← Your Undivided Attention
Your Undivided Attention
Rethinking School in the Age of AI
00:42:35
AI has upended school as we know it. In this episode, Daniel and Tristan talk with Maryanne Wolf and Rebecca Winthrop about how tech has broken the old model of education—and how we might build something better.
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- [00:00]
Tristan
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Daniel
This is Tristan and this is Daniel.
- [00:07]
Tristan
Welcome to your undivided attention.
- [00:11]
Daniel
AI is set to disrupt every part of our lives in the near future. Healthcare, finances, the job market, you name it. And some of this disruption is a few years away. But there's one place where it's immediate, and that's the classroom. Students can plug their homework into ChatGPT and it spits out an answer within seconds. It can write their essays for them, give them personalized cliff notes, and even answer complex math and science question questions. And there's no way for teachers to tell. It's like the rug has been pulled out from the entire system.
- [00:37]
Tristan
Yeah. And even if these students don't want to use these systems to cheat, they often feel like they have to or else they're going to fall behind their peers who are. When your grade feels like it's the only thing that matters, then all of the incentives push kids towards using and abusing these tools. And of course, teachers are struggling to figure out how to grade assignments. The old way of running education seems suddenly and pretty fundamentally broken.
- [00:59]
Daniel
So in a way, AI is forcing us to rethink what education is for and what the education system does. And that's critical because education is obviously the foundation of our society. If we do it right, it will set up our society to thrive. But if we do it wrong, the consequences can be disastrous. So we're at an inflection point where we can actually re examine some fundamental questions about what is the purpose of education? What is it actually for?
- [01:21]
Tristan
So to begin to answer that question, we've invited two guests on the show who've thought deeply about the structure and purpose of teaching for a very long time. Marianne Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist and expert on the development of the learning brain. She's the author of Proust and the Squid and Reader Come Home, which explore how reading, writing, and thinking affect brain development. And Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where she's on the global task force for AI in Education. Her book the Disengaged Teen came out in January of this year.
- [01:53]
Daniel
So, Marianne and Rebecca, welcome to your undivided attention.
- [01:56]
Marianne Wolf
And you have our very undivided attention. So please begin.
- [02:02]
Daniel
Great.
- [02:03]
Tristan
So we wanted to have you both on the show today because you're both lifelong educators who've thought a lot about the role of technology in education, and you've written books on the damage that social media has done and that smartphones have done to kids, attention spans and critical Thinking skills, but you're also optimistic about the kinds of positive role that technology could play in the classroom. So I was reading your work in preparation for this interview, and both of you in different ways talked about a kind of Faustian bargain that technology is in the classroom where you give up something of deep moral importance in exchange for something of material importance. And I was really struck by that. So we're wondering, like, what did you mean by that? And how have we seen this appear in education in the past? Maybe? Rebecca, let's start with you.
- [02:44]
Rebecca Winthrop
A Faustian bargain. Okay, Daniel, you don't start with the lightweight questions. Never. So I think the thing I am most haunted by as I watch AI, generative AI develop and think about how good it is getting, it's starting to reason it can possibly deceive. And they learn how to do algorithmic thinking, which is basically logical thinking. And that is a very foundational skill that helps them be better and give better answers in other parts of life.
- [03:21]
Marianne Wolf
And.
- [03:22]
Rebecca Winthrop
And that is exactly what we want kids to do. That's the reason we want kids to write essays. It is really the process of learning to think in a logical, clear way. A thesis statement with evidence underneath and organizing it and making an argument that transfers to life and being able to think across domains and subjects. And so I just keep thinking of little rooms around the world with incredibly smart developers training AI to think that way. And then ChatGPT, which students use a ton. It might be the majority user of ChatGPT or students actually using it to de skill themselves by having the essay write for them. And so like what are we doing here? So that's the thing that keeps me up at night.
- [04:19]
Daniel
Marianne.
