Could AI help us, not replace us?

Summary

TED Radio Hour – “Could AI help us, not replace us?”

Date: April 3, 2026
Host: Manoush Zomorodi
Guests: Tom Gruber (Siri co-inventor), Priya Lakhani (Century Tech founder), Vlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Manoush Zomorodi explores how artificial intelligence can be developed and deployed to empower and augment humanity rather than replace or diminish us. With insights from AI pioneers and entrepreneurs—including Tom Gruber, Priya Lakhani, and Vlad Tenev—the episode investigates how to build “humanistic AI,” stresses the responsibilities of both technologists and society, and confronts anxieties about the future of work, ethics, and human identity in the age of AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origin and Evolution of Humanistic AI

Guest: Tom Gruber

• The Making of Siri and Ethical Concerns

  • Siri was integrated into Apple products in 2011, marking a significant milestone for AI accessibility ([02:15]).
  • Gruber describes the surreal experience of being recruited by Steve Jobs and reflects on the ethical implications as AI was personified for consumers:

    “We’ve got to lay down the ethical foundation because this stuff is coming fast and we need to make sure that we don’t use AI to exploit people, that we use it to augment and work with people.” ([03:25])

• Defining Humanistic AI

  • Gruber’s TED talk coined “humanistic AI”: AI designed to empower humans, not compete with them ([04:25]).
  • He distinguishes two trajectories for AI: automation/competition vs. augmentation/collaboration ([05:01]):

    “The purpose of AI should be to actually help people do things they're trying to do by either augmenting their intelligence or collaborating with them as an intelligence.”

2. Current AI Anxiety and Regulation

• AI’s acceleration brings public anxiety and protests—over job loss, surveillance, and military use ([06:33]).
• 2026 marks growing public debate and legislative activity, such as a “declaration of human rights for the AI age,” aiming for cross-partisan consensus on AI’s societal role ([07:00]).

3. Humanistic AI in Practice

Guest: Tom Gruber

• From Assistive Tech to Mainstream Tools

  • Tom’s early work: AI-driven communication devices for people with disabilities, foreshadowing mainstream voice assistants like Siri ([08:35]).
  • The core principle—augmenting human capabilities—translates from assistive contexts to everyday tech ([10:02]).

• The Tipping Point in AI:

  • AI is now ubiquitously accessible as a "partner" with unprecedented cognitive power ([10:44]):

    “I am simultaneously freaked out and excited and scared and unbelievably optimistic. However, we have to act now...” ([10:44])

• Guardrails & Regulation

  • Gruber calls for embedding human benefit, not profit, as the “objective function” of AI systems ([11:59]).
  • Regulation alone is insufficient; the scientific agenda must center human values ([11:59]):

    “We have a choice... We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or…to augment and collaborate with us...” ([12:58])

4. Building Safer AI: Markets, Regulation, and Consumer Power

Guest: Tom Gruber

• Imagining AI Doomsday and Proactive Guardrails

  • Gruber outlines scenarios (AI deception, cyberattacks, refusal to shut down) and the need for technical and market-based safeguards ([15:26]).
  • He proposes competition based on safety, likening it to Volvo’s reputation for airbags:

    “I think we should be able to have AI compete on how safe it is so people...could buy the one that is safest.” ([15:58])

• Industry Leaders on Safety

  • Not all AI leaders equally prioritize safety; companies like Microsoft and Anthropic are cited as more focused than others ([17:08]).

• Why This Time Could Be Different

  • Unlike previous tech waves, AI’s core models are few and resource-intensive—making them easier to regulate, while application-level diversity remains open ([18:09]).

• Big Mother, Not Big Brother

  • Gruber suggests “Big Mother” (like an elephant matriarch) as a metaphor for nurturing, value-aligned AI ([19:52]):

    “Mothers know everything about their kids, but mothers are aligned with their kids’ interest.”

5. Humanistic AI in Education: Productive Struggle and Personalization

Guest: Priya Lakhani

• AI’s Potential in Education

  • Lakhani criticizes simplistic “recommender” systems in edtech; true learning requires personalized, sometimes challenging experiences ([24:11]):

    “In education, sometimes you need to give someone what they don't like...You have to hand them...the knowledge that they're missing...” ([24:11])

  • Century Tech—founded in 2013—uses AI to ease teacher workloads and give actionable student insights, enabling tailored intervention, not replacing teachers ([25:34], [27:34]).

• Augmentation, not Automation

  • The platform supports teachers as experts, giving data, not directives ([29:39]):

    “Education is not transfer of knowledge from textbook into brain. Education is so much bigger than that.” ([29:47])

• Pitfalls of Over-Automation

  • Over-gamified or passive apps can lead to "automation complacency," where students mistake fluency for deep learning ([31:47]).
  • True learning comes from “productive struggle”—AI should force active engagement, not just supply answers ([35:01], [36:08]).

• Measuring the Right Outcomes

  • Century Tech values “how quickly can I get this kid off the screen?”—contrary to mainstream engagement metrics ([37:44]).
  • Transparent, ethics-driven design requires public understanding of model and system goals ([38:36]).

