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Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools
Is AI Changing the Game for Education with Robert Danna
00:27:39
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A
AI is changing the game for education. But are we ready for it? Let's find out with today's expert, Bob Dana.
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B
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast where we make AI simple, practical and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated tech talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by Fraction aio, the trusted partner for AI Digital transformation. At Fraction aio, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most, driving growth and results. We guide you through a smooth, seamless transition to AI, ensuring you avoid costy mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let Fraction AIO help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more and get started.
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Fraction AIO.
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Bob, I'm excited to have you here because we talk a lot about AI, but as I see my kids trying to figure out how to do homework and we've seen the struggles before like figuring out if you use a calculator, do you actually know how to use math? And if you use Google, do you actually know how to do research? And now it's this question of if you use AI, do you know anything? So I'm really interested in kind of your passion for helping Gen Z and the younger generation start to figure out how they can use AI as they exit high school, as they enter the workforce and let's just start from there.
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C
That sounds great Jonathan, and thank you so much for, for the invitation to join you. Really looking forward to the conversation today. But yes, I think there's actually a number of different dimensions that are going on now with Gen Z and now Gen Alpha coming up as, as well and certainly I have lived through, I started on slide rules, so I started at the point where it was evolving into calculators and then into computers and then obviously Google, et cetera. It's, it's very interesting that I've seen the full transition including now in, into, into AI and so I think that in each case you've got to be able to, to both adopt the technology and then adapt to what that technology is going to offer and then what the changes are that are going to be appearing that you need to, to, to address. And I think that the key Is to have a real understanding of what AI is bringing to the table and then how to actually integrate it into the whole process of learning. Because it gives even opening up the Internet to students and now giving them the opportunity not to go to a library, to go to find an encyclopedia, to go and look up something. But it's there in at home. I think it's important that just adjust to that.
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A
I think that one of the challenges is that we always want people to do it the way we did. Because I did it the hard way. Like I had to learn how to do microfiche. And you go into the basement of the college library and everything's dusty and you think you're gonna get murdered because it feels like there's no one ever been down there. The lights all turn off. And that experience of looking for an old newspaper, like the really research used to be so hard. Like you put in so much time to find one article or one picture. And I think that especially in America, we have this idea that it has to be hard for it to be valuable. Like that there's something about the journey, right? Like the suffering on the way to success. So I think that's really interesting. And we're seeing a lot right now where a lot of people are hiring younger people and then complaining that they don't work in the same way, they don't have the same expectations, and they're letting them go very quickly. I think there's a lot of challenges with the phase of entering the workforce. I found it really challenging when I graduated from college because you see all these jobs that are entry level, but then they would want you to have three to five years of experience. I was like, that's not what entry means. Entry means. I don't. I just have educational experience. I found it really challenging. And you do that thing where you go to the university room where they say, oh, when you graduate, we'll help you get a job. And they basically said, oh, here's a website where they post jobs. Good luck. And I was like, what? And I looked around the room and realized they were all the graduates who had never succeeded. So they were still there. And it's like, these are the worst people to get advice from. They're all the people who've never left the campus. And that was one of those really big challenges. So I know that getting your first job, especially now where everyone's writing AI resumes. And actually with my company, as we hire people, we're doing almost all referral based hiring because resumes are so untrusted now it's actually handshakes, friendships, and who, you know, again. So what do you think about really, like, what can younger people do to enter the workforce and what should we as hirers be doing to bridge that gap better for them?
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C
Yeah, I think it's actually, Jonathan, going to be a real challenge over the next five to ten years or so, because there's a couple of different dimensions to this kind of AI emergence. Certainly what you're saying, all of those kinds of things stack up. But I think there's another big dimension, and that is that AI is going to take away a lot of the entry level positions. They're going to be replaced by machines, they're going to be replaced by AI. And so that might be as, as technical as being a physician or an accountant or an engineer. Any one of those will certainly be replaced by a robot, an AI doing the job. So now the real question is, is you as a student need to prepare for work life? There's a lot of skills that are not in fact presented as part of your education that you're going to have to build up in order for you to be able to really function in the kind of new world of work. And so I think things like skepticism, curiosity, the ability to continuously learn and pivot to what's new, but also being able to have a consultative kind of attitude. Because if in fact, the AI has taken over all of the mundane elements at the job, the entry level positions, then you're going to have to go in and be able to actually have a customer conversation that is more meaningful than just asking the basic questions that you would have done in that entry level position to get to a point where you now can contribute on a higher level.