- [04:21]
Marianne Wolf
So let me begin with what Rebecca said in the beginning. And that's about thinking. How do we develop thinking? What child learns best under what conditions? So in my book Reader come the reading brain in the digital world, I suggested, not unlike you, Rebecca, that there are several sets of skills that we want our children to learn, but that for the reading brain to develop, I think the research points to it being developed best in terms of deep reading as the goal on print. And so I suggested that between 0 and 10, 12 all along we're working on what not is just decoding, but the ability to develop these what I call deep reading skills that are analogical, inferential, empathic, and most importantly the sum of which is critical thinking that that happens in print when we have this beautiful reading brain. And I'll begin with reading, but we can same thing with math, but I'm just going to use it because that's my easy point. When we build this circuit, the circuit has a very basic function. The whole point of learning is to use the effort. And this is what I really want to say that is so worrisome to me about AI. It's the efforts to build the circuit's elaboration, to make analogical skills, to make inferential skills. One of the most beautiful parts of learning is to pass over from the perspective of that egocentric learner into the perspective of others. This is a affective cognitive process that's going on. But that all adds to the ability of that learner to become critically analytic about what they're reading. Now, the problem with AI for me, is what we call cognitive offloading. That in the interest of efficiency, we can do all this faster and better if we're using these technological devices that augment and blah, blah, blah. The reality is what we need as learners are the efforts. Even Emerson said, when we are braced by labors, that's where thinking begins. And all of that is in the interest of, of the imaginative insights of the individual. All of that should never be short circuited in the interest of efficiency or the best grade. If we could somehow model the importance of effort and labor, that's what builds the circuit of the deep reader.
- [07:11]
Tristan
But we have to dig in here because in some way, this feels a lot like teachers talking about the advent of calculators in mathematics. Like, kids won't remember their multiplication tables. And to a certain extent, it, I have to say, like, I'm all for that. I'm all for not having spent three years of my life, you know, two hours every day of the week, trying to memorize multiplication tables. That just seems like a win to me. So how do we tell the difference between things that are, we're fine being dependent on our technology versus the things you really don't want to be.
- [07:42]
Rebecca Winthrop
I would say we have over history as a species, evolved through cognitive offloading. Like, none of us, I think, could be dropped in the middle of the woods and know which berries are poisonous and which berries are not, which is something we would have known many, many years ago. The things that I worry about are sort of the core of what it means to be a learner. What Marian is talking about in terms of deep reading is a skill that is not just about reading. It's about thinking. It's about understanding yourself versus the rest of the world. It's about coming up with new ideas. Those are things that we should not Cognitively offload.
- [08:26]
Tristan
And I'm curious, like we're going to spend a lot of time in this episode on artificial intelligence. But I'm sort of curious starting in the past. So over the last 20 years, you've seen this happen in a lot of different classrooms, in different nations, in different municipalities trying to integrate technology. And there's been this similar kind of Faustian bargain, right? This, this, this gain of efficiency, but this real loss of social fabric or ability to teach kids what you're trying to. Can you talk a little bit about what just happened and then we'll move towards what's about to happen?
- [08:56]
Rebecca Winthrop
Sure. I mean, over the last couple decades, we've seen several waves of technology come into schools. So one of the big ones was hardware. Let's get devices in schools, not in kids hand. This is like desktop computers, computer labs. Remember the days of having computer labs? And at the end of the day, and the OECD has done research on this across many countries, about 70 countries. The education systems that really push getting computer labs in, desktop computers, technology in the classroom, their kids didn't learn more than the systems that didn't push it. And it's not that technology can't help with learning, it's that you have to integrate it into the teaching and learning process. So we've seen this a little bit time and time again. Certainly can talk about cell phones. I don't know if you want to go there. That's a whole different topic and issue, but it permeates schools. But I think the thing that we've learned is you have to be very intentional about how you introduce technology into education. It will not magically make things better.