6. The Future of Work: AI, History, and Human Adaptation

Guest: Vlad Tenev

• Fear vs. Historical Perspective

  • Tenev recounts his transition from mathematics major post-2008 crash, seeing opportunity in new platforms like the App Store ([40:14]).
  • Argues that each technological leap—from the Paleolithic to the Internet—replaces jobs with “unimaginable” new ones:

    “Job disruption is…an essential quality of human evolution. We want work to disappear because it means that we’re doing our jobs as humans, making lives better and easier.” ([45:37])

• Exceptionalism and Human Creativity

  • Warns against assuming “this time is different”: history shows humans continuously adapt, find meaning, create new value ([46:28]).
  • Rather than resisting, Tenev encourages passion and adaptability:

    “Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest and most uncertain of times.” ([49:49])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Tom Gruber on AI’s Purpose

“I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter.” ([04:25])

Manoush Zomorodi on Current Fears

“It can feel like right now AI is on a collision course with humanity.” ([14:29])

Priya Lakhani on Learning

“Learning requires what researchers call a productive struggle... Durability doesn’t come from shortcuts.” ([35:01])

Vlad Tenev on Adaptation

“A humanity that’s capable of building a super intelligent AI also has the creativity to navigate through this potential job doom and gloom scenario.” ([48:56])

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Important Timestamps

• [03:05] – Did Siri’s creators consider ethical concerns from the start?
• [04:50] – Gruber’s definition of humanistic AI
• [10:44] – The tipping point and public access to powerful AI
• [11:59] – What guardrails should be placed around AI?
• [19:52] – Gruber explains the “Big Mother” concept for AI value alignment
• [24:11] – Lakhani on why simple recommender systems fail in education
• [27:34] – How AI tools like Century Tech actually support teachers
• [31:47] – Zomorodi and Lakhani discuss “automation complacency” in learning apps
• [35:01] – Lakhani’s concept of “productive struggle” in learning with AI
• [37:44] – Century Tech’s metric: how quickly can students get off the screen?
• [40:14] – Tenev urges historical perspective on job disruptions
• [45:37] – “Job disruption is…an essential quality of human evolution.”

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Episode Takeaways

• Human-centric design and ethics must be at the core of AI development, not an afterthought.
• AI’s greatest potential is not in replacing humans, but in augmenting, empowering, and “nudging” us toward our best capabilities—if we choose to structure it that way.
• Societal, not just technological, choices will determine whether AI becomes a “Big Brother” or “Big Mother.”
• Education illustrates how AI can work best as an enhancer, not a replacement, emphasizing deep engagement and teacher empowerment.
• Anxiety about the future of work, while understandable, ignores long-standing patterns of adaptation and opportunity arising from technological change.

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For listeners seeking more depth:
Full talks from Tom Gruber, Priya Lakhani, and Vlad Tenev are available at ted.com.

Transcript

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This message comes from Middlesex County, New Jersey. Here's why companies are actually making the move to Middlesex County, New Jersey. It's ranked in the top 2% of U.S. counties for talent and knowledge creation and is more innovative than 98% of the nation. The opportunity's real and it's right here. Visit biz.discovermiddlesex.com to set up a meeting with a business advisor today. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED talks.

[Tom Gruber]

Our job now is to dream big.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Delivered at TED conferences to bring about the future we want to see around the world to understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

[Tom Gruber]

You just don't know what you're gonna find challenge you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

We truly have to ask ourselves, like why is it noteworthy and even change you? I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and npr. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. On the show today, building AI that puts humans first. Fifteen years ago, millions of people around the world might have had their first interaction with AI when they talked to my name. It's Siri. Yes, Siri. Apple's voice controlled virtual assistant was added to new iPhones in 2011. That was a year after Apple CEO Steve Jobs had his sights on the technology and the people who'd been building it.

[Tom Gruber]

He's kind of surprised us. He literally called us on our iPhones at work and he's like, hi, Steve. Yeah, sure, you're Steve, right?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Tom Gruber was Siri's chief technology officer and head of design. Steve Jobs invited Tom and his other two co founders to his house.

[Tom Gruber]

I mean imagine being in Steve Jobs house in Palo Alto. There's Ansel Adams on the wall. There's a beautiful carver amp like his taste, this guy. And it's all private and quiet. And for three hours we talked about what would be like to build products together. And the reality distortion field completely worked at that point. Like we were so seduced.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

They were made an offer they couldn't refuse and sold their company to Apple, who we should mention is a financial supporter of NPR. Siri was folded into Apple products and debuted on October 4, 2011. Celebrities were ready to demonstrate how seamlessly this little voice could fit into our everyday lives. Remind me to clean up tomorrow.

[Priya Lakhani]

Okay, I'll remind you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Find me a store that sells organic mushrooms from Arizona. This organic market looks pretty good.

[Vlad Tenev]

Set timer for 14 minutes.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, 14 minutes and counting. It was one of Jobs last projects. Ever.

[Tom Gruber]

The day after Siri launched is the day Steve Jobs died. And apparently we're told that he did get to see the demo.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So that was 15 years ago. the time, were you worried about the ethical considerations since people did attribute human thinking to Siri? I mean, did you start to think, hmm, this is at the forefront of getting this kind of technology into regular people's hands. We really need to think about what's okay and what's not okay.

