
• 27:21
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 27:31
  Chike Aguh: Shia Jabeti caught everyone and again, as someone who sat in government, again, people in government were not surprised by the Internet.
• 27:41
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 27:52
  Chike Aguh: So, number one this truly came out of nowhere, or so it seemed, even though you know shit.
• 27:58
  Chike Aguh: You know open ai has been around since 2014.
• 28:00
  Chike Aguh: So I think that's one.
• 28:00
  Chike Aguh: I two its capability shocked a lot of people.
• 28:05
  Chike Aguh: And again, think about early chat.
• 28:06
  Chike Aguh: Gpt got a lot of stuff wrong, produced things that were unusual, but it was doing things that you know.
• 28:14
  Chike Aguh: As a kid, I watched Star Trek.
• 28:15
  Chike Aguh: I love Star Trek.
• 28:15
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 28:23
  Chike Aguh: These are things that in a science fiction show, they would ask the computer to do.
• 28:27
  Chike Aguh: When it did and we thought this was oh, that's crazy.
• 28:30
  Chike Aguh: It's science fiction, but it's doing it imperfectly, but getting better, so on.
• 28:35
  Chike Aguh: So that's number two.
• 28:36
  Chike Aguh: And then, I think three, the generative piece, the ability to.
• 28:41
  Chike Aguh: The same way, when you printed something for the first time, that was a big deal for you.
• 28:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 29:01
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 29:20
  Chike Aguh: The fact that Google, from everything I read, was caught a little bit flat footed on that score.
• 29:26
  Chike Aguh: And, by the way, it's also why people didn't know If this had come out of Google.
• 29:29
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 29:33
  Chike Aguh: Most governments would a company of that size.
• 29:35
  Chike Aguh: The fact that this came from OpenAI, which people were aware of, but not to the same extent, just again made it really surprising.
• 29:44
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 29:59
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 30:05
  Chike Aguh: I mean the model, I mean the new model has what?
• 30:07
  Chike Aguh: Eight billion parameters.
• 30:09
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Wow yeah.
• 30:10
  Chike Aguh: So the issue is like tell me what it does.
• 30:11
  Chike Aguh: I don't totally know, and that is.
• 30:16
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 30:19
  Chike Aguh: There are things that are exciting and things that are disconcerting about that, because I don't know what it can do.
• 30:29
  Chike Aguh: The internet I knew, I knew what it could do.
• 30:31
  Chike Aguh: Social media I know what it can do.
• 30:33
  Chike Aguh: I didn't think about all the applications, but I know what it can do.
• 30:35
  Chike Aguh: But this, oh, I actually don't know.
• 30:39
  Chike Aguh: And that is, I think, partially why I'm glad we're having this conversation.
• 30:43
  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.
• 31:00
  Chike Aguh: And so I was there when President Biden put out his executive order on AI.
• 31:05
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 31:10
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 31:26
  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.
• 31:35
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 31:44
  Chike Aguh: Can I tell you we'll totally end up in the place it should?
• 31:47
  Chike Aguh: I can't, but God, I wish we had had this on social media In 2008,.
• 31:52
  Chike Aguh: I wish we'd had this conversation about the internet in the mid-90s or any of these other technologies that were as transformative.
• 32:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I wonder.
• 32:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 32:19
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But electricity, cars, a telegraph, computers, the early internet I think the innovation was directly coupled with progress, with benefits to society.
• 32:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Social media was, I think, maybe that first time that we started to see sort of very.
• 32:42
  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.
• 32:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It was very tightly coupled to happen within a matter of, let's say, five to 10 years.
• 33:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 33:27
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 33:42
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Because social media, when you were launching and when you were launching your work at Always On this, was like 2015.
• 33:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, that was kind of the heyday, almost like the peak of a lot of those companies.
• 33:56
  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.
• 34:06
  Chike Aguh: Now, if we go back we can take and again, I came from the Department of Labor, so I think about some of these.
• 34:12
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 34:24
  Chike Aguh: It was a garment factory almost on the lower East side and effectively, um they it.
• 34:31
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 34:44
  Chike Aguh: So this fire happened.
