I read a NYT report in today’s Economic Times about big tech firms racing to embed AI tools in schools.
Tech leaders are saying that AI tools can save teachers time, customize student learning and help prepare young people for an AI driven economy! Wow! Really?
It’s a scary development to me that education will now be deeply influenced by AI. Clearly, tech companies are racing to do this not out of any altruistic intentions but out of deep commercial interests.
I have been reading this book by Jonathan Haidt titled, “The Anxious Generation”. The fundamental premise of this author is that children who are born after the invention of smart phones and the arrival of several social media platforms have experienced a fundamentally altered childhood and at the heart of that childhood is anxiety.
Ask anyone who assigns any form of thinking work to their young team members and they will share their most common concern: the moment they assign a task which involves any form of thinking, their young employees surrender that “thinking opportunity” to one of the many AI tools.
And then I read reports in media that large consulting companies have their own AI platforms and are now mandating that employees use it in the interest of speed.
It’s unfortunate that the current narrative around any disruptive technology is shaped entirely by commercial interests – business growth, speed, cost optimisation, valuations. I think thinkers across the globe have a responsibility to bring a counter point, an alternate narrative. About the perils behind the money.
Why am I concerned about this?
As a coaching and leader development company, one of the most common asks from us is to help emerging leaders demonstrate more of their intellectual capacities: to be strategic, to be innovative, to connect the dots and synthesize, to solve problems at a fundamental level and not at the symptomatic level, to envision a future, to think about global developments and how they will impact them, to be discerning, to apply good judgment and so on.
As I listen to these briefs on one side and I see this rapid adoption of AI on the other side starting with schools, I am aghast.
For a variety of reasons, even today many leaders fail to move out of operational obsession and become more intellectually rigorous.
It now looks like we will compound this problem by bringing up an entire generation of children and adolescents and young professionals who will readily pass over every “thinking opportunity” in their professional and personal life to AI.
In that fast-emerging future, will it be even harder to coach leaders to think, discern, to be in flow state, to reflect, to be self-reliant, to be self assured and to even believe that they have the answers, that they actually can indeed think on their own?
The answer to that question appears very scary.
Youtube link: https://youtu.be/mpMV0stUkyI
