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That is a short essay by Arnold Kling. Excerpt:
Tyler’s Vision
As a student, you work with a mentor. At the beginning of each term, you and your mentor decide which courses you will take. If there are other students on campus taking them, great. If not, maybe you can take them with students at other schools, meeting remotely.
For each course, an AI can design the syllabus. Tyler gave an example of a syllabus generated by ChatGPT for a course on Tudor England. If you can find a qualified teacher for that course, great. If not, you could try learning it from ChatGPT, which would provide lessons, conversations, and learning assessments (tests).
Tyler thinks that 1/3 of higher ed right now should consist of teaching students how to work with AI. I do that by assigning a vibe-coding project, and by encouraging “vibe reading” and “vibe writing.”
The reason for proposing such a high proportion of effort to learning to work with AI is because we are in a transition period, where the capabilities of AI are changing rapidly. Once capabilities settle down, best practices will become established, and knowledge of how to use AI will be ingrained. For now, it is very hard to keep up.
It is possible, of course, that Tyler and I could be wrong. It could be that the best approach for higher ed is to keep students as far from AI as one can. I can respect someone who favors an anti-AI approach.
But I am disturbed by the lack of humility that often accompanies the anti-AI position in higher education. I have difficulty comprehending how faculty, at UATX and elsewhere, can express their anti-AI views with such vehemence and overconfidence. They come across to me like dinosaurs muttering that the meteor is not going to matter to them.
I believe the talk will be put online, but a few extra points here.
First, the one-third time spent learning how to use AI is not at the expense of studying other topics. You might for instance learn how to use AI to better understand Homer’s Odyssey. Or whatever.
Second, I remain a strong believer in spending many hours requiring the students to write (and thus think) without AI. Given the properties of statistical sampling, the anti-cheating solution here requires that only a small percentage of writing hours be spent locked in a room without AI.
Third, for a small school, which of course includes U. Austin, so often the choice is not “AI education vs. non-AI education,” rather “AI education vs. the class not being offered at all.”
Why should not a school experiment with two to three percent of its credits being AI offerings in this or other related manners? Then see how students respond.
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