• 34:46
  Chike Aguh: You can read descriptions of this.
• 34:48
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 35:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Shoot, there are people who are being exploited and who are suffering.
• 35:06
  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.
• 35:38
  Chike Aguh: Secondly, we'll call it a 1A the people who would?
• 35:42
  Chike Aguh: be affected by that are different and more widespread than are used to.
• 35:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 35:55
  Chike Aguh: It's generally people who are doing routine work or work that you do with your strength, generally low-paid work.
• 36:01
  Chike Aguh: What's really interesting is that AI is actually not good at simulating that.
• 36:04
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 36:16
  Chike Aguh: What AI is really good at?
• 36:17
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): generative AI reading and writing.
• 36:21
  Chike Aguh: And the people who do that for a living are under a threat they've never been under before.
• 36:25
  Chike Aguh: I just made a website and I did not hire anyone.
• 36:28
  Chike Aguh: I had ChatGPT make the mock-ups and I asked it to.
• 36:39
  Chike Aguh: I wanted to see if it could do.
• 36:39
  Chike Aguh: It Produced me all the back-end code and it did, and that's it.
• 36:41
  Chike Aguh: I've heard a lot of nonprofits doing the exact same thing, and so this is a.
• 36:45
  Chike Aguh: This is what's different.
• 36:46
  Chike Aguh: So it's not only that it's creating a harm.
• 36:47
  Chike Aguh: It's creating a harm for people who aren't used to being on the receiving end of harm.
• 36:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The people, the people who are actually in a place to drive these conversations.
• 36:56
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): If you're a lawyer who does document, review.
• 36:59
  Chike Aguh: This is a challenge for you.
• 37:00
  Chike Aguh: If you are an entry-level software engineer, this creates a challenge for you.
• 37:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Communications manager.
• 37:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I started my career drafting press releases.
• 37:16
  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.
• 37:25
  Chike Aguh: It's now it's come to life.
• 37:26
  Chike Aguh: Then you have a fear of that.
• 37:31
  Chike Aguh: Now you start thinking like real, real bad, which is the whole.
• 37:34
  Chike Aguh: You have bad actors out in the world and can this turbocharge them too?
• 37:37
  Chike Aguh: Uh, whether that be from misinformation to you know.
• 37:42
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 37:48
  Chike Aguh: So, for example, design for me a pathogen right that would do x, that would create x horrible harm.
• 37:54
  Chike Aguh: They're like nope, you can't do that and there's a reason because we have people who don't want to.
• 37:57
  Chike Aguh: Um, uh, so that's just one example.
• 38:01
  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.
• 38:13
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 38:21
  Chike Aguh: We saw this in social media.
• 38:22
  Chike Aguh: You know where I used to say, the Internet has the ability to divide and to unite, and I think we've seen both.
• 38:29
  Chike Aguh: And for AI it can be the same thing, and I think there's a huge worry about that.
• 38:34
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 38:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I hadn't thought about the fact that work is going to become more automated, even if humans are augmented.
• 38:52
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I see what you're saying.
• 38:53
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Actually, it's breaking down these built-in social interactions that are a part of your day.
• 38:58
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I guess you don't really think about working with your designer as a social interaction, but it very much is Again.
• 39:09
  Chike Aguh: we see this with e-commerce.
• 39:11
  Chike Aguh: Again, for those who are of a certain age, amazon, when I was a kid, only sold books.
• 39:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You could have Best Buy.
• 39:19
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You could have Radio Shack.
• 39:20
  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.
• 39:33
  Chike Aguh: So there's the other piece that we worry about and, by the way, it's compounded by the others.
• 39:37
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 39:51
  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.
• 39:57
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You know I've been to a best buy recently, um, and the there's still lots of folks working there.
• 40:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 40:12
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): When you're like come over.
• 40:13
  Chike Aguh: Let's look at things they would tell you all like.
• 40:14
  Chike Aguh: And now?
• 40:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): it's like like why would you ask me?
• 40:17
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 40:28
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Um, I want to sort of start steering us.
• 40:32
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to.
• 40:32
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to stay on sort of historical frame.
