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I&I - Back-to-school with AI · A New Angle

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[music]
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SPEAKER_02: This is A New Angle, conversations about how we're doing and where we're going.
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SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
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SPEAKER_02: This show is supported by the Headwaters Foundation,
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SPEAKER_02: First Security Bank, and the University of Montana College of Business.
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[music]
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SPEAKER_02: Hey, folks, welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.
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SPEAKER_02: Today is our September edition of Incentives and Instincts,
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SPEAKER_02: a recurring series in which I speak with economist and friend Bryce Ward about some
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SPEAKER_02: of the broader challenges facing our society.
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SPEAKER_02: Bryce, thanks for being here.
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SPEAKER_02: Happy to be here as always.
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SPEAKER_02: So it is back to school season.
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SPEAKER_02: Campus is bustling, families are adjusting to new rhythms, yours and mine alike.
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SPEAKER_02: And the news just landed from the good folks over at MIT that, quote,
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SPEAKER_02: Generative AI can produce credible solutions and provide reasonable responses
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SPEAKER_02: to almost any written assignment in our undergraduate curriculum,
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SPEAKER_02: including essays, math and science problems, proofs, and coding assignments.
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SPEAKER_02: And their power will only grow.
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SPEAKER_02: So it seems like a good time to revisit the idea of the future of higher education,
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SPEAKER_02: don't you think?
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_02: We're crossing new thresholds and maybe having to rethink at
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SPEAKER_01: a more fundamental level what is higher education going to be going forward.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I talked about this study with my students the first week of class,
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SPEAKER_02: and the way I framed it to them was AI appears to be
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SPEAKER_02: a pretty darn effective homework machine.
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SPEAKER_02: But if you allow,
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SPEAKER_02: if you basically outsource your college education to a machine,
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SPEAKER_02: you're doing yourself a disservice.
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SPEAKER_02: At the same time,
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SPEAKER_02: if you're experiencing as a student that everything
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SPEAKER_02: the professors are serving you is doable by AI,
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SPEAKER_02: You gotta demand more from your tuition dollars essentially.
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SPEAKER_02: So I think it's this two-sided thing that we're trying to navigate.
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SPEAKER_01: There's also kind of short and long run things here as well, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Like there's the, well, what are we doing now, right?
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SPEAKER_01: With AI where it is now and where things will be within a short time period.
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SPEAKER_01: But a college education is supposed to serve you for a 30 to 40 year career and 60
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SPEAKER_01: to 70 years of life after college.
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SPEAKER_01: What is it that we're supposed to be providing?
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SPEAKER_01: What are we supposed to be doing here?
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SPEAKER_01: If you think about what a university was created to be,
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SPEAKER_01: it was created to be a place, you know, You're off in the world.
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SPEAKER_01: And there were these very,
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SPEAKER_01: very scarce places where you could go and access the frontier of knowledge.
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SPEAKER_01: And that was true even when we started college, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Like the university library offered me things that were not available to me in my town.
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SPEAKER_01: There were libraries in my town,
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SPEAKER_01: but they were nothing close to the University of Oregon library system.
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SPEAKER_02: And there was no way to access that through some computer.
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SPEAKER_01: Maybe find out what they had at the University of Oregon.
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SPEAKER_01: I would have them send you a book or something if you were involved in some network.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's just books, right?
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SPEAKER_01: If you want access to a lab or professors who are working at that,
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SPEAKER_01: you had to go to a university.
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SPEAKER_01: That changed with the internet to some degree, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Our access to the frontier of knowledge became...
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SPEAKER_01: More accessible,
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SPEAKER_01: but you still needed kind of guidance and navigation and maybe some way
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SPEAKER_01: to figure it out.
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SPEAKER_02: I would also interject on that.
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SPEAKER_02: Another purpose of the university is sort of exploring that frontier of knowledge, right?
3:37
SPEAKER_01: yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: But let's focus now on what does a college degree need to be?
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SPEAKER_01: So what's changed first with the information age was You could access the frontier
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SPEAKER_01: from kind of anywhere.
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SPEAKER_01: And AI is basically the world mind, right?
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SPEAKER_01: What is it good at?
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SPEAKER_01: It's good at basically taking what we've already produced and kind
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SPEAKER_01: of helping you access it in some way.
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SPEAKER_01: So doing homework,
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SPEAKER_01: which is basically just helping people walk along the path to kind of go from
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SPEAKER_01: where they are to their frontier.
