February 14, 2023

“What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the 20th century to the fluid infrastructure of the 21st century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?”

Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

In A New Culture of Learning, Thomas and Brown wrote that when people think about learning, they usually think about schools. “And when people think about schools, they usually think about teachers.”  Yet, they say, the kind of learning that will define the 21st century is not taking place in a classroom. “Rather, it is happening all around us, everywhere, and is as powerful.” 

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere around us and it is most certainly powerful. AI has supercharged an automation process that now extends into advanced human tasks. At any given moment, AI is writing the articles we read online, creating sophisticated musical works in the style of iconic composers, learning how we cook and devise recipes, driving commercial trucks, beating us at our favorite board games, dancing like a human, designing new molecular proteins, assisting people with disabilities, creating poetry, and talking to us in a friendly tone. We’d been told for years that…