Wow, a new technology has been introduced that seems to provide nothing but upside. I wonder if there will be any unforeseen consequences that don’t manifest until it’s already too late and an entire generation has had its brains fried. No way to tell, it’s not like that’s ever happened before.
The consequences are already here, from an recent MIT study:
"After four months of AI-assisted writing, participants’ brains showed up to 55 per cent reduced neural connectivity compared to those who wrote independently. More importantly: when AI was taken away, their brains did not recover. The neural engagement patterns did not snap back. The cognitive architecture had been structurally reorganised."https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-sacred-triad-where-and-why-to
Last April my husband and I attended on AI and the Future of Education at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and were expecting to hear a lot of hype about how it would revolutionize education. Instead, to our great surprise, the speaker (Derek Muller) emphasized that 1. AI is used to render learning easier, thus bypassing effortful engagement and fundamental "system 1" thinking, 2. the real innovation lies not in using yet another technology, but people, because learning happens in the context of relationships.
Learning = effort + relationship / information
To learn something, we need to use cognitive effort, and we need to do it through human relationships; and since we can only absorb so much information at once, we need to present just enough information to challenge students but not to overwhelm them. Then repeat until mastery, and keep doing it.
Over the last two decades I've repeatedly observed that what propelled my children's learning was not the subject matter per se, or how well the curriclum was designed, but whether they connected with and admired their teachers. My daughter ended up studying French in universtiy because she was deeply inspired by her French teacher; my son pursued medieval studies because of the incredible passion his high school teacher brought to the class.
Passion for learning may ignite through subject matter alone, but it is the human teachers that bring it to life who act as catalysts.
Ruth, What your daughter's French teacher and your son's medievalist were doing — without knowing it in these terms — is precisely what the neuroscience of storytelling and shared attention has recently been able to demonstrate: that when a skilled, genuinely passionate human speaks to a gathered room, their brain precedes their listeners' brains by one to three seconds, entraining them not only to the content but to each other, producing something closer to a shared organism of attention than a collection of individuals receiving parallel information streams. Researchers call this the herding effect, demonstrated by Liu and colleagues in 2024, and it only works in the presence of a living human voice. Your children were not simply receiving French or medieval history. They were, in the most literal neurological sense, coupling with a mind that loved those things — and that coupling left a residue that no amount of well-designed curriculum could have produced, because the curriculum delivers the map while the teacher, in their passion and their personhood, briefly makes the territory inhabitable. Derek Muller's formula is right as far as it goes, but the relationship term in that equation is doing more than providing motivational context for effortful engagement: it is the very medium through which the knowledge becomes, as Mary puts it, metabolised — taken from inert information into something the learner can now live inside. The AI can replicate the information. It cannot replicate the longing to become.
This tracks… just yesterday I was hearing the umpteenth examples of “my kid chose this career because she had a really exciting teacher who taught it in high school”. It’s a very common story… how crazy is it that sometimes we just need someone to teach us something well, to transmit their love of that subject to us?
A very useful insight, thanks Ruth. When I think of it, I was also greatly influenced by the human qualities of individual tutors that crossed my path.
"Education is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs and so forth; it is learning to participate in the conversation of mankind"
Rabidly anti-AI. It’s too dangerous and humans too flawed to mess around with it at all and think it just a “tool.” That radically underestimates what AI actually is ontologically.
There is a psychological principle that 100 percent abstinence is easier than 98 percent and that applies here.
The dirty little secret of schools is most of the time is spent on classroom management and spurious games, especially at younger ages. Young kids getting through everything in 2 hours isnt really a huge feat, many homeschoolers can do that.
Studies have clearly shown better retention with old fashioned paper and pencil than screens. These kids dont need the whiz bang AI. A few books would have the same result.
All this brings to the forefront is the heritability of IQ and the grossly poor pedagogy of most schools.
For foreign language AI does have a place, as it gives a "good enough" foreign language teacher 24/7.
The folks who run Alpha School are not being totally honest, or rather they’re hyping it a bit. It’s not really “AI.” It’s a textbook on a computer with tests built in. It’s conceptually no different than “IPI,” which was a 60s-70s era individualized math program where kids did workbooks and proceeded at their own pace. IPI was all the rage at one time, but it fell out of favor. (I use that as an example because I learned math from IPI and was arguably a modest success for the program.)
