WHAT SHOULD AN EDUCATED PERSON STILL BE ABLE TO DO FOR THEMSELVES IN THE AGE OF A.I.?

This summer, I read an old book about the future.

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was published more than half a century ago. But much of what he describes feels a lot like the present.

Toffler was interested in the psychological and social effects of a rapidly changing society. He knew that the world is always changing. His concern was that the rate of change was accelerating beyond our capacity to adapt to it.

He called the resulting disorientation “future shock,” describing it as the consequence of the “premature arrival of the future.”

That’s a powerful phrase.

There are moments when it seems like the future is arriving faster than we can fully comprehend. Technologies that were once the subject of science fiction in my lifetime are now everyday realities. And new technologies spread, changing our daily practices before we are even able to establish a shared understanding of what they entail. And so we find ourselves making decisions about tools that are still evolving as we are attempting to decide what to do with them.

Alvin Toffler wrote his book before anybody knew of the internet, much less artificial intelligence. I can only imagine what he would have made of this moment. AI is changing how we produce information, communicate ideas, perform work, and make decisions. It’s forcing us to reconsider some of our most basic assumptions about intelligence, creativity, authorship, and learning.

But this isn’t a new problem for schools. Teachers have been experiencing this tension intensely for the last several years. Educational systems, however, tend to change slowly, even though students are quickly adapting to these new technologies. By the time a school develops a policy, establishes some professional learning plan, or selects a preferred platform, the technology has already morphed into some new form with new capabilities. The reference points keep moving. That’s a recipe for future shock.

This is where we have to be careful about our considerations and what questions we’re asking. Because what’s most important is not how quickly schools can adapt to AI, nor is it whether students should or should not use it. I can phrase the most important question into kind of a thought experiment:

When we imagine a student prepared to flourish in the age of AI, what do we want that student to be able to do that technology cannot do on their behalf?

Toffler believed that education should expand our capacity to adapt, but adaptation isn't enough. He argued that people living in conditions of rapid change would need to become better at learning, relating, and choosing; and more than 50 years later, those are still important qualities that remain relevant. Students will need to learn in environments where information is abundant and constantly changing. They’ll need to establish and sustain meaningful relationships across increasingly complex and diverse social and cultural landscapes. And they’ll need to make choices from an overwhelming number of options, influences, and potentialities.

But I don’t think adaptation alone is the proper purpose of education. People can adapt to conditions that diminish them. Students can adapt to AI by becoming highly proficient at outsourcing any friction that arises in their thinking. They can learn to summon an answer without constructing an understanding. They can generate an essay without developing an argument.

AI is a tool that will allow students to produce polished products without having earned the confidence that the ideas belong to them. Schools can adapt in similar ways. They can use AI to make existing practices faster without questioning whether those practices are still worthwhile. They can use new technologies to improve the efficiency of old systems whose purposes have already become obsolete.

That’s one of the challenges of accelerated change. Movement is easily mistaken for progress. Efficiency is easily mistaken for improvement. Adaptation is easily mistaken for agency. Of course, we should ask whether students can adjust to the future arriving around them. But the more important question is whether they’ll be able to exercise judgment about the future they’re being asked to accept.

What’s deserving of embrace?

What should be resisted?

What can be revised?

What might be created?

The responsibility of education isn’t merely to help students accommodate change. It’s to cultivate the capacities through which they can participate in determining the changes we want to see.

Artificial intelligence can do extraordinary things. I think it’s silly and not really helpful to pretend otherwise. It's getting better every day and will continue to identify patterns, summarize arguments, retrieve and organize enormous quantities of information, create images, solve problems, and produce language that resembles human thought. But artificial intelligence and human intelligence are not the same kind of intelligence.

AI processes representations of the world. Human intelligence is formed through living in the world. Human beings develop understandings within our encounters in physical, social, and cultural environments. We learn through bodies that move, struggle, tire, desire, remember, and occupy particular places. Humans don’t experience knowledge as information alone. Our ideas come into possession of meaning through the situations in which we encounter them. In other words, human cognition is grounded, distributed, and embodied.

Pizza is more than a sequence of letters or a category of objects. Pizza is a concept that may carry the memory of its shape and feel in your hand, the grease on your fingers (if it’s good pizza), the texture of the crust, the smell of the sauce, the flavor of the toppings, or it might be the experience of hanging out with others in a local pizza parlor while you share in an experience of friendship.

Our concepts are connected to physical sensations, relationships, places, stories, identities, and memories. This means that everyone understands pizza in their own way. It means that understanding is situated within experience and emotion.

I can extend this to concepts arguably more consequential than pizza. Justice, freedom, belonging, risk, beauty, humiliation, courage, and love have meaning beyond how they’re defined in the dictionary. We understand them through the ways in which they’ve been encountered in our lives.

LLM models we use are like super-advanced word calculators. AI is really good at identifying language patterns associated with these concepts. It can generate a reasonable definition of justice or write a convincing paragraph about belonging. But AI has never had the experience of belonging anywhere. And it’s never been excluded. AI has never shown courage, or endured humiliation, or fallen in love. It has information about human experience, but no experiential reference points.

Human learning is the development of increasingly rich and integrated understandings that are used to draw upon and interpret the world, which is something more sophisticated and complex than just the acquisition of information. Human intelligence is shaped by our emotional lives, which means that emotion is a source of intelligence that AI can describe but never replicate. Emotion gets a bad rap when it comes to cognition because it’s too often treated as interfering with thinking. We speak as if good judgment requires us to remove emotion so that reason can operate without disturbance. But emotion is information that helps us recognize what matters.

