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I&I - College is for community · A New Angle

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is A New Angle, conversations about how we're doing and where we're going.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: This show is supported by the Headwaters Foundation,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: First Security Bank, and the University of Montana College of Business.
• 0:22
  [music]
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, folks, welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Today is our October edition of Incentives and Instincts,
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  SPEAKER_02: a recurring series in which I speak with economist and friend,
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  SPEAKER_02: Bryce Ward, about some 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, Justin.
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  SPEAKER_02: So last month, we pondered the purpose of college in a world with ubiquitous AI.
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  SPEAKER_02: To follow up on that conversation,
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  SPEAKER_02: I've invited my friend and colleague,
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  SPEAKER_02: David Firth, Professor of Management Information Systems, to join us.
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  SPEAKER_02: David is deeply committed to helping his students get great careers.
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  SPEAKER_02: I've always learned something new from listening to your perspective.
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  SPEAKER_02: David, thanks for joining us.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you for having me.
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  SPEAKER_02: Since you're new to the show, tell us where did you grow up and what did your parents do?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I grew up in a small X mining town in Yorkshire,
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  SPEAKER_01: England, which is about 200 miles north of London.
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  SPEAKER_01: So my mom was a school teacher, but died when I was eight.
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  SPEAKER_01: And my dad was a university administrator.
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  SPEAKER_02: So last month, Bryce,
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  SPEAKER_02: you and I sort of landed on a framing of this conversation around scarcity,
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  SPEAKER_02: what will become scarce with ubiquitous AI.
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  SPEAKER_02: We talked about motivation.
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  SPEAKER_02: We talked about social skills, human interaction.
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  SPEAKER_02: David,
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  SPEAKER_02: what do you think of that framing as a way to navigate what we should be doing on
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  SPEAKER_02: a college campus now that AI can do a lot of the work that students have done in
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  SPEAKER_02: the past?
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: So what you guys talked about last time was right on the money.
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  SPEAKER_01: And it's the democratization of technology.
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  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the PC let everyone have a computer on their lap.
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  SPEAKER_01: Mobile phones allowed you to have different apps and the ability to get things done
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  SPEAKER_01: at a fairly basic level.
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  SPEAKER_01: AI allows you to get things done at a fairly advanced level.
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  SPEAKER_01: So you get access to...
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  SPEAKER_01: All the information on the planet.
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  SPEAKER_01: So it's another democratizer.
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  SPEAKER_01: So you were talking about scarcity, which is great.
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  SPEAKER_01: What is not scarce anymore is the skills and the knowledge,
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  SPEAKER_01: which Over time,
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  SPEAKER_01: that's what universities,
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  SPEAKER_01: certainly back in time,
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  SPEAKER_01: and you guys talked about this too,
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  SPEAKER_01: that's what universities were perfectly equipped to do,
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  SPEAKER_01: is to transfer knowledge,
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  SPEAKER_01: a deep level of knowledge,
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  SPEAKER_01: to students and graduates who could then use them in the workplace.
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, all of that's been now democratized out to everyone who even doesn't go to college.
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  SPEAKER_02: So given that broad agreement on the frame, Bryce, our minds are changing on this so rapidly.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Reflecting on that conversation, where have you shifted or have you shifted?
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  SPEAKER_03: So right after we recorded our podcast,
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  SPEAKER_03: the Dean of Harvard College,
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  SPEAKER_03: David Deming,
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  SPEAKER_03: who was rapidly becoming my favorite economist,
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  SPEAKER_03: he went on Plain English with Derek Thompson and they had a similar conversation.
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  SPEAKER_03: Early on in that conversation,
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  SPEAKER_03: he talked about the three eras,
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  SPEAKER_03: which I kind of got a little bit, he had much better terms for them, right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
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  SPEAKER_03: There was the kind of the library era where it's just like, oh, the university has a library.
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  SPEAKER_03: Harvard College was founded Because John Harvard had 400 books
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  SPEAKER_03: and he gave them to the college.