• 40:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to start steering a little bit back to education.
• 40:35
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So the lens I want to use is so for for teachers, parents, ad leaders, who are listening to this.
• 40:42
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They're like, well, what are we supposed to do?
• 40:46
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What am I supposed to tell my kid or my students?
• 40:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 41:00
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We can't say in 15 years, these are the jobs that you need to go towards.
• 41:07
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Five years ago I think we could say credibly computer science, stem, data science, those hard sciences.
• 41:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You're going to be set Lawyer, doctor If you can get onto one of those paths.
• 41:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And a lot of the conversation in the social sector was how do we get more students?
• 41:29
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): onto those pathways.
• 41:31
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 41:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 41:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So let's go back to the, the first industrial revolution.
• 41:55
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 42:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, they were creating entire garments for clients.
• 42:14
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They were working from home, like OG work from home.
• 42:21
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They had this rounded expertise.
• 42:22
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They could create the entire dress or the entire suit.
• 42:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Team Engine Loom comes along and they lose their jobs.
• 42:28
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But the story about the first industrial revolution is not one of job loss.
• 42:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's one of job creation.
• 42:35
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): All of these jobs were created.
• 42:38
  Chike Aguh: And I think that's often.
• 42:38
  Chike Aguh: It's the same conversation around the ATM and the banking industry.
• 42:40
  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.
• 42:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And I actually believe net-net, there's probably going to be created.
• 42:54
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I actually believe, net-net, there's probably going to be more jobs created than lost.
• 42:56
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 43:10
  Chike Aguh: Not the case anymore, or at least mostly Not the case anymore.
• 43:14
  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.
• 43:22
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Is that sufficient?
• 43:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Is that what we want kids to orient towards?
• 43:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 43:50
  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.
• 44:01
  Chike Aguh: When I was in graduate school, I gave my master's in education.
• 44:05
  Chike Aguh: We had a.
• 44:05
  Chike Aguh: I had a Pav.
• 44:07
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 44:17
  Chike Aguh: We were in a class on teacher education.
• 44:18
  Chike Aguh: It was in 2009.
• 44:19
  Chike Aguh: We asked him just one day hey Pop, how do you all do this?
• 44:22
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 44:30
  Chike Aguh: During that year, we have them write two papers.
• 44:34
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 44:45
  Chike Aguh: And the second paper is what is the school that would prepare your students for that world?
• 44:51
  Chike Aguh: And that, ideally, is the school that you should create.
• 44:54
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 45:04
  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?
• 45:09
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 45:19
  Chike Aguh: You want to talk about it with a bunch of other economic trends and let me just say the biggest.
• 45:23
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 45:30
  Chike Aguh: Why?
• 45:32
  Chike Aguh: Because Because in America right now the average couple has 2.1 kids.
• 45:35
  Chike Aguh: Excuse me, needs to have 2.1 kids to keep population level.
• 45:40
  Chike Aguh: The average couple right now has 1.6.
• 45:43
  Chike Aguh: That's just math, that's one.
• 45:47
  Chike Aguh: Secondly, because of that means we're going to have a tighter workforce.
• 45:51
  Chike Aguh: We call it tighter labor market, meaning there's just not as much flex.
• 45:53
  Chike Aguh: There's people who are not working, which in many ways is good, but it actually leads to shortages.
• 45:59
  Chike Aguh: It actually leads to jobs not being filled, even if we hired.
• 46:03
  Chike Aguh: Just to give you a sense of the data right now in America there are nine people looking for every 10 jobs open.
• 46:08
  Chike Aguh: Currently, in my state of Maryland, we have one person looking for every two jobs open.
• 46:14
  Chike Aguh: In my state of Maryland, we have one person looking for every two jobs open.
• 46:16
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 46:29
  Chike Aguh: That's one which means a couple of things.
• 46:31
  Chike Aguh: One I always say we need all the people and all the ai.
• 46:38
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 46:45
  Chike Aguh: Um, ideally, the way that most countries solve that issue is immigration.
• 46:49
  Chike Aguh: I'm not sure if you've watched, um, what's happening down the street from where we are here in Washington DC.
