How our current system is broken and what will replace it.
by homan.
Millions face a bleak reality: that what they've learned is useless and that they are crippled with student loan debt that they're unsure when they can repay, if ever. Many are in the pipeline to arrive at the same destination.
I believe that fixing education is the most important problem to work on. AI will amplify — not replace — human efforts and so the only way to solve our greatest challenges is to unlock every individual's potential. In a post-AI world, we will be the only thing holding us back.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated the gap between how students are trained and what the world needs from them, and has also invalidated the business model that powers education: selling education as a product that students (as customers) pay for. Therefore, fixing the education system isn't a matter of updating curriculums, hiring better teachers or even making all education free because its business model itself no longer works. We need an entirely new business model, and the set of incentives that come with it, that works in a post-AI world. In this essay I explore how AI invalidates our education's business model, what the new business model and education system will look like, and how to build it.
Most of us have a deep desire to create value in the world. This desire to create value for others will continue to exist no matter how good AI becomes.
Education is inextricably linked to what the world wants because people want to learn skills that will enable them to create value for the world. This desire to create value for others will continue to exist no matter how good AI becomes. Therefore, before we can discuss how education must change we need to first understand how AI changes what it even means to create value in the world.
AI makes outcomes very extreme: a small percentage of people will be responsible for the majority of economic value created in the world. The more powerful AI becomes, the more extreme outcomes become: even fewer will be responsible for the majority of economic value created. The more extreme outcomes become, the less room there is for the average performer to create value, and the greater the outcomes become for the best.
This trend towards extreme outcomes isn't a new phenomenon, it's been going on for some time. Surprisingly, it's caused by progress: better technology, better education, easier distribution of ideas and products make the world more extreme. But, AI is poised to accelerate the rate at which the world becomes extreme to unfathomable levels that will make today's extreme outcomes seem quite un-extreme.
To understand why outcomes are becoming more extreme, we need to understand the relationship between the complexity of work and its outcomes. Simple tasks have more equal outcomes: 100 factory workers assembling the same product will not have that much variance in their outcomes: the best performers will only be marginally faster or better. On the other hand, complex tasks have very extreme outcomes in which a few individuals account for the major majority of the value created. For example, if we take 1 billion YouTube content creators, only a tiny fraction of them will generate the majority of the revenue on the platform. We see such extreme outcomes in any complex task: building companies, making music, creating content, writing books, etc. Extreme outcomes don't have room for the average which is why there is no "middle class" for complex work: the average startup, musician, or content creator cannot make a sustainable living through their crafts. They either become quite successful or make little to nothing.