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SPEAKER_01: Like, well, AI could just do it.
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SPEAKER_01: Why do I need to do it?
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: And it can do it in conversation,
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SPEAKER_02: which is particularly compelling.
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SPEAKER_01: We are definitely in a different place.
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SPEAKER_01: And what does the value proposition of a university have to be and what does it mean?
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SPEAKER_01: A simple gloss on that is we are no longer in the business
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SPEAKER_02: of delivering information.
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SPEAKER_02: And that's sort of been true for a long time,
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SPEAKER_02: but I think AI just blows that
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SPEAKER_01: premise out of the water.
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SPEAKER_01: Anybody can access...
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SPEAKER_01: Pretty much any information they want, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Because it's all supposed to be about structuring a process that allows
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SPEAKER_01: a person who's not close to the frontier to get closer to the frontier and
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SPEAKER_01: then know how to apply close to frontier knowledge to whatever problems
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SPEAKER_01: that they are gonna be working in, right?
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SPEAKER_01: That to me is what the university was, or all education is in some sense supposed to be.
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SPEAKER_01: It's a kind of,
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SPEAKER_01: we take small humans who aren't capable of processing the frontier of knowledge
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SPEAKER_01: And we take you over this long process as your brain develops and your body develops
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SPEAKER_01: to kind of help you move through and then learn about the different ways in
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SPEAKER_01: the world works and then how to apply that to different things so that you can
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SPEAKER_01: then create value and collect value in your life.
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SPEAKER_02: So the premise is that we are preparing students to provide some value to society
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SPEAKER_02: and that value in order for it to have economic value needs to be of some scarcity,
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SPEAKER_02: right?
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SPEAKER_02: Knowledge regurgitation, knowledge regeneration, that's not going to be it.
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SPEAKER_02: So what is it that an education should do?
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SPEAKER_02: I mean, I always come back to three things that Michael Punk said in an interview
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SPEAKER_02: to me several years ago,
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SPEAKER_02: and that is an education should teach people how to think, write, and speak.
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SPEAKER_02: And you might say, well, AI does all the writing for you.
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SPEAKER_02: I maintain that writing is thinking.
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SPEAKER_02: So I still think it is important for students to write because there's something in
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SPEAKER_02: that process of taking the thing that's percolating in your brain
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SPEAKER_02: and putting it down.
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SPEAKER_02: And trying to make it into an articulate collection of words
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SPEAKER_02: that clarifies your thinking,
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SPEAKER_02: whether that's by hand or through a computer or in partnership with an AI.
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SPEAKER_02: I'm not quite sure exactly the best way to do that,
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SPEAKER_02: but I still think those things,
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SPEAKER_02: thinking, writing, and speaking are at the core of what we're trying to do.
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SPEAKER_02: I think we're going to
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SPEAKER_01: add a fourth.
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SPEAKER_02: Okay.
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SPEAKER_01: What is that?
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SPEAKER_01: Relate.
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SPEAKER_02: Which is sort of embedded in the conception of the four-year degree,
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SPEAKER_02: the social experiment that all students undergo.
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SPEAKER_02: Is phenomenal and important.
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SPEAKER_02: And unfortunately,
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SPEAKER_02: it's become increasingly more difficult to access because it is more expensive
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SPEAKER_02: and universities have innovated by trying to deliver their product in a bunch
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SPEAKER_02: of different ways, online education, open enrollment, MOOCs, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately,
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SPEAKER_02: I think AI has almost obviated the need for any of those alternative formats
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SPEAKER_02: of higher ed.
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SPEAKER_01: Just as developing as a human, thinking is important.
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SPEAKER_01: And because we live in a world where writing is available to us,
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SPEAKER_01: the written word has been available to us for millennia now,
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SPEAKER_01: thinking and writing are related.
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SPEAKER_01: You can't write, you really aren't thinking.
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SPEAKER_01: To write is to think.
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SPEAKER_01: So many ideas that you think in your head and you kind of mull around,
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SPEAKER_01: the second you start trying to put them on a page,
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SPEAKER_01: something changes in your brain and clarity only comes from really grappling
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SPEAKER_01: with it.
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SPEAKER_01: Which is why I think it's very important.
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SPEAKER_01: One important part of the future of higher education is that it's not gonna be AI.
