Co-Intelligence

AI does not need to be catastrophic. In fact, we can plan for the opposite. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote about exactly this, a situation he termed a eucatastrophe, so common in fairy tales: “the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ … is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.

One solution to incorporating more active learning is by “flipping” classrooms. Students would learn new concepts at home, typically through videos or other digital resources, and then apply what they’ve learned in the classroom through collaborative activities, discussions, or problem-solving exercises. The main idea behind flipped classrooms is t

When the calculator was first introduced in schools, the reaction was surprisingly close to the initial concerns I hear about students using AI for tasks like writing today. As education researcher Sarah J. Banks writes, in the early days of their popularity in the mid-1970s, many teachers were eager to incorporate calculators7 into their classroom

Here’s a secret: we have long known how to supercharge education; we just can’t quite pull it off. Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist, published a paper in 1984 called “The 2 Sigma Problem.”1 In this paper, Bloom reported that the average student tutored one-to-one performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a conven

We often take for granted the systems we use to structure and coordinate work in our organizations. We assume they are natural ways of getting things done. But in reality, they are historical artifacts, shaped by the technological and social conditions of their times. The organizational chart, for example, was originally made to run railroads in th

When the AI is very good, humans have no reason to work hard and pay attention. They let the AI take over instead of using it as a tool, which can hurt human learning, skill development, and productivity. He called this “falling asleep at the wheel.”

When you do include AI in idea generation, you should expect that most of its ideas will be mediocre. But that’s okay—that’s where you, as a human, come into the equation. You are looking for ideas that spark inspiration and recombination, and having a long list of generated possibilities can be an easier place to start for people who are not great

A contrasting philosophy, active learning, reduces the importance of the lecture, asking students to participate in the learning process through activities like problem-solving, group work, and hands-on exercises. In this approach, students collaborate with one another and the instructor to apply what they’ve learned. Multiple studies support the g

Then there are Automated Tasks, ones you leave completely to the AI and don’t even check on. Perhaps there is a category of email that you just let AI deal with, for example. This is likely to be a very small category … for now.