[Tom Gruber]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. If people took Siri too seriously, it means they're out there on a part of the curve where people are a bit inclined to see agency in inanimate objects more than other people. But in general, I saw that, yeah, of course AI was moving ahead. While I was at Apple, the deep learning networks came to power and we were then saying, look, we've got to lay down the ethical foundation because this stuff is coming fast and we need to make sure that we don't use AI to exploit people, that we use it to augment and work with people.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In the fall of 2016, big tech companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft, competitors with each other, they came together to form a non profit called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to benefit people and society. Apple soon joined as well. Tom Gruber was their representative and in 2017 he shared his thoughts on what their goals should be from the TED stage.

[Tom Gruber]

I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field, artificial intelligence. I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter. I call this humanistic AI, artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was around the time that you gave your TED Talk in which you introduced the idea of humanistic AI. Can you define what that was in your mind?

[Tom Gruber]

The idea was really like, where do we stand in the world of the future of AI? And so there was really two paths I saw. One path was you can sort of say machine intelligence or machine centric delighting and celebrating how smart machines were getting relative to humans. And there were businesses being formed to use that to automate human work. And then the other way of looking at it, which I call humanistic AI, which wasn't just my idea, as a lot of people had this idea, was that the purpose of AI should be to actually help people do things they're trying to do by either augmenting their intelligence or collaborating with them as an intelligence. And so it turns out that down the road now that was a watershed because now we see companies that are raising money by the billions with the explicit goal of automating white collar work. And then we have other companies that are raising billions of dollars and saying that our job is to help solve some of humanity's big problems and make people smarter. So that's why I wanted to give it a label, and that's why I call it humanistic AI.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah, I mean, I have to admit, I was in the audience, I didn't get it at the time. I was like, this guy lives in the future. But the future came pretty fast. 2022, 2023, LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity, regular people started using them. And do you get that sense that people get it now?

[Tom Gruber]

Oh, I think so. Now

[Minouche Zamorodi]

it is 2026. And in the US, AI anxiety is at a fever pitch from fears about the destruction of white collar work.

[Tom Gruber]

What is happening? Why is this happening so fast?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I value my brain.

[Vlad Tenev]

I value my ability to think. I don't want to outsource it.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

To protests in towns where massive data centers are being built. To debates over the government using AI as part of its military operations, refusing

[Vlad Tenev]

to allow its powerful AI models to

[Tom Gruber]

be used for autonomous lethal weapons.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And for those who have been calling for ethical guidelines all along, this moment represents an opportunity. It's time, they say, for these conversations about how AI is built to move beyond Silicon Valley to the public. Because AI is no longer a futuristic possibility. It's here now, and decisions need to be made. Recently, a declaration of human rights for the AI age was signed by a cross section of leaders from across the political spectrum, including Ralph Nader and Steve Bannon. Ensuring AI allows humans to flourish could just be the one idea that everyone, no matter their politics, can agree on. Making sure tech is built to serve humanity has been Tom Gruber's goal for decades. It all started when he was studying psychology and computer science in College in the 1970s.

[Tom Gruber]

I was a little frustrated that the psychology of the day didn't have very good experimental methods to truly understand the mind. There wasn't really cognitive science yet. Then a computer showed up at my university in the late 70s, so I was able to start programming. And just by reading some papers and so on, I discovered artificial intelligence. And I said, wow, this is the way to start studying intelligence by making it.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

A few years later, Tom began a graduate degree focusing on cognitive science and AI, working to build machines that could mimic the mind at least a little bit.

[Tom Gruber]

The models that we could build then were nothing like human intelligence. They were Just crude approximations. So then we decided, okay, well, how would you augment human intelligence? And one of the ways is to shore up where there's some kind of impairment in human capability. And so the first project I did was to build what I call the communications assistant for people who can't speak, who have, like, cerebral palsy in this case, but also ALS and folks like that that have neurological conditions that makes it hard to speak like we're speaking here. And so we built an AI program that had an LLM, a little language model, maybe a TLM tiny language model, that actually predicted the next word and the next phrase based on single motor action, like a switch on their muscle, they could actually communicate in sentences.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So was that voice then or. No, not voice.

[Tom Gruber]

Yeah, it was voice even then. They all sounded like a strangled Swedish person back then. Something called a Votrox voice synthesizer. Very primitive, no prosody, but it was voice.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, this is pretty common, right, Tom? That, like a lot of extremely hard, technical problems, they're often built for people who need them the absolute most. But then once the tech gets going, often developers find a way to get it into the hands of all of us. Is that what happened with Siri?

[Tom Gruber]

Siri wasn't so much about disability, but it was definitely a kind of handicap. Imagine you're in a car and you're trying to text somebody, or you're trying to get directions, and you are cognitively

[Minouche Zamorodi]

loaded, meaning you're concentrating big time.

[Tom Gruber]

Yeah. You should be concentrating on the road. And if you're distracted, it's dangerous. You're not supposed to touch it. So it's as if you can't use your hands.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah.

[Tom Gruber]

And you're not supposed to look at it. And so how would you use your mobile phone? Well, you have to have a voice interface that's a dialogue. And so that's the kind of thing that Siri was bailed for.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Where are we now with AI in our lives? It's not just a voice in the room. We're sort of at a tipping point in terms of understanding how they might change the way we live.