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SPEAKER_01: There's going to be an ongoing war between Pangram and the things like Pangram,
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SPEAKER_01: which will basically allow professors to immediately filter out AI responses.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, define what Pangram is.
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SPEAKER_01: So Pangram is an app.
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SPEAKER_01: There's several of them,
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SPEAKER_01: but it seems to be the market leader in being able to identify AI-produced content.
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SPEAKER_01: According to one study from the University of Chicago,
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SPEAKER_01: an absurdly low false positive rate,
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SPEAKER_01: which is what you need.
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SPEAKER_01: So not ideal, but important.
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SPEAKER_01: So that's an important part of the future of this process is going
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SPEAKER_01: to be us developing tools where we try and keep you from accessing the AI
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SPEAKER_01: that will stunt your development as a thinker and a writer.
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SPEAKER_01: Speaking is easier to evaluate because we have to see you do it.
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SPEAKER_01: But to the extent that you had AI write your speech, well, that's not great.
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SPEAKER_01: Relationship, that's the thing that AI struggles with the most.
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SPEAKER_01: It's the hardest thing for it to do and it may get better at it,
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SPEAKER_01: but it's always going to be comparatively worse,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: relatively worse because it's just AI is good at defined problems
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SPEAKER_01: with concrete answers.
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SPEAKER_01: Relationship stuff isn't that way.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the relationship piece is one I struggle with.
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SPEAKER_02: I mean,
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SPEAKER_02: I have a romantic view that people should be getting together and congregating
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SPEAKER_02: in spaces and navigating all the discomforts that come with that.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he had a troubled childhood and a lot of difficult and or abusive relationships.
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SPEAKER_02: And he told me that AI is the first thing that he's been able to trust.
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SPEAKER_02: It's the first relationship he's had that didn't betray him or fail him in some way.
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SPEAKER_02: And on the one hand, I could dismiss that as like, whoa, you're being deluded by this machine.
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SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, it's hard to argue against his premise given his life experiences.
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SPEAKER_01: I agree.
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SPEAKER_01: I certainly won't deny his experiences,
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SPEAKER_01: and I certainly won't deny that there are bad human actors and people
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SPEAKER_01: who have inflicted damage on other humans,
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SPEAKER_01: but that doesn't mean we can design the system around them.
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SPEAKER_01: We've had this conversation at several points, right?
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SPEAKER_01: We have to look at the aggregate.
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SPEAKER_01: And say, well,
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SPEAKER_01: like is designing the system for these relatively rare instances so
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SPEAKER_01: that they're not harmed the right way to make it so that everybody is,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, achieving the best possible outcome?
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
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SPEAKER_01: How do I read people?
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SPEAKER_01: How do we work well with people?
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SPEAKER_01: How do I get stuff from, how do I collectively get us to work well with each other?
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SPEAKER_01: And it's important, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Because again, from just a short run college expectations thing, right?
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SPEAKER_01: So it turns out that at least as of recently,
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SPEAKER_01: the same people who are good at managing humans are good at managing AI.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, those are the findings.
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SPEAKER_01: Like the correlation is absurdly high.
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SPEAKER_01: Management skill Is an important skill that seems to be likely to be valuable into the future.
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SPEAKER_01: Sure.
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SPEAKER_01: Right?
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SPEAKER_01: Because yeah,
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SPEAKER_01: we're going to have to still manage humans, but you're also going to be managing AI.
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SPEAKER_01: And if you're good at one...
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SPEAKER_01: It appears that you're gonna be good at the other.
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SPEAKER_01: That's the thing that's likely to still be scarce in value.
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SPEAKER_01: That involves thinking and speaking and writing, but it also involves relating, right?
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SPEAKER_01: You know, being able to figure out what's being lost in translation here, right?
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SPEAKER_01: You know, that feedback mechanism.
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SPEAKER_01: And it was weird because you would think, oh,
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SPEAKER_01: the human thing,
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SPEAKER_01: that's about,
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SPEAKER_01: I can read the tone of your voice,
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SPEAKER_01: I can read the expression on your face, all that kind of stuff.
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SPEAKER_01: But somehow being able to solve that problem for the human Also,
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SPEAKER_01: it helps me figure out how to be good with it.
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SPEAKER_02: And I wonder, I mean,
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SPEAKER_02: these things,
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SPEAKER_02: it's probably a correlational observation in the study you're talking about,
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SPEAKER_02: but you wonder kind of what the mechanism is.