• 46:55
  Chike Aguh: That's not going to get solved anytime soon.
• 46:57
  Chike Aguh: That is a shame, by the way, partially because of my own background, and it's an.
• 47:01
  Chike Aguh: It's an economic opportunity missed, but, candidly, I don't expect us to solve that anytime soon.
• 47:07
  Chike Aguh: Therefore, we have what we have, which means we need all the people and all the AI.
• 47:10
  Chike Aguh: That's number one.
• 47:12
  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.
• 47:32
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 47:40
  Chike Aguh: And the second a lot more is that combination of people and machines.
• 47:44
  Chike Aguh: We're talking about AI here, but there will be other technologies that come down the pike.
• 47:47
  Chike Aguh: That is the choice that we need to make.
• 47:51
  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.
• 47:56
  Chike Aguh: First bucket is what I call just-in-time skills.
• 47:59
  Chike Aguh: These are these technical skills that you learn to do your job.
• 48:01
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 48:11
  Chike Aguh: But they're also ones that you can learn in a very didactic, very classic classroom way.
• 48:15
  Chike Aguh: As time goes on, AI will do more of those things.
• 48:21
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 48:29
  Chike Aguh: Some people call them 21st century skills, some people call them employability skills.
• 48:33
  Chike Aguh: I call them 21st century skills.
• 48:34
  Chike Aguh: Some people call them employability skills.
• 48:35
  Chike Aguh: I call them timeless skills.
• 48:36
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 48:45
  Chike Aguh: I analogize them to being an athlete.
• 48:48
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 48:57
  Chike Aguh: You didn't watch a video about it solely, you didn't like go to a class about it.
• 49:03
  Chike Aguh: You did it.
• 49:03
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 49:17
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 49:22
  Chike Aguh: You do that cycle over and over and over again.
• 49:24
  Chike Aguh: That is how human beings get good at the timeless skills.
• 49:29
  Chike Aguh: You don't learn conflict resolution from a book.
• 49:31
  Chike Aguh: You don't learn conflict resolution from a book.
• 49:32
  Chike Aguh: Yes, you read some things.
• 49:33
  Chike Aguh: You hopefully get some practice and then you get into a conflict and you have to resolve it.
• 49:37
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 49:51
  Chike Aguh: It is too much students listen and teachers talk.
• 49:56
  Chike Aguh: What makes me hopeful?
• 49:57
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 50:10
  Chike Aguh: I think about the Bloomberg Philanthropies funding a quarter billion dollar initiative schools are doing.
• 50:14
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 50:29
  Chike Aguh: And, by the way, they're not just learning, for example, about nursing or phlebotomy.
• 50:34
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 50:42
  Chike Aguh: How do I resolve that conflict for them?
• 50:45
  Chike Aguh: Or I have to give a presentation.
• 50:46
  Chike Aguh: How do I do that when it really matters?
• 50:49
  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.
• 50:56
  Chike Aguh: There are these two worlds, potential futures.
• 50:59
  Chike Aguh: One of them is this future where the AI takes all the jobs.
• 51:02
  Chike Aguh: There's no use for human beings anymore, and that's not a world necessarily that most of us want to live in.
• 51:06
  Chike Aguh: There's another world where it's all techno-optimism and it's all great.
• 51:16
  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.
• 51:32
  Chike Aguh: But it is a choice.
• 51:33
  Chike Aguh: It is not one that will be kind of a fait accompli.
• 51:36
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 51:42
  Chike Aguh: I don't assume anything.
• 51:43
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 52:00
  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.
• 52:06
  Chike Aguh: This is the future that we want and therefore this is what we have to create.
• 52:11
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 52:17
  Chike Aguh: We have to put these tools in the hands of everyone, strategically, but also soon.
• 52:22
  Chike Aguh: One thing I say to schools when we're at tour think about this, and now let's get tactical.
• 52:26
  Chike Aguh: If you're a school, this means a couple things for you.
• 52:30
  Chike Aguh: One start something simple soon with AI with your kids.
• 52:34
  Chike Aguh: Don't do it everywhere, because even businesses are learning that.