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A
I think that's really interesting, I think about the invention of the cotton gin, which for some people, oh, they're replacing all the workers. But you, all it did is make the job easier, and then you had to learn how to operate the cotton gin and you could process more cotton faster. And so it's the same way that AI, it's like I always say, if they're replacing it with robots. So I want to be the robot repairman, I'll be the robot wrangler. There's other opportunities. And one of the challenges is that schools try to guess what skills we need to develop, and they often guess wrong. So my older sister learned how to type on a typewriter. I learned typing on a computer. And then for about 10 years they stopped teaching typing because they said, oh, it's all gonna be touchscreens. And my kids can't believe my computer monitors are not touchscreen. They're always trying to touchscreen the TV because they're so used to touchscreens and they're so shocked that I do everything through a keyboard. So I think that one of the problems we have with technology is that by the time you graduate, the technology has shifted again. So I've seen a lot of courses now where you can do four year course on AI. Imagine if everything I learned about AI right now started four years ago, in 2020, 2021. So much of that would be irrelevant. Like I stuff I was doing three months ago is now no longer current. AI shifting that fast, that there are new developments coming out every few days or at least once a week, that it's a massive market shift. So it's really, that's one of the bigger challenges is that it's changing so fast. There's this pressure to keep up and I think this actually affects every generation. How can I possibly know about AI? Because there's an update every day, a change every day, a tool every day, a major market shift. And I think that puts this additional pressure on young people. You spend all of high school learning AI, and everything you learn, freshman, sophomore, junior year, is no longer relevant by the time you're graduating. So there's this other challenge. So I like what you're talking about. The core skill of adaptability is one of the challenges I have when people ask why I'm good at AI. It's my problem solving methodology. Like I do almost all of my work in a notebook. I write down everything I'm going to do, I draw pictures and then I use the computer. Very, maybe 10% of my work is computerized. The rest of it, the planning, the strategy, the being able to understand when someone says what they want and knowing what they actually mean, that's the skill. So I like what you're talking about here, which is developing these skills of curiosity. We unfortunately have this methodology of teaching, especially in high school, more than college, which here's what happened. This is history, this is the rule, this is the way of doing math. And now there's like new math. My children have, they solved math problems in a different way. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. This is not how I learned math. So they're learning new math, which is like these different ways of getting the answers. And we unfortunately, one of the problems with education in my opinion has always been that it pushes away Curiosity that it doesn't reward asking questions like, sit down, be quiet, there's too many students here. Is there a way that teachers can implement AI to provide maybe more customized learning experience or to bridge this gap of where we've been spent so long decreasing curiosity, we can start increasing it again.