They don’t have “teachers,” but they do have “guides” who explain things when kids get stuck.
And they offer rewards for advancing rapidly — points, prizes and such.
Apparently high IQ kids from high income families who respond to rewards can rip through the elementary school curriculum in two hours a day. Sure, but the same would be true if they just used books.
There's a saying in athletic training that you actually get fitter when you sleep. Training (or any physical exertion) *tears* muscles and breaks them down; you improve because your body rebuilds them a little stronger to resist this. It seems rather obvious that this is true of learning too, just as you need sleep and food to train physically, it's quite possible that the retention part of learning happens elsewhere and that perhaps two hours of intense learning followed by social messing about is a more productive way to go about educating children than seven not-very intense (and dull hours) with less social interaction. OTOH, IIRC, all the kids at that school had bright parents who were probably motivated to learn and these things are genetic and passed on through interactions with those parents, so these aren't typical children, let alone struggling ones. Pretty much any exposure to education would seem to work with them.
Of course, we are all being habituated into a new form of life that is provably bad for all of us. Zooming out from the narrow goal of improving performance on PISA scores; the replacement of teacher time with "more efficient" screen time is just another way of normalizing this form of life.
But I've come to believe that there is a deeper hidden cost, here. We have a chance to signal care to children, through the provision of real human contact (ie the only kind of contact that can facilitate actual caring, see the Care Ethics tradition), and we are sending an entirely different signal altogether, one which might be catastrophic at scale... https://nicholassmyth.substack.com/p/efficiency-and-the-decline-of-care
Two books are helpful here-- "Failure to Disrupt" and "Teaching Machines." Both make the argument about the decades-long historical record of failure of such technologies to actual improve learning in any but a limited number of circumstances-- typically the already privileged, in STEM-related, standardizable-assessment-friendly areas. Studies have already shown that even initial boosts in test results using AI tutors plummet when AI is taken away-- students' cognitive abilities *atrophy* using AI. This is also happening in other fields-- one study showed that doctors could interpret scans better/faster initially with AI, but at the cost of total dependence on them, and internal cognitive atrophying (take away the AI, doctors interpret scans far poorly than they did pre-AI use).
This quote from Will Orr-Ewing’s post (Thankyou for sharing it Mary) seems to get to the root of the discussion: What is the goal of tutoring?
“Whereas once the goal was intellectual stimulation, academic excellence for its own sake, or the glorification of God - rarely social refinement! - now the overwhelming majority of tutoring pursuesthin and transactional ends: success in an exam such as the 11+, GCSE or A level.”
Perhaps, just perhaps, the problem with AI isn’t so much the AI, but with the current educational system trying to tack AI onto their framework. If so, maybe our real hope is that AI gets smart enough to start over from scratch.
AI can be a useful tool for efficiencies, and may even tailor education at the individual level, but turning it into a crutch will weaken learning. There's simply no substitute writing by hand or reading a physical book in how we process information. I also think the more corporations use it in the artistic realm, the more people will tire of it. One reason Hail Mary did so well at the box office is they used actual set pieces, and the story was written by an excellent author.
we don't need to improve our connections with more people, we need to increase our connection to a small group of tech companies that stand to profit hugely from our subscriptions to their platforms. trust me bro, it's what's best for humanity. /s
What we regard as "education" and "intelligence" and "one-on-one" certainly says a lot about us, doesn't it?
It does seem very key to define "AI"—it (like "technology) is used to cover too much ground. (E.g., pencils and keyboards are both tools/technology, but that doesn't give us much to go on; the real question is, what are their four causes?) Same thing regarding, say, powerful word search engines versus chatbots. Both seem to be regarded as AI, but both are quite different, and someone could use the first on a limited basis and not the other without being inconsistent.
I suspect some teachers--some--are so bogged down with bureaucracy, administration, test scores, etc. that they are functionally reduced to being less than optimal in areas where AI or LLMs can exceed them. More human support for teachers is also important to help them outcompete the AI, rather than the other way around, where administrations fund AI novelties against more human-based teacher support.
Wow, a new technology has been introduced that seems to provide nothing but upside. I wonder if there will be any unforeseen consequences that don’t manifest until it’s already too late and an entire generation has had its brains fried. No way to tell, it’s not like that’s ever happened before.