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SPEAKER_02: Like in my mind,
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SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking, okay,
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SPEAKER_02: the people who we've trained to be good managers of people also appear to be good
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SPEAKER_02: at managing this machine.
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SPEAKER_02: Does it work in reverse that if we train people to be great managers of AI,
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SPEAKER_02: that they then will likely be good managers of people?
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SPEAKER_01: I don't think we've seen
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SPEAKER_02: that one yet.
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SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we don't have as much experience with that.
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SPEAKER_01: It's really just what college is,
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SPEAKER_01: It's no longer about,
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SPEAKER_01: oh, this is where you go to get access to the frontier of knowledge.
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SPEAKER_01: It's where you go to...
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SPEAKER_01: There's still,
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SPEAKER_01: I think,
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SPEAKER_01: as of so far, I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: most of the evidence that I've seen suggests that humans still are better
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SPEAKER_01: at guiding education than AIs,
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SPEAKER_01: getting motivation, because a lot of it has to do with motivation.
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SPEAKER_01: So you're coming here to find people who are...
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SPEAKER_01: That's what the professor's job in the future will be.
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SPEAKER_01: It is to be the human guide, right?
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SPEAKER_01: That allows you to kind of, hey, here's where you are.
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SPEAKER_01: I know where you are.
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SPEAKER_01: I know where you're trying to get.
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SPEAKER_01: And we're going to try and shift you here.
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SPEAKER_01: But the composition of the campus is going to change.
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SPEAKER_01: The things that are going to create value in the future economy will be different
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SPEAKER_01: than the things that have been creating value in the economy.
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SPEAKER_01: And so the relative weights across different things on campus are going to change.
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SPEAKER_01: And it's not in the way that think people are used to.
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SPEAKER_01: I think that's the key.
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SPEAKER_01: Right?
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SPEAKER_01: Because it's not, oh,
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SPEAKER_01: it's all,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: the past 20 years have been learn to code,
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SPEAKER_01: be an engineer, do all that kind of stuff.
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SPEAKER_01: That's the stuff that AI really is good at.
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SPEAKER_01: And the relative scarcity of it, it's not to say that it's going to go away.
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SPEAKER_01: A lot of times what happens in the short term is you get a boost in that
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SPEAKER_01: because it's complimentary for a while until it becomes a full substitute, right?
13:28
SPEAKER_01: But if you're saying, oh, I need a 40 year career, right?
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SPEAKER_01: I do think there's still a lot of value to be had again in relational stuff,
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SPEAKER_01: but also the best prediction that I've seen for what the future looks like in
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SPEAKER_01: a world with AI that isn't dystopian, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Because Unfortunately,
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SPEAKER_01: the dystopian thing is there and it's terrifying and in my opinion,
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SPEAKER_01: non-trivially probable.
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SPEAKER_01: In that world, you shouldn't go to college.
13:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I guess so.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
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SPEAKER_01: And in a world where you're like,
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SPEAKER_01: There's a non-trivial chance that AI produces so much prosperity
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SPEAKER_01: that we're all not working at all.
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SPEAKER_01: And so then we got to figure out what college means.
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SPEAKER_01: Or AI produces like,
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SPEAKER_01: allow somebody to vibe code a doomsday virus and we're all going to be dead.
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SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe I should just consume now, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Why invest in the future?
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SPEAKER_01: And so that shifting of discount rates.
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SPEAKER_01: So in that world, the discount rates are really high.
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SPEAKER_02: We'll be back to my conversation with Bryce Ward after this short break.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: A New Angle would not be possible without the generous support of
15:14
SPEAKER_02: the Headwaters Foundation,
15:16
SPEAKER_02: working side by side with Western Montanans to improve the health
15:19
SPEAKER_02: of our communities.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: And you can't do that sort of work without access to capital and education.
15:26
SPEAKER_02: Two critical catalysts offered by First Security Bank and the University
15:29
SPEAKER_02: of Montana College of Business.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: Hey folks,
15:32
SPEAKER_02: I'd like to call your attention
15:34
SPEAKER_02: to Climate Smart Missoula's fourth annual Climate Solutions Week,
15:38
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15:41
SPEAKER_02: This year's theme is Humming Along,
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15:48
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15:52
SPEAKER_00: This is Meg Oliver, CBS News correspondent, and you're listening to A New Angle.