- [10:07]
Tristan
So what I think I heard from that is that underneath this big skill that we call reading are a bunch of cognitive development. Right. You have to learn what an analogy means. You have to learn a bunch of cognition. And I hear you saying that that is just way better done on print than on devices. Have we seen that as schools have rotated towards devices, have we seen those skills drop?
- [10:28]
Marianne Wolf
I often feel that I'm in the wild west frontier of knowledge in this area. I have people in Norway asking me to testify about what is happening with the digitizing of their textbooks and their libraries. And they're worried that like Sweden, they will do this massive digitization only to find the grades slipping and that academic performance is declining. So Norway now and Sweden have decided not to. Meanwhile, Korea is beginning to digitize their third grade textbooks. And I'm, I'm literally on their NPR's of PBS. Wait, let us get more information, but for heaven's sakes, do not do mass digitization. I think there's enough, if you will, data about this. I think all of you know the Singapore study that was released last year in which you have data from 0 to 8 from Singapore, McGill and Harvard, showing that the more digital exposure between 0 and 8, the less the attentional mechanisms are working in the same way and the difference in academic performance. So we have these different databases at different developmental epochs, some at infancy, some zero to eight, some young adults. But yes, I think the data to this moment in time suggests that reading is best with print, not to be not complimented, but to be learned during these very pivotal developmental times.
- [12:12]
Rebecca Winthrop
Daniel, I want to come in because one of the things that Marianne didn't say explicitly, but I certainly have taken from her work, because I think it's actually very relevant beyond reading, is that when you're reading on digital devices, you're more often skimming. Like Marianne, you've found, like, you've found that there's like an F pattern. You read the top and you go down a little bit in the second line or a Z pattern. Like, we're really not. We're doing what is called surface learning, which you're basically going quickly and sort of getting the top headline, and you're missing a lot of nuance and actually stuff that's interesting. You really are trying to operate as like a little bit like a machine. Input in, input out. Let me get it on the test, Let me get it on the. On the worksheet. Let me try to get the right answer. And that's actually not exciting for kids. And so one of the things that we found in. In the book research we did with my colleague Jenny Anderson was the kids are super disengaged from school. They are not motivated, they are not engaged, they are not enjoying learning. And we found these different modes that kids show up in, one of them being passenger mode, which is basically doing surface learning and coasting. And that is not just reading. It's across the board. So I think there's something deeper.
- [13:33]
Marianne Wolf
Absolutely. I can't be more thankful to you for making one of my major points, which is that reading is so much more than decoding the surface and that first circuit. That's what it does.
- [13:46]
Rebecca Winthrop
Right.
- [13:47]
Marianne Wolf
And what we are actually teaching our children is to elaborate that circuit, and that is engaging, because it engages not only what a word looks like, but what it's connected to. What are the thoughts that that evokes that elicits. So we're really teaching how to think. Han Byung Chul, the Korean philosopher, says that we are so accelerated that we're moving from thing to thing, stimulus to stimulus. And that's what reading is like, a canary of the mind for that. Because it shows you. With you skimming, you just don't have time to allocate attention. We have to have time for beauty. We have to have time for your own connections to this content.
- [14:33]
Tristan
Well, I love how live this conversation is and this is why I'm so thrilled to have you both in the same room. Because Marianne, you bring this like deep neuroscience of learning and Rebecca, you have this big macro. How are different countries thinking about this and what are the systems doing? So it's just a thrill to have you both in the same conversation together. So one of the things I hear you talking about is we've replaced not just the way that kids learn, but we've replaced some of the fundamental motivations for learning. And I'm curious if we can dig into that a little bit. Like how has the motivation for students of what they're getting out of every moment of learning, how has that changed? And how do we want them to be motivated?
- [15:09]
Rebecca Winthrop
I can definitely talk to that. I'll kick it off, Marianne, and pass it to you.
- [15:14]
Marianne Wolf
Great.