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  SPEAKER_03: At the time, that was two thirds the size of the biggest library in the world.
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  SPEAKER_03: So that was what Harvard was.
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  SPEAKER_03: They had a fire.
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  SPEAKER_03: You couldn't access the library.
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  SPEAKER_03: They just sent everybody home.
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  SPEAKER_03: There's no reason to be here.
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  SPEAKER_03: And then about a century ago, we moved into what he calls the era of the expert.
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  SPEAKER_03: And college is where you went to get the credential to be, quote, an expert, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: So your bachelor's degree was kind of the lowest level expert.
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  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, your master's, your PhD, you were really trying to accumulate expertise.
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  SPEAKER_03: AI makes less scarce is expertise.
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  SPEAKER_03: It's not to say that there's no role for experts
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  SPEAKER_03: and managing AI still requires expertise and knowledge and all those kinds
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  SPEAKER_03: of things, but it's not the same position in the market as it used to be, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: And so now we're moving into a new era and he basically argues that we're going
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  SPEAKER_03: to move into the relational or the collegium era, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: We're going to actually go back full circle where it's about college is going to
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  SPEAKER_03: about a community of learning.
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  SPEAKER_03: Right.
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  SPEAKER_03: It's going to be where you go to learn how to motivate yourself,
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  SPEAKER_03: learn about motivation, learn about how to relate to people.
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  SPEAKER_02: This idea of expertise, David, I'd be curious to get your take on it.
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  SPEAKER_02: I struggle with this, yes,
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  SPEAKER_02: expertise in a factual sense is becoming obsolete or unnecessary to acquire
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  SPEAKER_02: in some ways.
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  SPEAKER_02: However,
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  SPEAKER_02: even though you can use an AI to create a corpus of expertise that you can
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  SPEAKER_02: then digest in some way,
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  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that's an adequate substitute for years of swimming in the ocean of
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  SPEAKER_02: that particular topic.
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  SPEAKER_02: How do you think about expertise and how do you apply those ideas to
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  SPEAKER_02: the way you craft your classes?
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  SPEAKER_01: So for me,
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  SPEAKER_01: when we talk to our employers and we ask the question,
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  SPEAKER_01: hey, what do we need in the world of AI?
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  SPEAKER_01: They all say pretty much the same thing.
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  SPEAKER_01: We still need deep domain expertise.
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  SPEAKER_01: We need to understand the topic really well and understand.
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  SPEAKER_01: We need to know which tools to use in AI.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the way I actually am teaching my seniors in the undergrad program is
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  SPEAKER_01: the hard decision or the decision you need to make now is what is
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  SPEAKER_01: the unnecessary workload that you should offload to AI and what do you keep
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  SPEAKER_01: for human judgment?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that's discernment.
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  SPEAKER_01: It turns out that companies and our students,
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  SPEAKER_01: they only get discernment if they actually know stuff,
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  SPEAKER_01: if they're somewhat experts in what is easy,
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  SPEAKER_01: what's a handoff, because you can check it's right.
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  SPEAKER_01: You know what the output was supposed to be in advance.
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  SPEAKER_01: It was just going to take you a lot of time to get there.
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  SPEAKER_01: At 200 level students, I'm like, here's the deal.
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  SPEAKER_01: You're in my intro to management information systems class.
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  SPEAKER_01: The fact it's called introduction and you've never done the topic
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  SPEAKER_01: before means you have zero domain expertise for the most part.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so handing stuff off to AI first means you're getting nothing.
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  SPEAKER_01: You are literally not learning.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so you shouldn't.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I've picked articles.
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  SPEAKER_01: You need to read it.
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  SPEAKER_01: For yourself, because that's how learning builds.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then use the AI to challenge your learning.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'll say, hey, this is what I thought was going on.
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  SPEAKER_01: AI, what do you think?
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  SPEAKER_01: Can you, you know, challenge me?
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  SPEAKER_01: Give me some of the ways to look at it, some other things to read.