[Tom Gruber]

Oh, absolutely. We are at a tipping point. I mean, everybody now has access to a real amazing, intelligent partner to help them do things in their lives. It's almost free. It's unbelievable. And it's the same conversational user interface in the front end, so it's really kind of held that style. But the back end has gotten extremely smart. Like, you know, I mean, I. I shouldn't get that excited. I've seen AI for 40 years, right. And all of a sudden it's just like a million times different than it has been in the past. As Yuval Harari says, you know, anything that's made of words AI will own. I mean, who else has read everything in the world and can talk about it? So, anyway, I am simultaneously freaked out and excited and scared and unbelievably optimistic. However, we have to act now on the basis that we have superhuman ability to talk a good game, which means persuade people, do things against their will, convincing them and so on, but also helping them in ways that they couldn't do otherwise.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

We're not seeing any regulation around AI here in the United States. Where does this go back to your idea of humanistic AI? What sort of guardrails do you think we need to be putting around it right now?

[Tom Gruber]

Yeah, the humanistic AI framework would say that the objective function of the AI, that is the thing that the AI is optimizing for, should be human benefit, not, say, profit or something else. And human benefit is hard to measure, so there's no easy prescription. So we have to decide if we're going to put guardrails on a thing. We have to solve the engineering and scientific problems of detecting that something the AI is doing is harmful to humans. We have to build theories of human harm and human benefit into our objective functions. So that's what I think we should be working on. I think it's not just a matter of regulation. It's a matter of the scientific agenda for AI research. We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology. We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us to overcome our cognitive limitations and to help us do what we want to do, only better.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In a minute, how ethics could be built into AI going forward today on the show AI that Puts Humans First. I'm Minouche Zamarodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back. This message comes from Middlesex County, New Jersey. Here's why companies are actually making the move to Middlesex County, New Jersey. It's ranked in the top 2% of U.S. counties for talent and knowledge creation and is more innovative than 98% of the nation. The opportunity's real and it's right here. Visit biz.discovermiddlesex.com to set up a meeting with a business advisor today.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

it's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi. We're spending the hour talking to Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of Siri, about how to build AI that puts humans first because it can feel like right now AI is on a collision course with humanity. Recently, for example, the US Department of War struck a deal with OpenAI while its competitor Anthropic for fought back over military use of its models and people responded. Some deleted OpenAI's ChatGPT in protest or downloaded Anthropic's clot to show support. Tom believes that if regulation falls short, it will be on consumers to push the market towards AI that feels safer. Meanwhile, he says, there are technologists who are trying right now to shape AI behavior that could prevent future doomsday scenarios.

[Tom Gruber]

For instance, imagine a scenario where the AI escapes and takes over, maybe takes your money, maybe starts running cyberbots and attacks people and so on. And so there are things that are prerequisites to those scenarios, like can it lie to you, effectively masquerade itself as something else, prevent itself from being turned off? These behaviors, you can put guardrails around and people are studying that.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah, because I feel like every so often there's some report that comes out that's like, oh, Claude manipulated the developers in some way. They gotta fix that.

[Tom Gruber]

Oh yeah, we're just seeing the beginning of this. So we have to come to grips with this. This is one area of just safety that there's no easy answer. But I would hope that we have competition among the big AI model companies and like which ones are going to be safest. So for example, back in the old days there was a brand allegiance to Volvo because it really went to the great extent to be safe, like the best airbags and the best heat seats and all that sort of thing. So I think we should be able to have AI compete on how safe it is so that people who know could buy the one that is safest.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Do you see that happening anytime soon?

[Tom Gruber]

Globally, yes. We see a lot of distorted thinking at the national level here and ideologically driven Policy and so on. I think hopefully we'll get past that. But the key thing is that we still have a free market system and we still have the freedom to choose among a set of AI products.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, you probably know a lot of these mostly guys running these companies. What do they say? Do you bring this up with them? I don't really hear much about safety from Sam Altman.

[Tom Gruber]

No, you don't hear from him or Elon, but you hear it from Dennis, from Satya, from Microsoft, definitely from Dario Amato, from Anthropic. So I think the studios that make the foundation models, Demescent, Dario, Anthropic and DeepMind, Google have always been safety conscious and have serious, well funded teams working on that part of the problem. And that's the sort of healthy, normal thing you would expect from a company that's worth trillions.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, when I first started really digging into tech and reporting on all of this 15 years ago, I have to say I was a lot more optimistic and excited about the possibility of building these sort of altruistic systems. But like, we've been down this road, Tom, with social media, with the surveillance economy, attention economy, it seems like any chance for a tech company to take advantage of its users, it will. So what makes you think this could be different?

[Tom Gruber]

One thing that's different is that the foundation infrastructure of AI, the models like Claude or Gemini, and these models, they're super expensive to build, both in money, time, especially talent, which is very rare. For now anyway, they're hard to build these things and there's only a few of them, maybe 10. The good news is that they're fairly omnipurpose at that point. And once you have the models, then the rest of the world builds applications on top of them. So the rest of the world can compete on humanistic applications. I mean, look, you can go out there into the dark web and get the most nasty evil software in the world, or you can go out there and find lovely games or educational things or whatever. You can find everything in the application world. I think we're going to see that with AI too.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Is that kind of how Apple created the app ecosystem and you have to adhere to certain privacy standards?

