AI and the future of education

The rapid progress of large language models over the past two years has led some to argue that Al will soon make college education, especially in the liberal arts, obsolete.

- Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg

According to this view, young people would be better off skipping college and learning directly on the job.I strongly disagree. Learning through hands-on experience is valuable and always has been. But it works best when people have a good sense of which jobs and skills will be in demand. If there is one thing we can be confident about, it is that the future of work is highly uncertain. Advising young people to forgo college in favour of early entry into the labour market is misguided, at best.

Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern Al, once compared progress in his field to navigating through “fog”: you can see what lies immediately ahead, but not what comes next. Accordingly, the central challenge for educators is to prepare students to operate effectively in fog-like conditions. The answer is not to train them for specific tasks that may soon become obsolete, but to make them as adaptable as possible. Trying to prepare people for a fixed set of challenges when those challenges are constantly changing is a losing strategy.

From this perspective, education — and especially higher education — plays amore important role than ever. Because we do not know which specific skills will be in demand in the future, a return to fundamentals is imperative. Liberal education emphasises how to think, rather than what to do. It trains students to reason, to read carefully, to write clearly, and to evaluate evidence. These skills will age far better than narrow technical competencies.