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  SPEAKER_01: You know,
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  SPEAKER_01: that's how our 200 level students should be using AI is as a tutor
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  SPEAKER_01: after they've done some work themselves to help build their domain expertise.
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  SPEAKER_02: Just how do you grapple with motivation?
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  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, so the way I do it is...
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  SPEAKER_01: There's going to be a bunch of students who completely understand that and are very
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  SPEAKER_01: on board and they're here because they want an amazing career and they understand
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  SPEAKER_01: that AI is a tool to be used, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: And then there's some students who just want to graduate college and Cs get degrees.
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  SPEAKER_01: And frankly,
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  SPEAKER_01: I think for including my intro class,
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  SPEAKER_01: and I flat out say in class,
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  SPEAKER_01: if you just want If you want to pass the class and just get a C and not learn
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  SPEAKER_01: a damn thing,
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  SPEAKER_01: then you can just use Claude and Gemini and chat GPT right off the bat.
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  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we'll do all sorts of steps to try and not make that case.
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  SPEAKER_01: And we have projects and we'll have discussions,
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  SPEAKER_01: but that doesn't stop you from not being motivated, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: Come along for the ride because I'm here to help you be really good at how you use AI.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to teach you, and we do, how it works.
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  SPEAKER_01: It is not thinking.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's a prediction machine.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's just based on probabilities.
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  SPEAKER_01: There's bias in input, bias in output, and we talk about that.
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  SPEAKER_01: We talk about how it deals with ethical situations and how it's really crap,
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  SPEAKER_01: and that means we need more human judgment.
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  SPEAKER_01: We talk about new careers.
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  SPEAKER_01: The AI ethicist was literally not a job five years ago.
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  SPEAKER_02: So given that motivation in your conception is something you have or don't have,
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  SPEAKER_02: and how do you square that with this idea that the marketplace will select
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  SPEAKER_02: for mindset?
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  SPEAKER_02: And that's mindset is adjacent to motivation in a way.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so as a university,
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  SPEAKER_02: we have to think about like,
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  SPEAKER_02: how do we prepare the most people as possible for the world of the future?
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  SPEAKER_02: It would seem like we have to at least Create opportunities for students to discover
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  SPEAKER_02: if they have motivation.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's clearly a volume switch.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's not on and off.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's not one and zero.
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  SPEAKER_01: I assume it goes between zero and 10 or 11.
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  SPEAKER_01: Goes up to 11.
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  SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
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  SPEAKER_02: Can you say that in your British accent?
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  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
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  SPEAKER_01: I've turned it all the way up to 11.
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  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so students come with whatever preset, you know, they shipped with.
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  SPEAKER_01: And high school beat it up or down, for many down, frankly, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: Because it was high schools are still in the industrial,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know, revolution in 1850 when they were invented to produce factory workers.
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  SPEAKER_01: So many, I think many of our students have their motivation changed.
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  SPEAKER_01: Reduced by their high school experience.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so college should be a way,
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  SPEAKER_01: a place where we help them rediscover the motivation that was always there.
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  SPEAKER_01: And that is gonna take reconfiguration.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna take reconfiguration of how we teach and what we teach.
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  SPEAKER_01: Group work and how we grade.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
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  SPEAKER_01: that's what we need to be getting students excited about is their innate motivation
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  SPEAKER_01: to learn and discover and push through problems and be excited about something.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: To be part of a community.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
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  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think that's the thing that ultimately you come back to,
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  SPEAKER_03: right, is we're a social species.
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  SPEAKER_03: College is great for...
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  SPEAKER_03: Community does create lots of little communities,
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  SPEAKER_03: but I feel like my guess is that we'll see,
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  SPEAKER_03: even within a large university like the University of Montana,
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  SPEAKER_03: you might be,
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
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  SPEAKER_03: just like now you applied with majors and colleges within these large universities.
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  SPEAKER_03: My guess is that there will be some form of reorganization around communities, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: That are maybe related to the different topics,
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  SPEAKER_03: but also a little bit different just in order to try and get me to say,
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  SPEAKER_03: I'm looking for this type of community and I want to be part of this type
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  SPEAKER_03: of community.