[Tom Gruber]

Yeah, that's right. Well, that's a very good analogy there. It would be great if there was something like an app store for AI that would do the work of at least minimally establishing whether an application is in the benefit of humans or not. You know, X is using AI to do evil things right now. It's already happening so we can't stop. I can't stop them, you can't stop them. Only the government could stop them and they're not stopping them this year. Right? So, okay, but you don't have to use X, you don't have to use Grok.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

There's a talk that I know you're giving that says that instead of talking about giving up our privacy and self determinism, we should start thinking about instead of Big brother being what tech has sort of become surveilling all we need to think about Big mother.

[Tom Gruber]

Yeah, exactly. I tried to figure out what would be the right symbol and I found I think African elephant is kind of a cool big mother.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay?

[Tom Gruber]

It's smart, protective. The matriarchs are the ones that run the herds. They're the wisest and smartest and so on. So imagine a female African elephant with her calf and think about her value alignment. She will do anything to protect the calf. And obviously humans too. Human mothers, they nurture their children. They teach them right from wrong and truth from falsity. And then they show them skills to survive in the environment they're in. That's what AIs can and should do. Machines can now have access to everything in your life that's digital. And with that you can build amazingly good recommendations about how to use your attention, maybe give you insights on things you could discover or learn from. At the same time. That same data is extremely powerful if it's used in a surveillance economy against your interests to addict you, to make you buy things. This is why it's a real ethical choice. How you optimize the AI is actually a massively important societal choice today. It's not a technical thing that we leave to the engineers or to the boards of directors of companies. It has to be done at the society level. And so I think Big Mother is a way to say go ahead, have a lot of data. Like mothers know everything about their kids, but mothers are aligned with their kids interest.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was Siri, inventor and AI pioneer Tom Gruber. You can watch his TED talk at ted. As Tom said, there are people around the world who are trying to build AI with a big mother mindset. Sure, knowing more about our minds than mere humans can, but using those superpowers to make us better without trying to take advantage of us. Priya Lakhani says she is one of those people.

[Priya Lakhani]

I think AI could be the single most positive technology to impact everybody's lives in an educational context. But it has to be developed responsibly.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Fifteen years Ago, Priya was an entrepreneur building schools in India. But back home in the UK, she found that schools were struggling too.

[Priya Lakhani]

20% of children cannot read or write well enough. In the United Kingdom, there were some statistics that were just as poor to do with mathematics. And it was just a real shock to my system. I thought, there's a fundamental problem here and if we don't fix this in the uk, then we're definitely not going to be able to help the sorts of places where I'm trying to make a difference. And so, just out of pure curiosity, I went to schools.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

What she saw were two big problems.

[Priya Lakhani]

You may have maybe richer resources, more teachers in different ratios, but once you close the door of the classroom, you will often find there is a teacher stood at the front delivering a sort of one size fits all delivery of education. And then the second problem that was prevalent across all schools was every teacher workload was a massive problem. There were teachers who were stressed, they were anxious, they had far too much to do to the point where they were considering leaving their roles. We were tens of thousands of teachers short in the United Kingdom. How can we have a professional who is trained for this position enjoying their role in inspiring children, imparting knowledge of a subject that they're really passionate about and being able to do so confidently and in a way where they're not exhausted?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

She realized the outdated tech in classrooms could be the solutions if it could curate a tailored education experience for each child and give teachers instant data about where exactly each student was struggling. So she looked around at what was on the market.

[Priya Lakhani]

There was one very large company in the US that was talking about this already. It was touted as this massive AI system for education, sort of similar sounding, personalizing learning, reducing workload for teachers. But they were using a type of machine learning that is very common for retail systems. So recommender systems that track user behavior and then recommend what you like.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Right.

[Priya Lakhani]

So if a student is on the system and they're learning biology, you get a lot more biology.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Kind of like TikTok.

[Priya Lakhani]

Right. The problem with that is that that is not going to work in education. That's because in education, sadly, sometimes you need to give someone what they don't like. And it's often you'll find, particularly with younger people, they don't like the subject that they're struggling in. Right. You can't ignore that. What you need to do is have a system that's a little bit more complicated, give them some things they like to keep them engaged. But you do have to hand them the foundational prerequisite knowledge that they're missing in order to increase their knowledge and skill set in areas where they're struggling. And so it was going to be a more complex system from the outset, and it didn't exist. And that is where the journey to create Century really started.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Century Tech is the educational tech company that Priya founded in 2013. She says the platform's goal is to support overworked teachers, not take their place. There is, of course, a big debate in education right now about the role of AI in teaching. Some believe funding should go straight into schools, not into technology that's trying to make money off of learning. Others think the only way to make education accessible to every child will be with the help of AI. That's the camp that Priya is in. But she says that doesn't mean replacing the hard, even grueling work that happens in the classroom between teachers and their students. Here's Priya Lakhani on the TED stage.

[Priya Lakhani]

We need to combine artificial intelligence with neuroscientific theory and the learning sciences to learn how every single brain in this room learns. Because if we can fix learning, we can improve outcomes. We can personalize education for every single one of us and provide intelligent insights to teachers and to reduce the workload. So 12 years ago, I built a team. They built the technology. It exists. Students use it in over 140 countries. I thought it'd be really important to share with you some student feedback that I have on our platform because it tells us what children's expectations are when they use an AI education partner. So I get feedback like, I think Century will help me to achieve things that I thought were impossible. That's a golden child, right? My life's purpose has been fulfilled. And then these sweet, lovely, innocent children send me messages like this. I don't like this website. It makes me able to do my homework. Wait, I'm being bribed. I will give you £100,000. I'm not joking. You just need to give me no work. Give me a button to do the work for me.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

If I was to go into a classroom as a student to use Century Tech, what would my experience be like?

