Education in the age of AI and smart technology

Key points:

• As AI advances, workers will be needed to do the tasks that technology won’t be able to do well
• Educators will have to model the behaviors and new way of learning that students need
• See related article: ChatGPT is the shakeup education needs

We are in a new era–the Era of Smart Technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of ChatGPT-4 is very smart and ChatGPT-5, -6, and -7, etc. will be even smarter. Smart technology will change the “game of work” and it will change how we educate people.

We will live in the most disruptive job time since the Great Depression. Technology is and will continue to automate many blue- and white-collar jobs. Oxford University predicts that 25-47 percent of U.S. jobs will be automated by 2030. Scientists have predicted that the average person will have 5 completely different jobs in the next 20 years. No one will be exempt.

The new workplace will be very different than today’s workplace. As AI continues to advance, workers will be needed to do the tasks that technology won’t be able to do well. As of today, those tasks are:

1. Thinking in ways different from smart technology’s way of thinking. Those ways are higher-order critical thinking; making moral judgments; going into the unknown and figuring things out; creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking; problem solving; and making decisions in situations where there are lots of uncertainty and not a lot of data.
2. Excelling at building caring, trusting, positive emotional relationships with other human beings, including teammates, customers, co-workers, patients, clients, etc.
3. Excelling at doing trade jobs that require human dexterity and iterative diagnostic definitions of the problem and iterative trial- and-error approaches to solving the problem.

The goal of education will be to teach every student how to become a highly adaptive Learner who can learn, unlearn, and relearn at the speed of technological change. That will require every student to learn how to take ownership of their own selves so they can bring their best self to the world every day.