I’ve been thinking a lot about AI for a while now, more out of necessity than anything else. And it’s mostly professional: both as a teacher amongst teachers and as a teacher amongst students. AI is, of course, the hottest of topics. There’s optimism and defeatism and determinism and all kinds of views in between. I asked my some of my students about it, and they had a good sense of things: for reviewing, sure, but not for assignments that you’ll get graded on. Then I asked them if teachers should be allowed to use it? Not as clear, really, mostly because teachers are getting paid to do their work.

There are questions of scale and scope, of course, just as there are also questions of creativity and redundancy. It took us all years to realize some of the major downsides of one-to-one learning (which, good and bad, Covidtide exacerbated). And we’ve finally digested some of the truths crystallized in The Anxious Generation on cell phones, social media, and gaming. So we’ll see how educators navigate this.

While we work and wait and wonder, here’s a nice snippet from Alan Jacobs (of Baylor University) about the line between ruling and being ruled.