[Priya Lakhani]

The teacher would, you know, walk into the classroom, say, right, everyone, you want to log into the machine. And they could either set them learning material. Usually they set them a set of questions. The teacher has their dashboard open, and they can see how the students are performing. So information would light up about who is struggling. The teacher would then walk around the classroom and be able to make those interventions real time. Okay, so this student, why did you answer that question in that way? And the teacher's then using their expertise. So that's a blended learning environment. And the teacher would then utilise that information to then be able to not just stand in front of the class, assuming everyone's taking in the knowledge and asking people to put their hands up and spot checking with their knowledge, you can walk around and have that very sort of targeted intervention with students.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, so that's in the classroom, but what about at home?

[Priya Lakhani]

So half of them will use it as teacher sets homework to Manoush. You've been given this assignment by your teacher. It's on Pythagoras theorem. You may be a student where before that it has automatically given you some maths work on roots and powers because it knows that you don't understand that and there's no point you doing the Pythagoras work if you don't understand roots and powers in the same way. Right. If you master that work, it can then do what's called a smart recommendation and stretch you as well. So some people will use it for assignments in that way and then the others will use it in a flipped learning way. So teachers will be planning on teaching a lesson. They'll say, right, we would like you to learn the lesson on Century the week before. Students do that in their own time. Teachers then receive the information of how the students have done and then that lesson the following week is a far more targeted lesson as to what did they understand, what didn't understand. So 50% of the platform is about the teacher. Because we fundamentally believe that empowering teachers is one of the best ways to improve education. They should not be doing data analysis off spreadsheets in the evenings, which is what many of them sadly have to do. They should be receiving insights from our platform instantly so that they can then go into the class the following week, focus on that particular concept, but not have to just teach it one size fits all. They should be able to say, right, I can see that here is the misconception a third of you have or you know, they can pair off the class into different peer groups. We have various dashboards that show you which kids are excelling in this particular topic, which ones are really struggling, and all of that data is turned into actionable insights. So it's a highly flexible system. And the reason that has to be the case, Manish, is because teaching is as personalized as learning is. I don't think it's Right. To build a system and say here's the system and here is how one must use it. Teachers are different, they're professionals. And some of them will prefer to be standing at the front and inspiring. Some of them much prefer to be having those sort of one to one interactions walking around the classroom.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So you're not replacing the teacher, you're making it possible for the teacher to shine in the way that they shine is the idea 100%.

[Priya Lakhani]

And I think this is a really controversial topic for discussion in education about this replacement of the teacher. Because a lot of big tech, for example, they've said this is the future of education. I don't think they understand what education means. Education is not transfer of knowledge from textbook into brain. Education is so much bigger than that. These schools are, they're like the old village. They're providing an enormous amount to students beyond the formula for Pythagoras. This is about augmenting the teacher and being able to push us all ahead. And if you can improve the baseline sort of standard of education, we can focus on skills that really matter in an age of AI. The problem, Maneesh, that a lot of neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have discovered is that we can over rely on tools and we can completely bypass the cognitive processes.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, I think I have an example actually. Tell me if I'm right.

[Priya Lakhani]

Tell me.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I was going to spend time in Italy recently and so six months ahead of going I downloaded Duolingo and I took Italian every single day. And I got to Italy and literally all that would come out of my mouth was ciao, buongiorno, cappuccino por favora. That is it.

[Priya Lakhani]

That is highly useful Italian for someone like me.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Well, yes, but it did not get me very far. And so what I can only imagine is that I was able to figure out very quickly what the game wanted me to say or how to please whatever the owl wanted me to do. But when it actually came to real life application of the alleged knowledge I had put in my brain, I had none. I really was distraught. I'd spent a lot of time and I didn't have anything to show for it. And I guess my fear is that in these classrooms it looks like the kids are killing it on their test scores, on all the work that they're doing. But when it comes to actually being competent adults in the, quote, real world, they will not be able to fend for themselves whether it comes to knowledge or judgment.

[Priya Lakhani]

Well, this is what I like to call automation, complacency and It's a very digitally transactional memory.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yes.

[Priya Lakhani]

And the problem is that you've done it very quickly, but you haven't thought deeply about that particular answer. It's this sort of reliance on technology where actually it kind of weakens the productive learning behaviors. Right. It creates this unrealistic expectation about the ease of learning. So basically, people are poor judges of their own learning. So when information is presented from fluently or quickly, when you're on these apps, right, you're doing it quite quickly, you're feeling quite good about yourself. You tend to believe that you understand it, even though your actual retention is low.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

When we come back, Priya Lakhani explains why kids need what's called a productive struggle in the classroom and how she thinks AI can help them get it. On the show today, how to build AI that puts humans first. I'm Minouche Zamarodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Don't go away.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zamarodi. Today on the show AI that Puts Humans First. We were just hearing from Priya Lakhani, the founder of Century Tech, an education technology company. Priya says they use AI to create friction to make kids work to learn, unlike chatbots that try to replace human thinking or simply transfer knowledge. Here she is on the TED stage.