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C
Yeah, I think, in fact, it may not just be implementing AI. AI is the underpinning of the additional kind of tool set that the individuals have to drive this. I think what you were saying earlier on the curiosity. Start teaching logic, the ability to be a skeptic. Ask the questions, don't just accept an answer. Because I think that's one big thing that AI is doing now is the ability to ask, just ask AI and then get an answer and then just accept that answer. And what it's mining is maybe not as, as, as. As accurate as you want. So you want to be able to build in individuals and that's where you want to be able to exercise the. The AI tools is be able to have them do some research with some kind of questions that may in fact give a whole spectrum of different answers depending upon the way that the question is asked, the way that additional questions are asked based on the answers that are given, et cetera, et cetera, and start to build that in a model in school that allows them to be intimate with the AI, but be able to still have that human element of questioning, of logic, of skep skepticism that I think is going to be key to us being able to function moving forward for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
- [11:24]
A
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I'm always thinking about. People always ask me, like, do I think my kids are going to take over my job? And I'm like, the one thing I know they don't want to do is whatever daddy does. Like, we never want to do what our parents do. It's like they. I try to. My mindset is I want my kids to have enough skills that they can do what they want to do when they hit. Like, my job is to get them to 18 to have them have the right skills. So that's why if they want to learn music, great. Because I have friends who are very successful musicians. You can with anything, whether it's drawing or programming, there's always opportunities there. But it's the other skills that go by because like, sometimes it's the ability to endure the hard times that's the most valuable skill. Right. The not giving up. Because a lot of bands, I'm always fascinated by bands that people say they're an overnight success. I was like, haven't they been a band for eight years? Yeah, that's the longest. There's these we always discount. Like, there was a lot of struggle. Like, people sometimes they say, oh, wow, you've built your business overnight. I'm like, I lived on my friend's couch for 18 months. It's a long night. So I think that these other skills that we sometimes let go of a lot of the things that we used to teach in high school, like home economics and shop and metalworking, like, so useful. I was like, we graduate from high school now no one knows how to balance a checkbook. My kids don't even know what a checkbook is. And you don't know how to do these kind of critical life skills that you just are supposed to just figure it out. But they'll give you a credit card, you're 18, but you don't really understand what it means. And then you suddenly have problems. So I think that maybe the step back of looking at what are. We don't know what technology is going to be in 10 years, but we know the core skills that are consistent. One of the challenges, I lead a large team of engineers. The biggest problem that I have because every single time someone from one of the other teams, like marketing or the executive team talks to one of my engineers, there's always a problem because one, they're one of them speaking in pictures and one of them speaking in numbers. The engineers are engineers because they're not. They don't like talking to people and they just. That's the way it is, right? Programmers like to be alone. And there's this. And a lot of people, especially programmers or scientists, they struggle in their careers because they don't have the soft skills, which is chatting to other people, understanding what other people want, problem solving. And.
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This is one of the big things that happens. A lot of times when an engineer gets promoted to management or cto. Now they have to lead a team. And it's solving the problem without.
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Programming yourself is really a challenge. And one of my worries, and this is the biggest worry, is like, in the same way that social media really messes up people's, like, social skills and communication skills and you have these parasocial relationships. I see now people forming relationships with artificial intelligences where, like, an AI is their best friend or an AI is their boyfriend or girlfriend, and, like, it stunts their growth even more. And it's. I'm very mature, I use a lot of technology, but, like, I'm an Person AI is my work. I don't use it in my personal life. I don't like social media, I don't like the Internet. It's my job. People can never believe that. Yeah, it's my job. So when I'm not working, I am not playing on the computer like it's my job. But how do you think we can.
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Help people to develop these healthy skills? Because we're seeing a lot of these really and I'm not, maybe I'm not saying it, but like these social development challenges or like ability to connect with people or to have a, like to problem solve. Like when you have to work with someone you don't like, how do you solve that problem? When you have to work on a project, your boss gives you a project that you think is silly, but you have to do it because the boss is the boss.
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C
These are challenges, big challenges, and they're going to get even more significant, not less significant because like I said, I think that the technology, when it starts to take away more of the mundane, it really requires the core skill being the ability to interact with people. Because at that point that's probably not what the machine is going to be able to do for a long time. I think the other thing, Jonathan is actually starting to do quite a bit of mentoring for Gen Z over the last few years. And I think one of the big things that really is resonating with them is the concept of their career. And it's exactly what you're saying. Because I've had a 50 year career and so I've seen enormous changes and I've evolved from a physicist and engineer and IT and senior management in organizations, they're going to have 60 or 70 year careers. The model that I actually lay out is a career lattice because in fact you can't even conceive of what your career or in particular what your job is going to be 15 years from now. I have no idea. Okay. Everything is going to change. So you do have to have all of those core skills in order for you to be able to succeed in the future. That's going to be the key, is if you don't have those core skills and you're doing your job very well, the likelihood is you're going to have a very hard time succeeding in the future when you're going to have to evolve. And if you don't have those core skills, evolving is going to be very difficult.