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  SPEAKER_03: And I think it will also be something like,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: something I think you've mentioned before on here,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Justin, which is it's going to be lifelong.
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  SPEAKER_03: I'm being very selective in my choice in both sides,
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  SPEAKER_03: in the matching side, because we're looking at this not as a...
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, four years to get your preliminary expert credential, right?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's a, no, no, no,
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  SPEAKER_03: this is our,
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  SPEAKER_03: we're going to bring you into this community and you're going to have a role
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  SPEAKER_03: in this community ideally for the rest of your life.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: Where did you find motivation?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I actually, so I was doing physics, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: And I got to do an internship at, with the Ministry of Defense in England.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so I got to work and get paid to be at the Royal Aircross Establishment
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  SPEAKER_01: in Farnborough for my summers doing really cool physics, actually.
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  SPEAKER_01: I was working on fiber optics and LCDs before they were, anyone even knew about them.
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  SPEAKER_01: Super cool.
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  SPEAKER_01: But then I realized it was,
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  SPEAKER_01: if I got a full-time job there,
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  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna be living in the middle of freaking nowhere.
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  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna be 21 in the middle of nowhere and my life would suck.
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  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the work life would be fantastic, but the not work life would suck.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, that's not going to do it for me.
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  SPEAKER_01: So I was motivated.
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  SPEAKER_01: That was a game changer to be, I need to go into London.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: I need to be in London.
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  SPEAKER_01: And working in the city in a big accounting firm got that done.
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  SPEAKER_01: So that really helped me.
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  SPEAKER_01: Changed my motivation.
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  SPEAKER_02: So some notion of the future you saw in front of you versus the future you wanted.
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  SPEAKER_01: Well, oddly enough,
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  SPEAKER_01: as I speak about that, I'm speaking to my friend group and community, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: Literally it was, what's this going to look like when I'm 22 and 23?
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  SPEAKER_01: It's going to look awful.
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  SPEAKER_01: There's going to be no friend group and no community, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: My boss was 50 and I was 21.
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  SPEAKER_01: It just doesn't stack up, right?
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  SPEAKER_01: And so...
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  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it does.
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  SPEAKER_01: It comes back to...
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  SPEAKER_01: So my motivation was I want to be part of a community that excites me and pushes me
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  SPEAKER_01: and challenges me and rewards me.
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  SPEAKER_02: Bryce, how about you?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: What were key moments in you finding motivation?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: I fall into the category of natural student, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: You know, you set out some kind of this is what you do, you achieve it.
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  SPEAKER_03: I'm just going to follow that, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: Like I'm just like...
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  SPEAKER_03: I'm hardwired, I think.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's not shocking to listeners.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: But beyond that, it's the same thing, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: And this is what I used to tell students when I was teaching, right?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is your job in your early 20s is to figure out who you want to be, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: Where do you want to be?
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  SPEAKER_03: What life are you wanting to be?
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  SPEAKER_03: And then you ask yourself, what do I have to do to get there?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what college is supposed to be about.
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  SPEAKER_03: So the first thing that college does...
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: So I was at the University of Oregon.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm in a big state school.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_03: But I had a friend who went to Stanford.
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  SPEAKER_03: And he was learning all about these other things that I just wasn't aware of
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: in terms of the job market.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: And it kind of...
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's this very old economics quote about what makes cities great is
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: that innovation is just in the air, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: You just bump into people and you learn stuff.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_03: And Stanford in the late 90s was that, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_03: I watched this because I was a house tutor at Harvard.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
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  SPEAKER_03: It's a big part of it.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the classes are not that different, right?
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  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes they're a little bit harder because
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: they can be.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's basically a, like a- The dining hall.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's just like, oh, if you want to do this, you can.
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  SPEAKER_03: And here's a bunch of people who've already done it.