- [15:15]
Rebecca Winthrop
So Jenny and I, my co author and I just did three years of research and we were looking at the question of why kids don't really like school. And it's not actually that they don't like school. They like their friends. They like going to school to see their friends. We saw that in Covid. They don't like what they do in school. That's what they don't like. We found that kids show up to their learning. They're sort of motivated and engaged in kind of four ways. They're in passenger mode, which I just talked about. They're coasting, doing the bare minimum. This is roughly the experience of half of the middle school and high school kids in the US or they're in achiever mode, where they're really excited to do perfect on every assignment and get a gold star in everything that's put in front of them. We have thought for a very long time in education and in society that achiever mode was the top of the engagement mountain. Getting the right answer was the top of the engagement mountain. We have learned from our research it is not. And actually, kids who get stuck in achiever mode are very fragile. They're risk averse, they're less able to Adapt. And they do not have the resilience skills that if they have a bad day and get a bad grade, they can just pick themselves up. They're really focused on the outcome, not the process. And then you've got kids in resistor mode. These are quote unquote, the problem children. They're avoiding and disrupting their learning. But they actually have a fair bit of gumption in agency because they are saying, often inappropriately, class clown, not turning in their homework, skipping school. These are all kids way of telling adults, hey, this is not working for me. And they actually, those kids, if you shift the learning environment, can actually flip to Explore mode, which is the top of the engagement mountain. And we know from two decades of research, Explore Mode is where they get to explore their curiosity and they are driven and they really do become unstoppable. And when they get that opportunity, they actually do better academically and they're being prepared to swim in the AI world that they are entering because they will be able to navigate all the shifts and changes that come their way. But less than 4% of kids we found in middle school and high school get a chance to regularly be in Explore mode in school. And so that to me is what we need to hold in our mind and figure out how technology and AI can help kids get into Explorer mode, not reduce them to passenger mode.
- [17:46]
Daniel
I was going to say, does technology put us into Explorer mode or achievement mode or one of the other modes?
- [17:52]
Rebecca Winthrop
It totally depends on how technology is used. There are times when it can be really good. So, for example, Arizona State University a couple years ago piloted a new approach with virtual reality in their Biology 101 class. So this is an introductory to biology class. Everybody ought to take it. Not a lot of people loved it. Kids didn't do really well except when they started introducing for 10 minutes each class sort of do a lecture on a concept, photosynthesis or endangered species, I don't know, make it up. And they go into this virtual reality, beautifully created world that they have to explore and go find the example of what they're learning in the textbook in this world, that ability to actually explore in sort of a semi embodied state, even though it's not, it's in virtual reality. You know, kids did so much better on Biology 101 that that's a methodology that they're using.
- [18:54]
Tristan
Yeah, the great promise of education technology was always that you could let kids follow their interest. You could let them explore the topics they were interested in. Instead of reading one textbook, it would react to and if the more of you show interest in something, the more you could pull from it. But that doesn't feel like what I've seen, or certainly I haven't seen results from that in education. Why didn't we live up to that great promise of giving kids tools that would let them explore more?
- [19:17]
Rebecca Winthrop
I think that we gave kids tools that were focused on adaptive and personalized learning, which is not exploration. That is, I want you to learn fractions and third grade, and I will give you an adapted sequence where, you know, if you get the wrong answer, we'll give you a couple more questions till you master it, and then you could move on to the next. Very effective in mastering third grade fractions. Not hugely exploratory. And then the other thing I think is we made the mistake on the other end of just letting into our classrooms a wash of overwhelming technology, from cell phones to the Internet to, you know, Chromebooks. I can't tell you how many times my seventh grader came home last year, and I was like, how was school? What'd you do? What'd you do in math? And he was like, I played Minecraft unblocked. I played Zelda unblocked. You can get any video game unblocked on any Chromebook. Kids will find a way around it. So I think we kind of never really nailed that piece.
- [20:20]
Marianne Wolf
Well.