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I think that some of the most important skills I learned when I was younger is like adaptability, realizing you're capable of more than you think and enduring adversity. And we've seen this shift in education where we try to remove all adversity, where it's like, everyone gets a trophy, there's no more dodgeball. And.
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I was not good at any of those things. I was terrible at any of those things. But I still felt. I still felt like you have to do things that are hard to get stronger if you never do anything that's hard. Like, I was talking to someone earlier today. It's like when someone says the worst thing that's ever happened to them as a comment on social media, I say, what a blessed life. That's the worst thing that's ever happened. I wish. I can't imagine if the worst thing that ever happened to me. Right. Like, I've had real life things happen. And that's the thing is you have these real life challenges. And that's really. I think one of the things that's missing, we're shifting so far in this direction of like, we don't want our kids to ever have any challenges is then when they're adults, they're not ready for them. And it's this ability to adapt that I think the most valuable skill, because I would have never thought even six months ago that I'm doing what I'm doing right now. I would have never. There's this mistake I think a lot of people make that we look at someone else and we think similar to I mentioned overnight success earlier, is that we think their first idea was a winner. Oh, this People look at this podcast. He's. A lot of podcasts take 10 years to catch on. Or I know people who spend 15 years before something hits and we look at them and go, oh, it's so easy. They are. They're an industry plant. I'm like, that's the worst plant I've ever seen. Took them 15 years. There's this. We misassess other people's journeys. We say overnight success or it was super easy or that they didn't. That it's. And that we don't. We discount our adaptability. We don't flex that muscle, which is to do things outside your comfort zone, do things that are difficult, do things that are. You're not going to be good at. I learn more from my failures than from my successes. Like, I have friends who, their first idea did work and when the second idea doesn't, it's brutal because they didn't realize that there's a struggle. So now it's even Harder. When you've had a success, you go, oh, success is easy. And then that business fails, and then suddenly you have to start a new one. And it's so hard for. I guess I'm lucky that my first ten ideas all failed. So how can we teach adversity in a way that, like, is not traumatizing? That's the line we try to navigate. Right. Where they learn adversity without actually suffering. Is there a way to do that?
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C
No. Yeah, I. I do believe there is a way to do that. And I think the key is to be able to explain the journey. I think the journey is a way more interesting story to tell. Where right now in everything you see the kind of morning shows are talking about successes and everything is. It looks like it's easy. It looks like all you had to do was be in the right place at the right time, and there you are now, multimillionaire world traveler, et cetera, et cetera. It's just, that's not the journey that the vast majority of individuals. So having kind of role models, having stories that describe the journey and some of those things where all of those challenges are explored in more detail, maybe even role played, I think would be really helpful for individuals to understand. And lives of individuals are, in fact, long journeys to get to where they are and where they will be still in the future.
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A
Yeah. We just created this shift to where everyone wants to be rich and everyone wants to be rich fast. And like, sometimes you ask people, like, what do you think the average income is? And they say, half a million dollars. And I'm like, that's not average. Are you like, when I was a kid.
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Making $36,000 a year was, like, amazing. And I'm sure even before then it was less. Right. Because money's always changing. But it's like our idea of. I think there's also this shift that is like, what will make you happy is not what you think. Everyone thinks it's stuff. And to an extent. Right. Having your bills paid, having air conditioning, having food. Yeah. But once you cross a certain line where you don't have financial stress, there's a lot of super rich people that are super unhappy. Like, one of the things that a lot of the people I mentor, they say, oh, this person's my. This billionaire is my hero. I'm like, that person had a massive divorce. Their kids hate them so much, they change their names. Is that a price you're willing to pay? Like, I do not want to be so wealthy that my kids hate me so that's one of my calibrations, right? Is that.