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  SPEAKER_03: And here's what it is that it takes to do it.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I just think that that's going to be a bigger part.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: We'll be back to my conversation with Bryce Ward and David Firth after this short break.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle would not be possible without the generous support of
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: the Headwaters Foundation,
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: working side by side with Western Montanans to improve the health
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: of our communities.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you can't do that sort of work without access to capital and education.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: Two critical catalysts offered by First Security Bank and the University
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: of Montana College of Business.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Anya Jabor,
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Regents Professor of History at the University of Montana,
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: and you are listening to A New Angle.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to A New Angle.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm here with Bryce Ward and David Firth talking about the future of college.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: A framework is emerging in this conversation for me.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: I've often thought of my source of motivation as just chance occurrences.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: Something somebody said to me,
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_02: like before a championship regatta in college,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: the coach just said, we had had a decent, but we hadn't really had a big win.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the coach said, why not us?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that's like something I've repeated to myself in the 30 plus years hence.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like, why not me?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: Why not me?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: I can just,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: not from a place of arrogance,
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_02: but just from the standpoint, well, if I don't try that, it won't happen.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: Snippets like that, those memories, one thing one person said, one experience.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that idea sits on top of the dining hall metaphor.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: You have to put yourself in the sort of community where the likelihood of having one
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_02: of those types of experiences or interactions will increase.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: You have to sort of put yourself in the community that supports the outcomes
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: that you think you want or you might want to achieve.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: I find it fascinating that dining hall experience because I was literally just back
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: at Oxford and we went to formal halls at my college,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: all the colleges do a formal dining every week.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: You get,
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: the women get dressed up in gowns,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: the men get dressed up in suits and they're sub-fuss, so they're robes.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: My wife and I went to that and we sat next to two PhD students in computational chemistry.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even know that was a topic.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: To your point, Bryce, right?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: But we're at the dining room at an Oxford college and they're talking about what
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: the heck they do in computational chemistry, right?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, that is flipping interesting.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not what I want to do, but I didn't even know it existed.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So Oxford has it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: You talked about Harvard has it.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do we create that here at the University of Montana, then, is the next question, isn't it?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think so.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think that comes from intentional creation of community.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's the,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: it's when you're basically saying,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: yeah, again, for a long time, this was a credential machine, right?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: And it will still be a credential machine.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: You talk about domain expertise still being valid,
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: but you need to be able to be able to say, that doesn't seem right.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: When the AI spits out an answer, right?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: You need to be able to have the knowledge and creativity to be able to say,
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: oh, I wanna put these things together.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of what college is in the classroom, I don't think is gonna change that much.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_03: How you evaluate it, how you work on the muscles, that'll change a little bit.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: You're gonna have a new tool that you'll be working with.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_03: But the layer that we will have to be more intentional about is, yeah,
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_03: we just want to get a bunch of people who are going to bounce off of each other
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_03: in ways that will be beneficial for all of them, right?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_03: Because if I go there and I apply to this group,
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going to meet the people who are the right complements for me.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: They're going to stir my drink up and get me moving forward.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so, yeah, I just think that's going to be...
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's where the innovation is going to come in the higher education space
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: if higher education wants to keep
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: being of value.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we've spent so many recent years trying to innovate our way
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: into different systems of delivery,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: online education,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: more on-ramps to the classroom experience,
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: Zoom, remote, all these different modalities.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yet it seems like there's a snapback to the core product industry.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: And what was missing in all of those?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: Community.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_03: The most convincing studies of online education, why it fails, is motivation.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not motivated to perform in a two-dimensional environment.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't work.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Most people need to be dropped into a physical space where they're looking around
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: at their competitor students and have a relationship with an instructor.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: And that gets them to kind of take whatever extra steps they need to get going.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_03: Now, again,
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: we still have now we have like, okay, well,
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_03: in that environment,
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: how do we avoid using the AI crutch,
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: which is going to cripple my ability to learn all that kind of stuff now still has
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_03: to be part of it.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: But why do people want to use the AI crutch?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: Because they want the pad on the back of success.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's why they're not...