The consequences are already here, from an recent MIT study:
"After four months of AI-assisted writing, participants’ brains showed up to 55 per cent reduced neural connectivity compared to those who wrote independently. More importantly: when AI was taken away, their brains did not recover. The neural engagement patterns did not snap back. The cognitive architecture had been structurally reorganised."https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/the-sacred-triad-where-and-why-to
Last April my husband and I attended on AI and the Future of Education at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and were expecting to hear a lot of hype about how it would revolutionize education. Instead, to our great surprise, the speaker (Derek Muller) emphasized that 1. AI is used to render learning easier, thus bypassing effortful engagement and fundamental "system 1" thinking, 2. the real innovation lies not in using yet another technology, but people, because learning happens in the context of relationships.
Learning = effort + relationship / information
To learn something, we need to use cognitive effort, and we need to do it through human relationships; and since we can only absorb so much information at once, we need to present just enough information to challenge students but not to overwhelm them. Then repeat until mastery, and keep doing it.
You can read our essay reporting on this talk here: Learning Fast, and Slow: Why AI will not revolutionize education https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/learning-fast-and-slow-why-ai-will
Over the last two decades I've repeatedly observed that what propelled my children's learning was not the subject matter per se, or how well the curriclum was designed, but whether they connected with and admired their teachers. My daughter ended up studying French in universtiy because she was deeply inspired by her French teacher; my son pursued medieval studies because of the incredible passion his high school teacher brought to the class.
Passion for learning may ignite through subject matter alone, but it is the human teachers that bring it to life who act as catalysts.
Ruth, What your daughter's French teacher and your son's medievalist were doing — without knowing it in these terms — is precisely what the neuroscience of storytelling and shared attention has recently been able to demonstrate: that when a skilled, genuinely passionate human speaks to a gathered room, their brain precedes their listeners' brains by one to three seconds, entraining them not only to the content but to each other, producing something closer to a shared organism of attention than a collection of individuals receiving parallel information streams. Researchers call this the herding effect, demonstrated by Liu and colleagues in 2024, and it only works in the presence of a living human voice. Your children were not simply receiving French or medieval history. They were, in the most literal neurological sense, coupling with a mind that loved those things — and that coupling left a residue that no amount of well-designed curriculum could have produced, because the curriculum delivers the map while the teacher, in their passion and their personhood, briefly makes the territory inhabitable. Derek Muller's formula is right as far as it goes, but the relationship term in that equation is doing more than providing motivational context for effortful engagement: it is the very medium through which the knowledge becomes, as Mary puts it, metabolised — taken from inert information into something the learner can now live inside. The AI can replicate the information. It cannot replicate the longing to become.
This tracks… just yesterday I was hearing the umpteenth examples of “my kid chose this career because she had a really exciting teacher who taught it in high school”. It’s a very common story… how crazy is it that sometimes we just need someone to teach us something well, to transmit their love of that subject to us?
A very useful insight, thanks Ruth. When I think of it, I was also greatly influenced by the human qualities of individual tutors that crossed my path.
Michael Oakeshott:
"Education is not acquiring a stock of ready-made ideas, images, sentiments, beliefs and so forth; it is learning to participate in the conversation of mankind"
He's right, of course.
AI learning is the contemporary evolution of generalized computer learning of the last 40 years that has failed to help our students.
The main beneficiaries during that time have been computer hardware and software companies, not students or teachers.
Rabidly anti-AI. It’s too dangerous and humans too flawed to mess around with it at all and think it just a “tool.” That radically underestimates what AI actually is ontologically.
There is a psychological principle that 100 percent abstinence is easier than 98 percent and that applies here.
The dirty little secret of schools is most of the time is spent on classroom management and spurious games, especially at younger ages. Young kids getting through everything in 2 hours isnt really a huge feat, many homeschoolers can do that.
Studies have clearly shown better retention with old fashioned paper and pencil than screens. These kids dont need the whiz bang AI. A few books would have the same result.
All this brings to the forefront is the heritability of IQ and the grossly poor pedagogy of most schools.
For foreign language AI does have a place, as it gives a "good enough" foreign language teacher 24/7.