Fear can alert us to danger. Anger can signal that a boundary has been crossed. Curiosity pulls our attention towards something we don’t yet understand. Joy can reveal connection. Grief is the testimony that something or someone held meaning for us. A sense of belonging reveals something about our relationship to a place and the people within it.

This doesn’t mean that every emotion leads automatically to a wise interpretation. Emotions must also be examined, questioned, and processed. But emotion is not incidental to intelligence. It shapes what we notice and what we remember, what we value, and how we act.

AI can classify sentiment, imitate empathy, and generate language that sounds caring. But AI has no emotional stake in the situations that matter to humans. It doesn’t hope that its decisions turn out well. It doesn’t worry about whom an action may harm. It doesn’t experience wonder when an unexpected connection appears. But humans do.

To flourish is to live a rich intellectual, relational, and emotional life. If we imagine students as prepared for the age of AI, we can’t possibly mean that they only know how to operate the tools. We must also mean that they can draw from their experiences and emotions to make meaning, draw wisdom, and build understanding. AI may be able to describe what people commonly feel in a particular situation. But it can never feel on our behalf.

There are many valid concerns we educators should have about how students use AI.

Will they use it to write the essay?

Will they ask it to solve the problem?

Will they employ it to subvert the challenge inherent in the learning that’s necessary for understanding?

But we have to think carefully about what AI is changing about learning. Even more than the risk that students will outsource answers, the greatest peril is that they’ll bypass the experiences through which human intelligence is developed.

Learning requires uncertainty. It is necessary to encounter something that doesn’t fit neatly into what we already understand. To pause. To wonder. To struggle. To move an idea around. Learning involves testing ideas against existing knowledge and from different angles, placing them in different contexts to see what they can do. This is how meaning is constructed.

The process of learning might involve frustration. We might feel fatigue. There may be confusion, or even some disappointment. These emotions aren’t merely orbiting a learning experience. They are the necessary ingredients that allow for the possession of understanding.

AI can provide an answer within seconds. But the distance between the question and the answer is where learning occurs. When technology removes that distance, students may be able to produce work that meets the quality expectations of the teacher and never develop their own understanding. They can become increasingly capable while also becoming less confident in their ability to think, judge, and create without the mediation of technology.

AI can’t undergo the experience through which the student develops understanding, judgment, and a meaningful relationship to the thinking represented within the product.

Without that experience, there may be posturing, but no self-efficacy.

And so, the responsibilities of teachers are evolving. We can’t stop the pace of change. Nor do I think our role should be to defend an earlier version of education that I would argue has under-delivered in terms of responsiveness. Teachers have always made use of tools and resources to support students’ learning. But the responsible use of artificial intelligence must extend human intelligence. The reckless use of artificial intelligence is to replace human judgment.

We are going to see AI tools that are increasingly capable of acting on behalf of humans to perform tasks which mandated tremendous toil and effort even just a few years ago. I see this as an opportunity to reconceptualize the role and responsibility of teaching. Learning can no longer be argued to be the algorithmic process of receiving information and repeating answers. To learn is to construct understanding.

Schooling needs to be reimagined so that we recenter uncertainty as a necessary step in learning. To learn is to recognize emotions as sources of information and examine what those emotions may tell us. Students need to test their judgments and encounter different perspectives than their own. They need to build relationships, make consequential choices, and experience their actions as having some bearing on what happens next.

Ironically, much of what I’m describing is how the privileged have already structured the learning environments for their students. You see this kind of student-led inquiry and problem- and project-based learning experiences at affluent private schools all over the United States. To continue to exclude the majority from these opportunities is to sentence the have-nots to a concrete, underclass status in our society.

Experience and emotion are not extracurricular dimensions of learning. They are central to the development of human agency, the grounded belief that our thinking, choices, and actions can make a difference in the world around us. That belief isn’t conjured up in an AI chat thread. It develops through experience. To encounter a problem. To bring forth one’s assets. To make a judgment. To take an action. To observe something change.

It's critical for students to sense that their contribution affects the conversation... their question opens a line of inquiry... their interpretation helps another person to see something differently. This is how students develop esteem for their own capacities. It’s also how relationships, cultural identity, emotion, and experience resonate in learning. AI can contribute to that process. But it can’t become the process.

Toffler worried that people become irreconcilably disoriented when the rate of change exceeds their ability to adapt. When I read his book and then look around, I feel like there’s some credence to that concern. But preparing students for change is more than increasing technological proficiency. They need the anchors of relationships, habits for reflective thinking, and the grounded confidence in their own capacities to confidently entertain uncertainty without being swept away by it. The goal of education is to develop people who can encounter unfamiliar situations, notice what’s happening around them, judge what’s most relevant, and decide what they’re responsible for. We want them to learn, and relate, and choose well. And we want them to feel, interpret, judge, imagine, and act responsibly.

So I’m back to the question I introduced earlier:

When we imagine a student prepared to flourish in the age of AI, what do we want that student to be able to do that technology cannot do on their behalf?

I want students to experience the world directly. I want them to be conscious of recognizing what matters and draw wisdom from their emotions. I want them to construct meaning with other people so that they individually, and our society collectively, can make judgments, accept responsibility, and act from the belief that it is possible to influence what happens next.

We’re not trying to just keep up with the machines. This is our moment to cultivate the distinctly human capacities that allow students to decide where we should be going.