Stephen Downes

Good post though perhaps too long on how we should change how we think about education in the age of AI. Steve Hargadon writes, "What AI destroys is performed compliance: the busywork, the credential that certified obedience, the elaborate game in which students learned to produce the appearance of understanding and call it an education. That was never worth keeping." But what's left? "In the age of artificial intelligence, agency is no longer one path to success among many. It is the only thing left that can actually produce it... it is the one input the new machine cannot supply, cannot fake, cannot simulate, and cannot replace." I think that's partially true; agency depends on, and is intertwined with, human experience. Anyhow, Hargadon continues, "If agency is the whole game, then the only question that matters for education is how a human acquires it. These are described in "the conditions of learning, and they are irreducibly human and relational. They are also, not coincidentally, the one thing the new machine cannot provide because they are not made of information. They are made of relationships."