16:00
SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to A New Angle.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: I'm here with Bryce Ward talking about the future of college.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: Now college is consumption, right?
16:07
SPEAKER_01: Which I think is going to be an even bigger part of what college will be, right?
16:13
SPEAKER_01: Now those in the relational thing have historically gone well together.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: We don't really train you in the relational aspect,
16:20
SPEAKER_01: but we put you in situations that require you to relate.
16:23
SPEAKER_02: In the pursuit of Accessibility and equity and some other lofty objectives
16:32
SPEAKER_02: with good virtue that we're sort of in this race to the bottom.
16:36
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah,
16:36
SPEAKER_02: students have adapted their brains to be able to process bits
16:39
SPEAKER_02: of information that's delivered in the form of TikTok.
16:43
SPEAKER_02: So let's make education TikTok.
16:45
SPEAKER_02: And it's this race to the bottom with our hands firmly on the wheel.
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SPEAKER_02: I think we got to teach grit and focus and the ability to think about a single topic
16:53
SPEAKER_02: for an extended period of time.
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SPEAKER_02: You have to go, something's leading the opposite direction.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: So AI, it reduces a lot of friction,
17:02
SPEAKER_01: which means that you have to create the headwinds that train the student, right?
17:07
SPEAKER_01: And again, on the relationship piece, it's not...
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SPEAKER_01: You're not teaching kids how to relate when you remove all the difficulties
17:15
SPEAKER_01: about relating by fiat.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: The difficulties of relating come from learning how to manage the difficult situation.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: You need to feel that like Oh my God, I'm starting to sweat.
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SPEAKER_02: I'm so uncomfortable with what this person's saying or it's so antithetical
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SPEAKER_02: to what I believe or this idea is making me so uncomfortable that I physically feel
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SPEAKER_02: the impetus to remove myself.
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SPEAKER_02: I think you need to sit with that.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: And use that to develop a stronger idea or to develop a critique of
17:48
SPEAKER_02: the idea that's making you so uncomfortable.
17:51
SPEAKER_02: Or the person that's making you uncomfortable.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: Or the person, yeah.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: When you talk to the skilled social practitioners, they always talk about go to the heat.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: If it's uncomfortable, that's where you need to turn.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: And part of the skill that they have,
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SPEAKER_01: which is what I'm saying that Colleges are going to have to learn how
18:13
SPEAKER_01: to develop more intentionally.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: Because what we've done with college,
18:16
SPEAKER_01: and so I do think college develops social skills, but it's almost by accident.
18:21
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: Right?
18:22
SPEAKER_01: We're going to put you in these situations.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: We're going to put you in a dorm with a random roommate and you're going to have
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SPEAKER_01: to learn how to go on with each other.
18:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're just going to smash people together and hope for the best.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: We're going to put you in classrooms and we're going to put you in little groups
18:31
SPEAKER_01: in those classrooms and we're going to have to figure out how to work together.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: And you're going to learn what you don't like and what you do like.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: And there's all these kinds of things where we're going and we're kind
18:37
SPEAKER_01: of smashing people together,
18:39
SPEAKER_01: but we're not like kind of sitting there saying,
18:41
SPEAKER_01: okay, well, where do people consistently get hung up?
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Where do these types of people get hung up and how do we help them learn to process
18:49
SPEAKER_01: and figure out to be the best version of themselves in a relational world?
18:53
SPEAKER_01: The future economy is going to involve, yes, there's going to be a lot of management of AI.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be fighting of AI, right?
19:00
SPEAKER_01: Because AI has some bad tendencies and we're going to have to be on top of them as humans.
19:05
SPEAKER_01: So those will be scarce.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: That'll be valued and scarce because we need to keep this thing in line, right?
19:12
SPEAKER_01: But there's also going to be If we get the good version,
19:16
SPEAKER_01: where AI produces substantial economic growth and increased prosperity,
19:24
SPEAKER_01: well, that means we're going to be richer.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: When the masses get more affluent, what they want is what rich people already have.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: They spend their money on relational goods.
19:31
SPEAKER_01: The easiest example is a tailor.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: The positive vision of the future is that we're actually going to go back
19:36
SPEAKER_01: to something that's more closely to a pre-industrial society.
