There are certainly some things I don’t see eye-to-eye on in the entirety of this podcast regarding our near future with AI, but I did like this part about young (and old) people reading Homer and Shakespeare to find capable understandings (“skills”) that will be needed for success.
It’s something I always tried to tell my students in almost two decades in middle and high school classrooms here in the Carolinas… first it was “learn how to code!” that they were hearing and now it’s “you’re doomed if you don’t understand agentic AI!” … but this time around, I don’t think agentic or generative AI is going to be a passing fad that allows for education specialists to sell for huge profits to local school districts with leaders who don’t fully grasp what’s ahead like “coding” happened to be there for about the same amount of time that I was in the classroom…
The Experimentation Machine (Ep. 285):
And now if the AI is doing it for our young people, how are they actually going to know what excellent looks like? And so really being good at discernment and taste and judgment, I think is going to be really important. And for young people, how to develop that. I think it’s a moment where it’s like the Revenge of the Liberal Arts, meaning, like, go read Shakespeare and go read Homer and see the best movies in the world and, you know, watch the best TV shows and be strong at interpersonal skills and leadership skills and communication skills and really understand human motivation and understand what excellence looks like, and understand taste and study design and study art, because the technical skills are all going to just be there at our fingertips…