• 52:37
  Chike Aguh: Oh, I shouldn't apply these tools everywhere because it doesn't make sense everywhere.
• 52:40
  Chike Aguh: But you cannot say school will be an AI-free zone.
• 52:45
  Chike Aguh: That is a mistake.
• 52:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 53:00
  Chike Aguh: So that's one.
• 53:00
  Chike Aguh: And then again, let me say a 1A here.
• 53:03
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 53:10
  Chike Aguh: You wouldn't hire someone who couldn't use Google Search.
• 53:13
  Chike Aguh: These tools in the next 12 months will be as ubiquitous as those and you will be expected to do that.
• 53:20
  Chike Aguh: And if you don't prepare kids for that, you are disserving them.
• 53:22
  Chike Aguh: That's number one.
• 53:23
  Chike Aguh: Number two how, as a school, are you integrating AI in the classroom with work and experiential learning outside the classroom?
• 53:33
  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.
• 53:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): If someone showed up to an interview and I was like, well, why should I hire you?
• 53:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And they said, well, I know how to use Google, I know how to use Microsoft.
• 53:48
  Chike Aguh: Word.
• 53:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean that would be the end of the interview.
• 53:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's like well, it's necessary, but not sufficient.
• 53:53
  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?
• 54:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And that's the role I think that teachers play right.
• 54:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 54:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I love that paradigm because you don't learn how to ride a bike by reading a book.
• 54:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 54:34
  Chike Aguh: I've read a lot of books on how to do a jump shot.
• 54:35
  Chike Aguh: I do not shoot.
• 54:37
  Chike Aguh: I do not shoot like Luca.
• 54:39
  Chike Aguh: I don't because I don't do what he does on a regular basis, but continue.
• 54:49
  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?
• 55:07
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 55:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Well, it may be very hard for someone to intuit what AI can or can't do today, let alone 10 years from now.
• 55:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 55:32
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 55:50
  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.
• 55:57
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 56:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's a great question recommendations.
• 56:36
  Chike Aguh: I see a couple things.
• 56:36
  Chike Aguh: One, uh, again, because of the nature of the tool, I find exploration is helpful.
• 56:40
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 56:59
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 57:04
  Chike Aguh: Really important because you'll begin to learn.
• 57:06
  Chike Aguh: Okay, actually it's not good at this.
• 57:07
  Chike Aguh: We need to ask it this way.
• 57:12
  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.
• 57:22
  Chike Aguh: 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?
• 57:34
  Chike Aguh: And so I just came up with.
• 57:35
  Chike Aguh: There are a bunch of great prompts around.
• 57:37
  Chike Aguh: So, for example, I need to learn in the next two weeks, I need to learn the ins and outs of quantum computing.
• 57:44
  Chike Aguh: Can you create me a syllabus and a set of videos and articles that I should read?
• 57:50
  Chike Aguh: That would make that possible, that I could have a reasonable conversation with a quantum researcher?
• 57:55
  Chike Aguh: Go and it will do it.
• 57:57
  Chike Aguh: You will actually have a great list.
• 57:58
  Chike Aguh: So actually use these tools to help do that.
• 58:03
  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.
• 58:10
  Chike Aguh: So, for example, with GPT-TAS, for example, cloud has, I think, a similar feature.
• 58:15
  Chike Aguh: Hey, can you ping me anytime an article that I should learn on AI?
• 58:19
  Chike Aguh: If you have it on your phone it can send you notifications.
• 58:23
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 58:33
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 58:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, it's like, it's like you.
• 58:42
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You almost insulate a bit from the power of the technology.
• 58:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 59:11
  Chike Aguh: And this is important.
• 59:14
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Because you can spend hours going through.
• 59:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 59:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And so that's the buzzword of personalizing education.
• 59:30
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think it really goes beyond the buzzword.
• 59:33
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think there is a there.
• 59:34
  Chike Aguh: There.
• 59:34
  Chike Aguh: The other thing I'll say is how is this Make the tool so?
• 59:40
  Chike Aguh: Two other things.