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, rejigger that equation, right?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: And we should be able to figure it out where students are like,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: no, I don't want to use the AI crutch.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: Because if I'm just doing this to get a credential and be at the top of the class
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: with the good grades and all that kind of stuff, all of that was expert era college.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to live with that For a while,
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: but I think we will develop new ways of evaluating and we're like,
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: yeah, we're measuring your contribution to the community.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me think about your consulting class, David.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: You must assess for a different range of skills and capabilities rather than just
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: who knows the most.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So almost every assignment in my consulting class is designed to help you figure out
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: and to do the best you can for yourself.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's no right answer for me.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: I usually don't care at all about what your answer is because
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: the assignment's designed to help you Figure things out for yourself and
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: who you are.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so my grading scheme is if you put, you know, clearly put a lot of effort in 100%.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you half-assed it,
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's either 60 or 40,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: depending on the level of, you know, not effort put in motivation, actually.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then zero if you didn't add it in.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's actually a motivation grade.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I had never called it that before, funnily enough.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what it is.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: But that's exactly what I grade on is level of motivation.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: I'm hopeful that,
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: you know, again,
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: we'll be able to weed out some of the stuff that we haven't liked about the era of
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: the expert,
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: which is kids just doing assignments as quickly as they can,
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_03: just kind of trying to check boxes, right?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's going to be, no, no.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_03: You're here because you're trying to acquire domain expertise
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: that you can do offline on your own.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: You know,
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: and if you don't achieve it,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: Like you're going to walk into an interview and they're going to ask you a question
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: and you're not gonna be able to pull up AI and you're going to fall flat
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: on your face and not get a job.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: So I have to be motivated to do what I want to do, to,
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: you know,
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: put myself into a role,
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_03: to find what I'm good at,
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: to figure out where, you know, how I can, you know, can fit into the market.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so I just think that you're going to, I'm hopeful.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I don't know if, There will be as many people that go to college in this world.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure there's enough innate motivation,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: but the ones that do survive,
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: I think you have the possibility of them being really vibrant,
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: exciting places to spend time.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Two comments on what you just said.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: So one was you're not gonna be able to,
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know, during an interview, you're not able to look at AI.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: What we heard from our employers last week was we might, one,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: we might just stop accepting resumes because we don't need a thousand resumes
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: for one position.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're just gonna talk to people we know.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we're certainly not ever gonna do video or Zoom or Teams
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: because we know you've got,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: there's too many people have a second screen open and they're just reading
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: the AI answer.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we're only going to do in-person interviews.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So literally,
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: it's like, oh my gosh, we're going back to, I don't know, 1995 here then, aren't we?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going back in time, right?
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's, yeah.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: And look,
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: there's lots of reasons why people don't like the who you know world,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: but that relational aspect to college that we talked about in the last episode,
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: that's part of it.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Is, yeah,
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: employers are going to come to you guys and you guys are going to be,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: it's going to be about the recommendations that you write or the names
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: that you give them on a list.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not going to be like,
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: why would you look at a GPA in an era where you can't be sure that
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: that GPA wasn't just.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: You have no idea what it means.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: If it doesn't mean, right.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: When I was at graduate school,
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: I took over being the head TF when we changed
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: the more mathematical intermediate micro class.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: And in my first meeting with Ed Glazer,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: my dissertation advisor,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: he's like, the goal of this class is that an A will be a signal to the world.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: We'll give out lots of A minuses, but there's like four A's.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: What I want this to be is when a PhD program is looking to admit a student,
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: if they see an A, they know that that's an automatic admit.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_03: So that was how we designed the class.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: Very rigorous.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: And if you wanted the top grades,
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: we had to be confident that you could essentially survive in
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: a first year graduate PhD level micro class.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't know that as an employer, right?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: If you can't get that signal out into the world, what do you default to?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: We're a social animal.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_03: We will default back to the social solution, which is, yeah, well, who do you know?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_03: Who's going to vouch for you?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I could say it's actually who knows you, right?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the employees were saying.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so it came back, though, to motivation and community.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: So they were like,
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: so Cognizant just hired,
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think, it's either two or five, I'm not sure, some of our MIS majors.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, yeah,
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: so they showed up to when we came and did office hours,
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: when we came and talked to the student club, they would come down and talk to us.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: When we do the business expo, they would come and talk to us.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: We had stuff in the office and they actually came.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: They showed up.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was just- They wanted to be part of the community.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Community is where you
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: show up repeatedly.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: What is community?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: Community is wherever you show up repeatedly.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: And if you keep showing up at our events- And that's exactly what
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: they said.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to hire you.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: We know who you are, right?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we are not hiring for skills because you can use ChatGPT for that part of the job.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well,
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: I am grateful that the two of you are the sort of guys that continuously show up,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: and I appreciate it.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Great conversation.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want to shift gears in our remaining time to the thing
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: that we probably should be talking about the most,
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: and that is, David, I just want to get your take on the existential threats.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_02: How do you feel about...