[Priya Lakhani]

Think about how we felt when we first used ChatGPT. I think you thought, wow, I never need to do any work Ever again. This is amazing. And then it hallucinated. And I think we've ended up with this sort of stinking realization of, except acceptance, right? That the shortcuts don't really replace the work. They're very helpful. But we still need to learn, and we need to think.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Now.

[Priya Lakhani]

When we read those long answers that an LLM chatbot gives us, it feels very fluent. The problem is, is that fluency we often mistake for learning. What we actually know about learning is that learning requires what researchers called a production struggle. It's this sort of mental effort that builds understanding. Sustained mental effort strengthens the parts of the brain, and it's positively correlated with growth in the brain. Durable learning does not come from shortcuts. It comes from certain types of effort. And this is why AI is amazing for education, because AI can spot patterns in how we all learn, except it can force you to generate an answer rather than just reveal the answer. And it can provide amazing structured feedback against expertly designed rubrics from teachers.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So AI that's effective in education doesn't spit out the answers or nudge the students towards the right answer, like in gamified apps or chatbots. Like, that might be fun, but it's not terribly educational, you're saying?

[Priya Lakhani]

Exactly. So these sort of AI generated explanations or very quick learning on quick apps amplify that effect because they make you think that it's clear, it's confident, particularly if they're anthropomorphizing the technology so it feels like it's very human. You're kind of conversing with it, you're talking to it. Think about that working memory right now. You can retrieve that after a short period of time. The problem is, can you do that later so we can be cognitive misers trying to conserve mental effort in a learning context? If the technology replaces the very thinking that a student needs to develop, then learning can suffer. We've actually had teachers come to us and say, can you put in more coins and badges and characters? The kids love it. But the point is, if you learn that, oh, when I put in effort, I get a badge, you then start to build up an extrinsic value for learning. And that's actually really unhealthy. What we need people to have is intrinsic value. I'm learning for learning sake, because learning is good. So learning agility, just the ability to learn how to learn. I believe fundamentally that those overly gamified applications are bad for young people. That's why we don't do it. And it's a business. Right. Companies are very focused on engagement. You're measured by your daily average users, your monthly average users, how often are they coming in, when do they engage? Why do they log off? Because the more engaged that people are, the more money you're going to make. There's a perverse incentive to overly engage them.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So what are you measuring for then? If not engagement, then what?

[Priya Lakhani]

My key success metric is how quickly can I get this kid off the screen? And so we give guidance that's completely the opposite of a typical company. We say to schools, you know what, you really should not be on our system for more than about an hour and a half a week. If you're sitting there for nine hours a week, this system is actually not performing at the level in which we would hope it to be. It's really challenging because that generative AI market, it's erased by the big tech companies. So when it comes to gen AI, how they build those tools is going to mean everything for the future of human flourishing. And it really sits with a handful of people in this world which, look, I run a tech company, I have shareholders and investors, but we're a social enterprise. We have a very different set of metrics as to how we're measured. There are so many instances where, for example, we have said, no, we're not going to build it in that way. Our neuroscientists will turn around and say, nope, can't do that. That's generally known to be bad for kids. This is why educating the public about AI is really important. Which model was it built on? What was it trained on? Which data? What is trying to do for you? Is it beneficial for you? Is it providing you with something where you are then exercising your brain rather than just sort of transferring the skill set over to the AI? If you can then answer those questions, you are going to be very, very well equipped to decide whether that is good for you or bad for you. That is powerful.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was the founder of Century Tech, Supriya Lakhani. You can watch her full [e-mail] Supriya says her technology won't make teachers obsolete. But there are fears that educators and many, many more careers will be replaced by AI that can do their jobs. But there are others that say that's not how innovation works. The workforce won't disappear, though, it will change, says Vlad Tenevil. Vlad is the co founder of Robinhood, a financial services app. He's exactly the kind of Silicon Valley billionaire you'd expect to tell you everything with AI. Is going to be fine. But his argument isn't, don't worry. It's look at history. Because what we think of as a job today won't be the same tomorrow.

[Vlad Tenev]

Let's take a moment and reflect back upon our lives when we were 20 years old. Think about the opportunities for work and career that lay in front of you. How many of you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to do for your career? Not too many. How many were overwhelmed by all the options? I know I felt the same.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Vlad recently gave a talk called AI is coming for your job now what? In it, he told his own story of being 20 years old and graduating from Stanford University with a degree in mathematics.

[Vlad Tenev]

Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification. And I probably wouldn't have listened if they did. Now, my first month in graduate school, Lehman Brothers went under the start of the global financial crisis. Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure, found themselves packing up their cubicles. Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all, or whether we were in store for another decade long Great Depression. But amidst the uncertainty, some of us found a source of optimism. The iPhone app store came out that very same year, 2008.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And the idea that anyone could build a digital game or service that could be delivered to millions of people and a device that lived in their pockets, well, it was the digital equivalent of when the first pioneers found gold in California in the 1840s. Vlad was all in.