The folks who run Alpha School are not being totally honest, or rather they’re hyping it a bit. It’s not really “AI.” It’s a textbook on a computer with tests built in. It’s conceptually no different than “IPI,” which was a 60s-70s era individualized math program where kids did workbooks and proceeded at their own pace. IPI was all the rage at one time, but it fell out of favor. (I use that as an example because I learned math from IPI and was arguably a modest success for the program.)
They don’t have “teachers,” but they do have “guides” who explain things when kids get stuck.
And they offer rewards for advancing rapidly — points, prizes and such.
Apparently high IQ kids from high income families who respond to rewards can rip through the elementary school curriculum in two hours a day. Sure, but the same would be true if they just used books.
...and had good teachers...who were allowed to BE good teachers.
There's a saying in athletic training that you actually get fitter when you sleep. Training (or any physical exertion) *tears* muscles and breaks them down; you improve because your body rebuilds them a little stronger to resist this. It seems rather obvious that this is true of learning too, just as you need sleep and food to train physically, it's quite possible that the retention part of learning happens elsewhere and that perhaps two hours of intense learning followed by social messing about is a more productive way to go about educating children than seven not-very intense (and dull hours) with less social interaction. OTOH, IIRC, all the kids at that school had bright parents who were probably motivated to learn and these things are genetic and passed on through interactions with those parents, so these aren't typical children, let alone struggling ones. Pretty much any exposure to education would seem to work with them.
Of course, we are all being habituated into a new form of life that is provably bad for all of us. Zooming out from the narrow goal of improving performance on PISA scores; the replacement of teacher time with "more efficient" screen time is just another way of normalizing this form of life.
But I've come to believe that there is a deeper hidden cost, here. We have a chance to signal care to children, through the provision of real human contact (ie the only kind of contact that can facilitate actual caring, see the Care Ethics tradition), and we are sending an entirely different signal altogether, one which might be catastrophic at scale... https://nicholassmyth.substack.com/p/efficiency-and-the-decline-of-care
Two books are helpful here-- "Failure to Disrupt" and "Teaching Machines." Both make the argument about the decades-long historical record of failure of such technologies to actual improve learning in any but a limited number of circumstances-- typically the already privileged, in STEM-related, standardizable-assessment-friendly areas. Studies have already shown that even initial boosts in test results using AI tutors plummet when AI is taken away-- students' cognitive abilities *atrophy* using AI. This is also happening in other fields-- one study showed that doctors could interpret scans better/faster initially with AI, but at the cost of total dependence on them, and internal cognitive atrophying (take away the AI, doctors interpret scans far poorly than they did pre-AI use).
This quote from Will Orr-Ewing’s post (Thankyou for sharing it Mary) seems to get to the root of the discussion: What is the goal of tutoring?
“Whereas once the goal was intellectual stimulation, academic excellence for its own sake, or the glorification of God - rarely social refinement! - now the overwhelming majority of tutoring pursuesthin and transactional ends: success in an exam such as the 11+, GCSE or A level.”
Perhaps, just perhaps, the problem with AI isn’t so much the AI, but with the current educational system trying to tack AI onto their framework. If so, maybe our real hope is that AI gets smart enough to start over from scratch.
AI can be a useful tool for efficiencies, and may even tailor education at the individual level, but turning it into a crutch will weaken learning. There's simply no substitute writing by hand or reading a physical book in how we process information. I also think the more corporations use it in the artistic realm, the more people will tire of it. One reason Hail Mary did so well at the box office is they used actual set pieces, and the story was written by an excellent author.
we don't need to improve our connections with more people, we need to increase our connection to a small group of tech companies that stand to profit hugely from our subscriptions to their platforms. trust me bro, it's what's best for humanity. /s
What we regard as "education" and "intelligence" and "one-on-one" certainly says a lot about us, doesn't it?
It does seem very key to define "AI"—it (like "technology) is used to cover too much ground. (E.g., pencils and keyboards are both tools/technology, but that doesn't give us much to go on; the real question is, what are their four causes?) Same thing regarding, say, powerful word search engines versus chatbots. Both seem to be regarded as AI, but both are quite different, and someone could use the first on a limited basis and not the other without being inconsistent.
I suspect some teachers--some--are so bogged down with bureaucracy, administration, test scores, etc. that they are functionally reduced to being less than optimal in areas where AI or LLMs can exceed them. More human support for teachers is also important to help them outcompete the AI, rather than the other way around, where administrations fund AI novelties against more human-based teacher support.