• 59:40
  Chike Aguh: I'll add One don't just use one tool.
• 59:42
  Chike Aguh: So, like most of us, I started on ChatGPT but I was using Claw Gemini.
• 59:47
  Chike Aguh: I use Copilot Because they're different.
• 59:49
  Chike Aguh: Do you have a favorite?
• 59:50
  Chike Aguh: I have found certain ones are good for certain things, and so there are some.
• 59:58
  Chike Aguh: For example, just take the Copilots.
• 1:00:00
  Chike Aguh: I like Microsoft Word Copilot.
• 1:00:04
  Chike Aguh: I like Microsoft PowerPoint Copilot.
• 1:00:06
  Chike Aguh: I think Excel I'm not quite there yet, um, but same thing with all the other kind of dominant tools.
• 1:00:13
  Chike Aguh: I think.
• 1:00:13
  Chike Aguh: Learn to use them all.
• 1:00:15
  Chike Aguh: Um, it's unlike you know, I think, what will happen.
• 1:00:18
  Chike Aguh: Unlike the search engine game from the late 90s, which no one here will remember, but there were.
• 1:00:23
  Chike Aguh: Google was one of them.
• 1:00:24
  Chike Aguh: There were a bunch of other ones that do not exist because vista all theista.
• 1:00:27
  Chike Aguh: AltaVista, hotbot, all these I do not believe we're going to get to like there will be one.
• 1:00:31
  Chike Aguh: I don't believe that I believe we will have because there's just so many companies and so much capital.
• 1:00:35
  Chike Aguh: But the other thing is make the tool ask you questions.
• 1:00:40
  Chike Aguh: So, for example just take that example Make me this curriculum for quantum computing.
• 1:00:48
  Chike Aguh: What else would you need to know about me to create an accurate uh syllabus?
• 1:00:53
  Chike Aguh: And it'll ask you hey, it'll be helpful for me to know your age, your level of knowledge.
• 1:00:57
  Chike Aguh: Like make it ask you questions yeah, and this is the, the.
• 1:01:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think, I think the.
• 1:01:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The.
• 1:01:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): There's a fallacy where people say, well, I want to learn prompt engineering, so what are the prompts that I need to memorize?
• 1:01:06
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): There's a lot of where people say, well, I want to learn prompt engineering, so what are?
• 1:01:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The prompts that I need to memorize.
• 1:01:10
  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.
• 1:01:17
  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.
• 1:01:21
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's just like just ask, ask the LLM, ask the LLM, how can I prompt you?
• 1:01:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And it will literally give you the cheat codes to design that prompt.
• 1:01:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But what you're pushing for is you just have to get hands-on.
• 1:01:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You literally have to push yourself, and a lot of the times.
• 1:01:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think what you're also alluding to is sometimes it's inefficient.
• 1:01:46
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Sometimes it's actually easier to just write the email yourself.
• 1:01:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:02:07
  Chike Aguh: I think so.
• 1:02:08
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:02:20
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:02:35
  Chike Aguh: I didn't get that until he literally showed me the cost curve.
• 1:02:38
  Chike Aguh: So that's, I think, and it's the same thing in life.
• 1:02:42
  Chike Aguh: There are some things where, to your point, actually it's just more efficient for you to do it.
• 1:02:46
  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.
• 1:03:01
  Chike Aguh: You don't want the kids walled off from it, and I also don't want them in the AI wilderness by themselves.
• 1:03:05
  Chike Aguh: You want them with a coach by their side.
• 1:03:10
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:03:14
  Chike Aguh: That's not how it works.
• 1:03:15
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:03:36
  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.
• 1:03:47
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:04:00
  Chike Aguh: I have, I have two kids myself.
• 1:04:02
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:04:07
  Chike Aguh: That's also part of the job yeah.
• 1:04:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The interesting thing, though, is you're when you describe that side by side.
• 1:04:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:04:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I went back to my alma mater, cobbly high school.
• 1:04:28
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:04:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 1:04:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What is?
• 1:04:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What are language models like?
• 1:04:42
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Why should you care about this?
• 1:04:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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?