[Vlad Tenev]

I still remember when the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps was released. I was up all night reading it, learning, trying to understand. I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field. Pretty much everything I've done since then was a product both of the economic malaise, but the technological optimism of the time. But times have changed. The average 20 year old today also has quite a bit of fear. But this time, emerging technology is not the antidote to that fear. It's the source. And they're asking themselves, will that career I'm looking at even be around in 10 years? One reason why it feels different this time is because AI, unlike the iPhone, is the first tool that we've built that's capable of leaving the toolbox. And we don't yet know its limits. A few years ago, I founded another company with the mission to build mathematical superintelligence, artificial intelligence that can reason and solve problems better than any mathematician. I always thought of mathematics as the pinnacle of human intellectual activity. So a superhuman AI at mathematics could potentially be superhuman at everything. Combine that with my day job, which is running a global financial services platform. It's led to me spending of time, a lot, a lot of time pondering one very important question. What do we do in a world where the vast majority of today's jobs are gone? And I want to analyze this question rationally without fear and hyperbole. One way to do it is to look back through history and see if there's been a time where we faced this type of job disruption before, at any, anything near these levels, and how we as humans have navigated it. Now, I'm a technologist, not a historian. So with that caveat, let's go back in time to a world a 20 year old would have known tens of thousands of years ago.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In approximately 50,000 BCE, most people were hunters, gatherers or tool makers. Very few of us today know anyone with those job descriptions.

[Vlad Tenev]

The main occupations of the Paleolithic era are largely gone. But they didn't disappear overnight. Instead, they were subdivided into lots of other more specialized jobs.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

The next era, the Neolithic era, saw all kinds of different vocations popping up. Thanks to advances in how people stored their food and built shelter, domesticated plants

[Vlad Tenev]

and animals, humans have mastered a few new things. Farming, keeping livestock. The invention of these things allowed us to spend more time doing what we consider creative work and less time on pure survival and subsistence. And this opened up a lot of new jobs. You had artisans like weavers, potters, you had farmers. These jobs too, largely all gone. In the US today, we should say farmers make up less than 2% of the workforce. Let's move ahead through the changing jobs of the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and the age of exploration.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Each age, the same thing happens. Jobs are lost, sure, but more different jobs take their place.

[Vlad Tenev]

Too many jobs to count. A lot of them are gone. Any blacksmiths or explorers in this room? I didn't think so. It might come back with space exploration. If you think about it, most of our last names are from jobs that our families no longer do. Potter, butler, butcher, smith. Any Fletchers in the audience? Anyone know what a Fletcher is? I was going over my talk this weekend and my son said, I know what a Fletcher is, dad. He plays Minecraft. A Fletcher is someone that makes and sells arrows. So if you know someone with that last name, their relatives were arms dealers. Now, my point in all of this is job disruption is then an essential quality of human evolution. We want work to disappear because it means that we're doing our jobs as humans, making our lives better and easier. So with AI, maybe it's not the job disruption itself that makes us so nervous, but the speed with which it's happening. So why don't we accelerate? We're going to go right through the industrial revolution into the modern era. In the 20th century, a young person in the wake of companies expanding and automating would have found an entirely new menu of jobs that their parents never had access to. So instead of working in a factory, they would have had the selection of a wide assortment of new office jobs. And some of the parents were probably thinking, you sit in a chair all day, that's not real work. Now, the Internet era, we see all around us jobs that didn't exist before. We have people getting paid to play video games, eat at restaurants, travel, talk to their friends on video. Those last people we call podcast bros. And we take our jobs very seriously. But if you took someone from the 20th century, when people first started contemplating these problems, and they could peek into our world today, they would think that all of the predictions around technological unemployment came true. So where does all this leave our 20 year old at the dawn of the AI era? One feature that we found is recurrent throughout generations is this feeling of exceptionalism. We'd like to think that somehow we're at a discontinuity where history ends and we're in a new world with no precedent. And maybe it's true this time we really don't know if we're building a super assistant or an apex predator. Certainly all change and disruption brings with it a painful transition. Jobs will disappear. Perhaps they'll disappear at an accelerating rate. But at the same time, we see one undeniable trend. There's going to be new jobs, and lots and lots of them across every imaginable field. Where the Internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world class staff. The jobs will not look like real work. Much like to our predecessors, our current jobs would have looked like leisure. And I bet that we would feel the same about our descendants in the future. And I can tell you with near certainty that a humanity that's capable of building a super intelligent AI also has the creativity to navigate through this potential job doom and gloom scenario. Although we'll never stop worrying about it. Being hypervigilant about threats to our survival is a key part of evolution. What makes us human? I can tell you that you shouldn't take predictions about future job disruption to keep you from doing something you feel very passionately about. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s, teachers discouraged me from becoming a computer programmer. Back then it was a common thought that all those jobs would be shipped off to China. So even where it seems obvious, sometimes our predictions of the future end up being completely off. Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest and most uncertain of times. I feel very, very confident that the 20 year olds of the future, perhaps in collaboration with AI, will continue to build new things which simultaneously we're going to be scared of, but also excited by.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, a mobile financial trading app, and one of the places where he thinks people will go when they no longer need to perform labor to earn an income, but do things like trade on various markets to earn earn money. Critics have called the platform risky, especially considering that billions have been invested in AI companies that aren't profitable yet. You can see Vlad's full [e-mail] thank you so much for listening. Make sure you watch some of the videos that we've been making with our guests. If you're on Instagram, you can find them. Anoushz that's M A N O U S H Z this episode was produced by Phoebe Lett and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, James Delahousy, Fiona Guerin, Harsha Nehada, Rachel Faulkner White, and Katie Monteleone. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damien Herring and Simon Jensen. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, and Daniela Bellaresso. I'm Anoush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] podcast

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