19:40
SPEAKER_01: Because what industrialization did is allowed us to commodify.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: And we commodified agriculture first,
19:45
SPEAKER_01: and then we commodified,
19:46
SPEAKER_01: you know, we've commodified so many, now we have clothes that are commodified.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: We have furniture that's commodified.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And if you get to the full AI,
19:54
SPEAKER_01: now we're commodifying knowledge and training, you know, all sorts of other things.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: What that does is it lowers their price, right?
20:01
SPEAKER_01: And, but as long as there's still,
20:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:03
SPEAKER_01: as long as we don't tip and there's certain models where it tips,
20:06
SPEAKER_01: but for the most part, we don't think it will tip, right?
20:08
SPEAKER_01: What you end up with is effectively overall richer.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: And so what do we say?
20:13
SPEAKER_01: Well, gosh, I've got more money.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: And you might want to buy tailored clothes or you might want
20:17
SPEAKER_01: to buy handmade furniture or hire a personal trainer
20:23
SPEAKER_02: or a one-on-one tutor.
20:24
SPEAKER_02: All of which are relational products.
20:26
SPEAKER_02: They're all relational products where the
20:28
SPEAKER_01: human that you're buying it from is part
20:29
SPEAKER_01: of the product, which is what we had pre-industrialization.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: So we're sort
20:33
SPEAKER_02: of decommodifying our consumption.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: These were the two blacksmiths in my town and I had a relationship with this one.
20:41
SPEAKER_01: I liked him better.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: So where did I go to?
20:43
SPEAKER_01: I bought all my stuff from him.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: I like that take.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how Jeff Bezos feels We'll see.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: It'll be feel fine because look,
20:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the reality is, is that the owners of capital are going to get richer.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm pushing to an extreme in that version.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: Most of the forecasts of AI suggest that it's not going to really do much.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: It will increase wealth inequality.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: That is a general consensus.
21:03
SPEAKER_01: Labor share will likely fall,
21:06
SPEAKER_01: but as long as the economy grows quickly enough,
21:09
SPEAKER_01: workers aren't going to end up necessarily worse.
21:11
SPEAKER_01: They will be relatively worse off,
21:13
SPEAKER_01: but in terms of absolute purchasing power, It will continue to grow.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Income and happiness are positively correlated, right?
21:22
SPEAKER_01: So when a society gets richer, happiness goes up.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: When individuals get richer, happiness goes up.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: It goes up at a diminished rate.
21:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's sort of a ceiling effect there, right?
21:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: What has a negative correlation with income is meaning, right?
21:37
SPEAKER_01: So what we have struggled to do,
21:38
SPEAKER_01: we've gotten much better at producing income,
21:41
SPEAKER_01: which produces hedonic pleasure,
21:43
SPEAKER_01: but that hedonic That income generation machine at
21:49
SPEAKER_01: a cross-country level is negatively correlated with meaning.
21:53
SPEAKER_01: A lot of that negative correlation,
21:54
SPEAKER_01: once you take out and control for religion,
21:57
SPEAKER_01: the decline in religiosity that goes with rising cross-country incomes,
22:01
SPEAKER_01: the correlation kind of flatlines.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: You get nothing.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: But regardless,
22:04
SPEAKER_01: even if it's just through the declining religion channel,
22:07
SPEAKER_01: making us richer seems to make us less capable at successfully adapting to...
22:15
SPEAKER_01: A big part, you know, the eudaimonia part of life.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, finding meaning.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:19
SPEAKER_01: And so I think there will be jobs in the future,
22:23
SPEAKER_01: but I think part of college education in the future should be,
22:25
SPEAKER_01: and what's now, should be, well, what is it, how do you find this, right?
22:31
SPEAKER_01: You know, what are the different options?
22:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's lots of history in this.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: Like what created meaning in a 19th century aristocracy?
22:39
SPEAKER_01: What created meaning for peasants in fuel times?
22:43
SPEAKER_01: Was it absent?
22:44
SPEAKER_01: How did we find it?
22:45
SPEAKER_01: What are the common threads?
22:46
SPEAKER_01: What are the things that we can pull on?
22:47
SPEAKER_01: How does it differ across people?
22:48
SPEAKER_01: What do you need to do versus what do I need to do?
22:52
SPEAKER_01: Because look,
22:53
SPEAKER_01: if we're imagining a world where it's easy to achieve a high standard of living,
22:58
SPEAKER_01: well, if colleges can help me find meaning...
23:03
SPEAKER_01: Right?
23:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's great.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Then you've provided a value proposition which will become increasingly valuable
23:10
SPEAKER_01: because the material aspects of life will be more easily satisfied in a world
23:16
SPEAKER_02: where GDP is much higher.
23:18
SPEAKER_02: Well, I will say in our remaining moments that there are some specific things
23:21
SPEAKER_02: that I've been playing around with in my courses.
23:25
SPEAKER_02: I teach our freshman introductory course.
23:28
SPEAKER_02: It's 200 freshmen in a big room, first class at college.
23:34
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the College of Business, here we go.
23:37
SPEAKER_02: We call it introduction to business, but I sort of call it introduction to adulting.
23:43
SPEAKER_02: In the last two semesters, I have Brought back handwritten assignments.
23:49
SPEAKER_02: So each student has a journal and we write in that journal all the time
23:53
SPEAKER_02: and they have to hand in handwritten assignments.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: I'm experimenting with oral examinations and interviews.
24:01
SPEAKER_02: Non-threatening, like come into my office, talk about this thing and I evaluate that.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: Presentations, cooperative use of technology.
24:11
SPEAKER_02: And I'm thinking about honor codes.
24:14
SPEAKER_02: Honor codes were sort of favorable when I was an undergraduate, maybe when you were.
24:18
SPEAKER_02: And I think we need to bring them back.
24:21
SPEAKER_02: They fell out of favor.
24:22
SPEAKER_02: I think we maybe need to bring them back and just be explicit about like,
24:25
SPEAKER_02: here are the guardrails that we all agree to when we start this thing.
24:29
SPEAKER_02: And to have real consequence for violating those things.
24:33
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, those are some of the ideas I'm playing with.
24:37
SPEAKER_02: This is an ongoing challenge.
24:39
SPEAKER_02: We're grappling with this every day.
24:40
SPEAKER_02: My opinions on this might change five minutes from now, five days from now.
24:45
SPEAKER_02: Certainly will change five weeks from now.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I think that particularly the moving to oral,
24:52
SPEAKER_01: one-on-one oral,
24:53
SPEAKER_01: I was reading something with somebody who's basically talking about for people
24:57
SPEAKER_01: who teach advanced level undergraduate courses, right?
25:00
SPEAKER_01: So a common assignment is pick a Current journal article and write a referee report.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can do that for you.
25:06
SPEAKER_02: A referee report would be like a review, a peer review.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of this piece of work.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: So AI can do that, right?
25:13
SPEAKER_01: But what he started doing was saying, you have to come and give it to me in person, right?
25:17
SPEAKER_01: And I question you on it, right?
25:20
SPEAKER_01: So I can figure out if you know what's in here or not, right?
25:24
SPEAKER_01: But he said, he's like, I should have been doing this all along.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: Because when I was a teacher,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: I always used to say that class was just an advertisement for office hours.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Because that's where I taught you.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: In this increasingly relational world,
25:40
SPEAKER_01: and if college is going to provide value,
25:42
SPEAKER_01: it needs It needs to be about creating deeper relationships between faculty,
25:47
SPEAKER_01: mentors,
25:48
SPEAKER_01: who will help guide you through whatever your challenges are to get you
25:52
SPEAKER_01: where you're trying to be.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: And you can't do that if you never go see them in their office.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: I think that's right.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: Right?
25:58
SPEAKER_01: And so what he says, A,
26:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm getting essentially a reader's digest of a bunch of articles
26:05
SPEAKER_01: that I would have never read.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: But mostly a bunch of students who would have never come
26:10
SPEAKER_01: to office hours are now realizing that,
26:12
SPEAKER_01: oh, wow, this is where I should be doing this.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: There's value in this.
26:15
SPEAKER_01: There's real value in this.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: So kind of, yeah, it's more labor intensive to some degree.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: So this is the challenge where we have to figure out where is
26:23
SPEAKER_01: the college saving money or where is the consumer getting richer so
26:29
SPEAKER_01: that they're willing to pay more?
26:30
SPEAKER_01: Because, look...
26:33
SPEAKER_01: The adjustment phase of this is going to be pretty brutal for higher education.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: It already is.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: College is getting cheaper.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: Despite what you hear, college is getting cheaper.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: And colleges are going out of business.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: So there's going to be a brutal period here.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: But to the extent that colleges really do want to start trying to adapt, Yeah,
26:56
SPEAKER_01: you got to figure out the more one-on-one,
26:59
SPEAKER_01: individualized, smaller group, how do I help guide you?