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: AI killing us all, or these sort of tail risks, as you call them.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I walked in this morning and I was thinking about all the existential risks
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: that we've had over time.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had, well, just yesterday, right, the plague broke out of a Russian lab.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's an existential threat, right?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: CERN has had this Large Hadron Collider spinning particles,
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And when they slam into each other,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: there's a non-zero chance they will create a black hole that will wipe out
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: the entire Earth.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: But we still run the experiment.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, we just upgraded the machine and made it 10 times more powerful.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Surely that means we're 10 times more likely to, you know, evaporate the Earth.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Moving to AI.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, there's just...
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: My whole point was we have been living with existential threats for a very long time.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: They're very different.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Bubonic plague, you know, particles creating a black hole.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so AI existential threat.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I tell my students to watch the movie Terminator so they can see how
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: that existential threat actually plays out.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: So live with it.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's nothing new.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's nothing new and I live on the positive side of the world.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: I would visit the Large Hadron Collider even though I could get swallowed by a black hole.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean,
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: you'd probably get swallowed here if the black hole-
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: The way I put it in class is
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: that at least France goes first.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it takes that much time.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: So yes, there's an existential threat from AI.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: There is no kill switch.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's loads of examples of it breaking out of the lab.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: I got it.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do a parent trap.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: David, you can sort of see what we're up to and decide if you want to partake or not.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is our monthly segment during which Bryce and I commiserate
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: about our misadventures in parenting.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: Bryce, do you have a parent trap this month?
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: Let's start with you.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: I've kind of got to get my brain back into it.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I have one that's related to a shared experience we're having as parents
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: of daughters on this sports team that's heading off to the state tournament.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: And this relates to something I was talking about before with moments
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_02: where motivation set in for me.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've learned over the years that I have a pretty good understanding
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: of moments like, okay, this is a moment that's going to demand the most of me.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or this is a moment where I could be a different person or have a different life on
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: the other side of this thing.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: And that might be a little bit of like self-mythologizing.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not quite sure.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: But I've come to think that I've been able to discern when the moment was important
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: and do my best to show up for it.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an important skillset or perspective and I'm trying to impose that
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: on my daughter who I think is going through one of those experiences.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: She did not,
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: she's a junior,
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: she was on the JV team all year and then got asked to join the tournament team in
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: the sport and all of a sudden finds herself playing in these consequential games on
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: the varsity team.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: Totally new experience for her, but all of a sudden it's like, okay, here's your opportunity.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty obvious that this is a moment for her.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: I want to be able to help my daughters understand how to sense those moments
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: and decide whether they want to rise to them or not.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I also don't want to heap pressure on them.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: And riding that line between the two is difficult.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't quite know how to do it other than just get them excited in a positive way.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's a really hard line to walk.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
• 29:18
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• 29:23
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• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49, a generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hanson.
• 29:43
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• 29:46
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• 29:49
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• 29:52
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• 29:56
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• 30:03
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• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: John Brownell, Jeff Ament, and John Wicks made our music.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.