• 1:04:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:04:57
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And then afterward there was some kids, you know sort of approached me.
• 1:05:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We've seen all this stuff.
• 1:05:06
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): None of this is new.
• 1:05:07
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Can I ask for a show of hands?
• 1:05:09
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Who's using ChatGBT to help with homework or to cheat on their homework?
• 1:05:13
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): A third of the group raised their hand.
• 1:05:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They were like everybody should have raised their hand.
• 1:05:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're all using it.
• 1:05:19
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): To me that's new.
• 1:05:27
  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.
• 1:05:33
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They feel like it's sort of something that's out of, something they can't control, which you can't um.
• 1:05:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:05:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You can ban in schools.
• 1:05:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They're going to use it out of school.
• 1:05:46
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You can ban it in schools.
• 1:05:47
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): They're going to use it on their phone.
• 1:05:49
  Chike Aguh: Your only solution is.
• 1:05:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You have to learn yourself.
• 1:05:55
  Chike Aguh: And you can't.
• 1:05:55
  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.
• 1:06:07
  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.
• 1:06:30
  Chike Aguh: He was like should I tell them that I have three jobs?
• 1:06:32
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:06:41
  Chike Aguh: Two to three x that you don't use.
• 1:06:45
  Chike Aguh: That's that, that's not tenable.
• 1:06:47
  Chike Aguh: And so I think, one parents, guardians, that broad teacher category, you have to learn these tools.
• 1:06:54
  Chike Aguh: One Secondly, your job may not be to teach them technically what to do.
• 1:06:59
  Chike Aguh: Your job is to help them make sense of this.
• 1:07:02
  Chike Aguh: Your job is to help them.
• 1:07:04
  Chike Aguh: What should I use this for?
• 1:07:05
  Chike Aguh: What should I not use this for?
• 1:07:06
  Chike Aguh: Should I write this myself?
• 1:07:08
  Chike Aguh: It produced this answer for me.
• 1:07:11
  Chike Aguh: Do I believe it?
• 1:07:12
  Chike Aguh: And if I don't, how could I cross-check this?
• 1:07:16
  Chike Aguh: That's actually where that teacher category is so useful and so valuable.
• 1:07:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm going to grasp for a metaphor here.
• 1:07:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm going to grasp for a metaphor here.
• 1:07:27
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:07:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You don't know what's in store.
• 1:07:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You can make sure that they have waterproof boots.
• 1:07:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You boots make sure they have all the equipment that they need can prepare them for what they might encounter.
• 1:07:55
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So they're not surprised.
• 1:07:57
  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.
• 1:08:07
  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.
• 1:08:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): There is a space of like, a gamut of like, what might you know what might transpire, but it's not completely unknowable.
• 1:08:29
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:08:47
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:08:57
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's not?
• 1:08:57
  Chike Aguh: yeah, and are and are you going to be a doc review lawyer versus a litigator, versus a pilot, versus?
• 1:09:04
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:09:13
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:09:21
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:09:30
  Chike Aguh: Yoda never swings a lightsaber.
• 1:09:31
  Chike Aguh: He doesn't do any flips, he doesn't do anything like that.
• 1:09:32
  Chike Aguh: All he does is he just gives like luke habits of mind, like I remember when he tells him like, like, lift the rock.
• 1:09:37
  Chike Aguh: He's like I'll try.
• 1:09:38
  Chike Aguh: He's like there is no try.
• 1:09:38
  Chike Aguh: You do or you do not.
• 1:09:40
  Chike Aguh: There is no try.
• 1:09:42
  Chike Aguh: Um, and in many ways I would argue again for that teacher category.
• 1:09:45
  Chike Aguh: That's what you're doing.
• 1:09:46
  Chike Aguh: You're right, these kids may know this tool better than you.
• 1:09:49
  Chike Aguh: You don't need to compete with them there, but your job is to how should you think about this?
• 1:09:55
  Chike Aguh: And as much you know, like every middle schooler and teenager who thinks they know everything, you kind of know you don't.
• 1:10:03
  Chike Aguh: Even though you act like you do, you kind of know that you don't.