- [20:20]
Daniel
So one question is, why are we just throwing technology at children as if it's going to help? I mean, I'll just say, when I was at Google, I knew product managers who were building the Google Classroom sort of suite. They were not experts in child developmental psychology. These were just people who were trying to build products and get marketing, you know, get the thing adopted by as many schools as possible. Not that they didn't care about kids. They did. It's just that they weren't actually fundamentally developmentally attuned. That was not their core education as they were making design choices that would influence, you know, the developmental brain that, Marianne, you speak about so eloquently. So we just. Should we talk for a moment just about the incentives of, you know, schools don't want to look like they're behind and not adopting the latest technology. As the other schools get the Chromebooks, we should adopt them, too. The other schools are getting the iPads. We should get them to, oh, well, kids are going to grow up in this phone world. So we got to make sure that kids are using phones in the classroom. But all of this is just misguided and very naive thinking. Can we talk about some of these sort of social pressures and what's driving this mass naive and sort of almost counterproductive adoption of technology.
- [21:21]
Rebecca Winthrop
I think there's multiple incentives and center for Humane Technology talks about incentives a lot. So you guys know what they are broadly in the tech space. And I think you do a very good job of, of uncovering them. So a lot of tech companies are trying to sell into schools and the incentive is to create products that will be easily adopted at scale and make money. We analyze edtech based on does it substitute for an analog function? Does it augment what we're doing in real life? Does it modify or redefine? And so most of what tech does is substitute or augment because that is the incentive is to sell into schools in a way they can plug and play very easily and you can scale and get money. I did a large study several years ago for a book called Leapfrogging Inequality and we looked at 3,000 education innovations across 160 countries and 1,500 of them were ed tech. And 80% of those innovations were just substitution and augmentation. And that would mean if you're doing a paper multiplication worksheet and you digitize it on a tablet, it could help, it could augment because it could automatically grade and save the teacher time. But you are not profoundly changing what education is like. That said, your point, Tristan, about the fact that a lot of ed tech is developed not by educationalists, is is the perennial discussion in every single education conference I go to, which is why can't we get educators at the table? Because we do know that when educators are at the table, better products are made. I think about clever, which is in a lot of classrooms, which if you guys don't know or your listeners don't know, is a very simple single sign on portal for teachers and parents and students. Other areas that I think do really well in edtech are incredible work on supporting neurodivergent kids with technology. There's incredible Dyslexia software my son uses from text to speech, speech to text. And it's, you know, developed by educators. So when it is developed by educators and solves a problem in education, it can be quite effective.
- [23:52]
Tristan
Well, so I want to build on that, though it's easy to talk about the supply side and say teachers aren't enough at the table. Or the people, to Tristan's point, the people who know how to build tech aren't the people who know about human development. But there's another side of it too, which is since the 90s we've gone from a period of real information scarcity to this flood of information. And the other side of it that I've seen is educators, teachers, parents even say, you know, we need to educate kids for the world that we have now. And that means making sure that we educate them for the flood of information. What does it mean? Forget about what exists now and how broken it is. What does it mean to actually educate the next generation for this absolute tidal wave of information, this confusing, often contradictory, often overwhelming information we get through the Internet?
- [24:42]
Marianne Wolf
Well, I think we have for good reasons, good intentions believe that if we had test scores, we could see how well education was doing. And when it isn't doing well, there's this, if you will, almost reflex, okay, let's do something more. And the something more, inevitably in the last decade has been technological fixes. The reality is that we put so much on the backs of teachers who have to use all kinds of flexibilities to move from one thing to the next. And they're expected to, whatever it is that year, they're expected to do it. So that third grade, fourth grade, and eighth grade scores show how well they're doing, when in fact, we're all doing poorly. The NAEP scores of the country, which were released just last month, show abysmal results that if my goal is deep reading for the world, only one third of our eighth graders in the United States are even close to that. And of that 1/3, only 1 half of the kids of color are in that third. Even worse, 40% of our eighth graders are not at a basic level of reading. Now, technology is not going to fix that.