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Because it's not going to be the scale that you used to exploit, right?
27:09
SPEAKER_01: One professor,
27:10
SPEAKER_01: room of 200 students, like, oh,
27:13
SPEAKER_01: I can just sit up here and deliver information and then they write it down and
27:16
SPEAKER_01: then I have them write it down and it tests.
27:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it doesn't work anymore.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: That's not a model where...
27:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to say there's no value in it,
27:24
SPEAKER_01: but you have to be able to do more because what's scarce is no longer knowledge
27:30
SPEAKER_01: or information or even the ability to process it at a basic undergraduate level.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: What's going to be scarce is helping students be motivated to do the work themselves
27:42
SPEAKER_01: to get them to the point where they're smarter than the AI or to where they have
27:46
SPEAKER_01: the skills to be able to go out into
27:49
SPEAKER_02: the future.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Bryce, we're going to be revisiting this topic.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: Listeners, if you've got takes, let us know.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: We certainly don't have all the answers.
27:56
SPEAKER_02: And I think the more certain somebody seems about their viewpoint
28:00
SPEAKER_02: on this particular issue,
28:01
SPEAKER_02: the less you should trust them because it is changing every day.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: The confidence intervals about the future
28:07
SPEAKER_01: are very wide.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: We have no idea what it's going to be.
28:09
SPEAKER_02: That was like the most nerdy way you could have said that.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm literally envisioning this paper I just read that was a bunch of thousands
28:16
SPEAKER_01: of economists,
28:17
SPEAKER_01: AI experts,
28:18
SPEAKER_01: and general public trying to predict the future under different conditions of AI.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: Here we are.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: Let's do a Parent Trap.
28:24
SPEAKER_02: Do you have one this month?
28:25
SPEAKER_02: We should tell listeners the Parent Trap is our monthly segment where Bryce
28:29
SPEAKER_02: and I commiserate on our misadventures in parenting.
28:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:34
SPEAKER_02: Do you want to go or do you want me to start?
28:35
SPEAKER_02: You can start.
28:36
SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to decide between two.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: My daughters are both in high school now, junior and a freshman.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: I would consider them to be ambitious.
28:50
SPEAKER_02: They are achievers.
28:54
SPEAKER_02: I think they have their eyes set on fancy colleges.
29:01
SPEAKER_02: Thought over the years,
29:02
SPEAKER_02: like how much of that is attributable to the choices their mom and I made
29:06
SPEAKER_02: in our lives?
29:07
SPEAKER_02: Are they aspiring to things that we did or are they picking this up from other places?
29:11
SPEAKER_02: I'm not quite sure.
29:14
SPEAKER_02: What I'm finding is that
29:20
SPEAKER_02: really want to help them discern between achievement and passion.
29:27
SPEAKER_02: And I care less about achievement and more about passion.
29:31
SPEAKER_02: I want them to figure out what they really care about.
29:34
SPEAKER_02: Where do they find meaning in the frame of our prior conversation?
29:39
SPEAKER_02: And help connect them with pathways to that.
29:43
SPEAKER_02: That just sort of emerged for me as a student.
29:46
SPEAKER_02: Like I found it in athletics and that just sort of guided me through much
29:51
SPEAKER_02: of my educational experience for better and worse.
29:54
SPEAKER_02: For my daughter's sport isn't quite it,
29:59
SPEAKER_02: but I don't think they've quite landed on where it is for them.
30:02
SPEAKER_02: And I want to help them in that way over the next year.
30:04
SPEAKER_02: That's sort of my project for
30:06
SPEAKER_01: this academic year.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: And what are the steps in that process?
30:09
SPEAKER_02: I don't know yet.
30:10
SPEAKER_02: That's why it's the trap this month.
30:13
SPEAKER_02: I've diagnosed the problem that I'm trying to solve and I haven't figured out a solution yet.
30:21
SPEAKER_02: That's all the time we have for this episode.
30:23
SPEAKER_02: If you'd like to hear more of this conversation and receive other exclusive content,
30:27
SPEAKER_02: please consider a paid subscription.
30:31
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
30:32
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30:35
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30:41
SPEAKER_02: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49, a generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hanson.
30:48
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30:50
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30:54
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30:56
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31:00
SPEAKER_02: of Business, with additional help from CED, Drum Coffee, and Montana Public Radio.
31:08
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31:10
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31:14
SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.