Educational institutions need to change and do so very quickly due to recent leaps in technology.
For centuries, we have treated intelligence as something that distinguishes one human being from another. What happens when intelligence becomes something everyone can access, rather than something individuals must exclusively possess?
Imagine being given a backhoe and then asked to dig a very deep hole. And then being told not to use the backhoe, but rather this shovel that your father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and all other generations before you had to use to dig holes.
Suddenly, a student can access something resembling an extraordinarily knowledgeable tutor, research assistant, editor, programmer, and intellectual sparring partner. Available around the clock. Patient beyond human endurance. Capable of explaining the same concept fifteen different ways without becoming irritated.
And what is one of the first responses from educational institutions?
Don’t use it to complete your assignments.
What happens when the purpose of education is no longer constrained by the intellectual labor required to demonstrate that one has been educated?
For centuries, educational institutions have operated under a fairly straightforward arrangement: instructors possess or curate knowledge, students acquire it, and examinations determine how successfully that transfer has occurred.
Of course, education has always involved more than knowledge transfer. But much of its machinery, the lectures, homework, examinations, grades, credit hours, and degrees, was designed around a world in which accessing, organizing, analyzing, and articulating information required considerable human effort.
Then along comes generative artificial intelligence.
And what is one of the first responses from educational institutions? Don’t use it to complete your assignments.
There’s your backhoe.
The backhoe doesn’t merely allow us to dig the same hole faster. It allows us to contemplate excavations that would have been impractical with a shovel.
Perhaps the real educational revolution won’t be teaching students how to use the backhoe. Perhaps it will be allowing them to decide what is worth building once excavation is no longer the limiting factor.
Consider two students assigned to write a research paper on the relationship between skeletal muscle mass and healthy aging.
Student A spends twelve hours searching databases, locating papers, extracting relevant findings, organizing notes, and writing a coherent argument.
Student B uses AI to accelerate those activities, spending three hours gathering and organizing material and another nine hours investigating methodological weaknesses, challenging conclusions, comparing competing explanations, and developing an original hypothesis.
Both invest twelve hours. But which student has engaged in more meaningful intellectual development?
We cannot determine that simply by looking at their finished papers. Student A may have learned more through the struggle, while Student B may have reached a substantially deeper understanding.
And therein lies the problem. Our educational assessment systems are often better at measuring the products of intellectual labor than the intellectual capabilities that supposedly justify that labor.
The distinction becomes enormously important when the cost of producing those products approaches zero.