- [26:05]
Tristan
I mean, I think the top note you're talking about is kind of an exasperation. All this technology has moved so quickly, and educators and parents and teachers are all struggling to integrate it. And Marianne, to your point, integrating it has meant this very linear approach to education. And so that's what just happened to us. And we're still recovering from that. But now AI comes into the picture, well, how will AI change education? How do you not take away the essay? When you have an essay writing machine, what does that mean? Because you don't want to take away the essay, but the essay is now broken.
- [26:35]
Rebecca Winthrop
I think, Daniel, what you're bringing up is the purpose of education. And the purpose of education in schools is profoundly shaken to its core because we are moving from an age of achievement where the purpose of school has been primarily to rank and sort kids, to what I would call an age of agency and lean into a lot of the other purposes of school that have evolved over the years. There are many purposes that are crucially important. One, custodial care. What would we do? We knew. We actually found this experiment in Covid. Schools are the number one ways in which governments provide childcare. Number two, socialization, which it doesn't have to just happen in school, but that is a big way. And if you live in a democracy, it's about citizenship, development, everybody having a similar school experience. Because if we don't have a shared understanding and experience, we will devolve and lose our democratic way of life.
- [27:42]
Marianne Wolf
Let me add a fourth. I think what we have right now is this almost bifurcation or trifurcation of information, knowledge and wisdom. And when we are only after information, which AI is so good at, and its translation into knowledge, which we hope it will complement us, we nevertheless must never forget what does that all mean for humanity? The future of the species. And that the wisdom part. And so what I hope that the school can give is this sense of translation that we are taking information, we are transmitting it to you so that you will have knowledge from which you will help propel us wisely.
- [28:30]
Tristan
So I completely agree, and I just want to acknowledge like, that the stakes of this are, are really high, right? We're talking about democracy, we're talking about wisdom, we're talking about not losing deep human skills. And yet I feel like less and less sure that I know what wisdom means in an AI empowered world, right? And so we are really sitting at this precipice of a really deep change to what it means to grow up inside of a world imbued with artificial intelligence. And to my ear, some of these solutions sound great, but I'm wondering, they're really much focused on sort of the continuation of an old tradition. So for example, you talked about, you know, school used to be a place where you memorized things, because if it wasn't with you in your brain, it was really hard to look it up. And then schools became, I forgot how you said this, but it's where you find it, not what it is. We increasingly had to live with the Internet in knowing where I can look for things or knowing where the knowledge sits. And with AI, I think there's a new skill that's coming online which is almost how to manage like it used to be. Management was something that you learned late in your career because really, for the first five to 10 years of your job, you were just an individual contributor. And now I'm actually seeing management skills in Kids the age of 10 because they need to manage their AI in doing certain tasks. And I'm curious, as people look at education as a set of metacognitive tasks instead of learning how to do certain things, what tasks that we haven't been teaching kids that we suddenly need to teach them in a world of AI.
- [29:59]
Rebecca Winthrop
I think there's an opportunity. Daniel. I've spent my life looking at education innovations and how to transform education systems. And so in some way I'm very excited about AI because it has to move us from the age of achievement into the sort of age of agency, as I call it, where you could have schools break open that sorting and ranking and really bring much closer together knowledge acquisition with knowledge application. Many schools are trying this. There's great models around which is, okay, what are we going to do for this quarter? We're going to try to solve the problem of trash in the streets. This is an example from a conference I was just at with the former undersecretary of Rio de Janeiro who did this in the favelas radical agency in their schools. And they actually learned a lot better on the content because when you're trying to solve a problem that's meaningful and relevant, you have to. It included everything, included math, included geography and social sciences. And they had to survey and they had to do interviews and they had to look at the history of trash and they remembered that so much more.
- [31:15]
Tristan
Right. Than a skills based curriculum. Right.
- [31:18]
Rebecca Winthrop
Rather than input in and put out because we learn things when we make meaning of them and they're relevant to our lives. So can AI help us do that more? Maybe if it's used in that way and in that sort of explore mode. That would be a great example of explore mode. Yes. But I also think just because AI is here doesn't mean we have to force it on our kids. We should feel free to say, no, we don't want to use this for our young kids at this moment in time.