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I. You want to admire people whose entire lives you want. We make this mistake of just admiring one portion of a person's life, though they're really good at one thing. It's do you want all the rest that comes with it? Do you want the family? Do you want the health problems, all these other things. And we sometimes skip over that because we again, ignore the journey. Especially we're shifting more and more to shorter and shorter movies and forms of content and 7 seconds of this and 4 seconds of that. And I think that's where we miss the other part. Like I'm just as guilty of this, right? There's like the version of me I present to the world when I'm telling the story of my financial journey. And you always tell one version of the story, right? And there's different versions that are truth, but you, that are both true. But you tell the version that there's the version you tell to your audience because you want to inspire them. But then there's a different version I tell to my kids and a different version you tell to other people. Just like I talk to you differently than I talk to my kids. It'll be weird if I talk to you the same way I talk to a four year old. That would be really weird that we sometimes forget that we talk to different people in different ways. And so we have to pay attention to not just who's talking, but who are they talking to? Because that changes the story.
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C
Yeah, but I think that is exactly right, Jonathan. But I think the storytelling is just such a critical part. I grew up, I was born in 51, so I grew up in the 50s and 60s. Neither of my parents graduated high school. I come from, from Italian immigrants who came over in the early 1900s. Be able to talk about that whole journey. One of the first to go to college, et cetera, and then physicist working for the, for the US Navy as a Naval officer. How do you even think about that as a kid? Unless you hear multiple stories of multiple individuals who did not make it overnight, who are not multimillionaires or multi billionaires, who in fact have very full and happy lives. They don't even, they don't even know what that, that feels like. Other than yourself, your wife, a couple of your friends, maybe, et cetera, very closed community. So the more that we can bring in these other stories and actually have them celebrated as part of kind of whole education process, I think is critically important these days and even more important than it probably has ever been.
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A
Yeah, I think that's really the key. I think that one of the challenges as well is that, like, we have. We've shifted to where both parents work. So more and more we rely more and more on teachers and education to fill in that gap. Like, my wife doesn't work. My kids are very fortunate. Like, they're very fortunate that Mommy's home all the time. It's like really something that was really. I worked for. It was really important to me. But so often we. One of the things that's really interesting is that there's been all these studies about how when you are in daycare, you develop less of a sense of self or sense of ego because you're on the playground and no one's watching you. They're watching all of kids but you. It affects your sense of, like, confidence and specialness. And there's these little things that we don't realize they're so important because we're sometimes chasing technology and advancement so much. We're trying all these different ideas that sometimes we skip past the basics. So I think you're very much onto something here. This is really valuable. I know that my audience is going to love this because as much as our listeners are passionate about AI and their executives, most of us have kids and we want to prepare them for the future. So for people who want to learn more about what you're doing, Bob, see some of the things you're doing online and some of the things, really cool things you're doing for the younger generations, where can they find you online and just learn about what you're doing?
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C
Sure. I've got a website, mycuriouslife.net so I just published my memoir last year, and so I've tried to capture a lot of my kind of learning and insights and, and. And all of that on my website. So again, mycuriouslife.net would probably be the place to go. And then secondly, you can find me either Bob Dana or Robert Danna on, on LinkedIn, certainly link to me on LinkedIn. And then actually if you just Google me. So, Bob Dana, my Curious Life. If you just put that in, what you'll find is a number of other podcasts and radio shows and keynotes that I've done that I think, also tries to inform the audiences around this whole concept of curiosity, continuous learning. But even more, I do try to aim it at the Gen Zs kids in high school, all the way through college and now probably into their late twenties when they've actually started working, they're now got some career background. That's who I'm aiming to speak to because at this point I'm retired and my mission in life is to to try to capture and distill and then communicate as many of these stories as as much as I can to that Gen Z in order for they to really understand what they're facing for the next 50, 60, 70 years of their careers. And they're not going to have one job that that is going to be what they're going to focus on for the next 60 years. It's in fact going to be a journey. What does that look like? And then what do they need to do to prepare for that journey as a young person?
- [26:52]
A
Amazing. So I'll make sure to put those links in the show notes and below the video so that everyone has access this thank you so much for your time. This has been another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
- [27:04]
B
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- [27:37]
A
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