• 1:10:06
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:10:20
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:10:34
  Chike Aguh: I hope, when my kids are old enough, that I can say well, how could TragGPT help you do X thing better?
• 1:10:42
  Chike Aguh: How could you expand your impact with people that you are serving using these tools?
• 1:10:46
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:10:59
  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?
• 1:11:08
  Chike Aguh: Uh, there's a great group of students at Northeastern where I have an appointment who are working with the governor's office.
• 1:11:16
  Chike Aguh: They used AI to basically find intersections that don't have road signs or stop signs or traffic lights.
• 1:11:23
  Chike Aguh: That should, because we reduce traffic deaths.
• 1:11:24
  Chike Aguh: They've literally mapped this out using these tools.
• 1:11:27
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:11:35
  Chike Aguh: That, I think, is the actual world where there's the doom world, where, again, where we, it's like the matrix.
• 1:11:42
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:11:55
  Chike Aguh: But that's a choice.
• 1:11:58
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, and to bring it all home.
• 1:11:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:12:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You're an educator on, you know, on the ground, like literally in the front lines, but you also understand the policy policymaker perspective.
• 1:12:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's very reassuring that you're, you know, repeating back a lot of these.
• 1:12:39
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:12:48
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to close by circling back to what you said about there is no predetermined outcome.
• 1:12:55
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:13:00
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're sort of charting a course.
• 1:13:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:13:31
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Um, you know, education schools are where we build those sensibilities and the mindsets.
• 1:13:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:13:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Right, you know, guarantee us, you know anyone, they can create some guardrails, they can orient.
• 1:13:50
  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?
• 1:14:01
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): 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.
• 1:14:17
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): How could you use this to help your community, to help your Girl Scouts group?
• 1:14:26
  Chike Aguh: The last two things.
• 1:14:27
  Chike Aguh: I'll say that maybe kind of dovetail there.
• 1:14:31
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:14:49
  Chike Aguh: It will take all of us everywhere to to figure out how to harness this.
• 1:14:53
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:15:00
  Chike Aguh: And when I think about this, I think about a study that Ross Chetty did.
• 1:15:04
  Chike Aguh: Ross Chetty, brilliant economist at Harvard.
• 1:15:06
  Chike Aguh: Chetty did Raj Chetty, brilliant economist at Harvard.
• 1:15:07
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:15:20
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:15:42
  Chike Aguh: Then I want to see what happened to them when they were adults.
• 1:15:47
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:15:54
  Chike Aguh: And I want to say, particularly in terms of the filing of patents, I want to see how many of them filed a patent.
• 1:16:01
  Chike Aguh: And what you found was again same aptitude when they were eight.
• 1:16:03
  Chike Aguh: Go 20 years later.
• 1:16:05
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:16:19
  Chike Aguh: And he titles his paper the Lost Einstein Paper and he said, ok, I've now removed the aptitude question.
• 1:16:28
  Chike Aguh: I've taken all people who have roughly the same aptitude.
• 1:16:31
  Chike Aguh: So that's not the explanation for the different outcomes.
• 1:16:35
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:16:46
  Chike Aguh: We can argue about that forever, but these folks who didn't do well that was a huge lost opportunity for America.
• 1:16:54
  Chike Aguh: Another book that I think about is the Idea Factory.
• 1:16:56
  Chike Aguh: It's a great book on the history of Bell Labs.
• 1:16:59
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:17:18
  Chike Aguh: If you look at who worked there tens of thousands of people.
• 1:17:22
  Chike Aguh: On one hand they were very ecumenical.
• 1:17:24
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:17:37
  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.
• 1:17:53
  Chike Aguh: 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.
• 1:17:57
  Chike Aguh: Again, we wouldn't live in the same country if we didn't have Bell Labs.
• 1:17:59
  Chike Aguh: They held them in radar, which was critical to winning World War II.
• 1:18:02
  Chike Aguh: How much greater could Bell Labs have been if we had used everybody?
• 1:18:09
  Chike Aguh: And so, when I think about why what you do is so important is, how do we not lose the Einsteins?
• 1:18:12
  Chike Aguh: 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.