- [31:57]
Daniel
So one of the big promises of AI is obviously tutors, that we are going to have individualized tutors. And that's what we're being sold is a story that AI is going to enable that for the masses about to enter this age of abundance, the best education we've ever had. And obviously there's conflicting views on this, but recently the World bank ran a program in Nigeria where they used an AI tutor to help students learn English. And the early results were extraordinary that just after six weeks the students achieved the equivalent of something like two years of instruction. And Students who had those tutors performed much better in their end of year exams. And the longer that they worked with those tutors, the better they did. And just curious to sort of dissect this example because it sits on the optimistic side.
- [32:35]
Rebecca Winthrop
Yeah. So part of it has to do with the context. I have worked across the globe and in many countries there are 100, 150 kids in one class, in a first grade, second grade, third grade class. And teachers teach their heart out, but there is no way they are able to reach every last kid. So the Nigeria example, six weeks after school, it was twice a week with an AI tutor, it was about a 0.3 standard deviation improvement, which is quite good in education. We also saw a 0.3 standard deviation improvement during COVID in Botswana, 12 weeks. Not through AI, it was through teachers sending text messages on flip phones to parents, parents opening it up, kids doing its math problems. And then the teachers would call and say, can you put the kid on speakerphone, let's talk through this math problem. If the kid got it, they would send a harder problem the next week. And kids also improved 0.3 standard deviations. So what you're seeing is that there's very little instruction going on. So it is not a replacement for teachers in education. All these contexts and there's many more examples that get that.
- [33:57]
Marianne Wolf
And we're all for teaching those early precursors of literacy, which is what they were doing in Nigeria. But it's what happens next. And what happens next can have all kinds of differences. I work in Johannesburg sometimes where the one school, Bella Vista, teaches the schools in the settlement with 100 kids in a classroom. These are wonderful apps. They're in 45 languages. Now, there is no question that those technical aids are essential. There is never a binary here. It's what works best, in what context, for which children. I think it's never been more important, 100%.
- [34:36]
Tristan
And we need to watch out. Right. That we don't. We're not pulling up the ladder of education behind us. Like these tools can supercharge adult learners and people who have those cognitive skills. And the worry is that actually for early learners, you're not just not helping, you're actively hurting them. Having the abilities that you want later.
- [34:51]
Marianne Wolf
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:52]
Daniel
Basically, if you give ChatGPT to someone who does not yet have the critical thinking skills, they're doing more cognitive offloading versus if you have someone who, let's say, goes all the way through high school having a full developmental paradigm, then they use ChatGPT, then they're getting the uplift and they're getting more enrichment and it's not totally lasting. There's still some offloading, but it's like there's an enriching, there's a non diminishment process. And I feel like when we talk about what an ideal world looks like, I feel like landing that distinction is very important.
- [35:18]
Marianne Wolf
Absolutely.
- [35:19]
Rebecca Winthrop
We really have to look at adult users versus children users very differently. Is AI helping adults in the education system do their work better and more efficiently? Is it making bus schedules more efficient? Yes, it's amazing. Is it doing calendaring, which is always a pain in the butt for schools, more efficiently? Yes, it is. There's an incredible examples from around the world of walled garden GPTs being given to teachers who are just experimenting, coming up with really interesting things that make their lives better, like being able to assess kids who are learning English for the first time much more quickly and saving a lot of time. And that is because. Because those adults in the system have critical thinking skills and have their hand on the steering wheel. They have agency over the AI.
- [36:14]
Tristan
Rebecca, you're running a pre mortem on AI in education. Tell us about that. Because I imagine it has to do with these skipped skills or these places where we're just going to do it wrong. What does it look like to run a pre mortem on AI?
- [36:27]
Rebecca Winthrop
So a pre mortem, there's a science behind a pre. Mortem. It is the opposite of a postmortem where you move the debrief, the autopsy forward. We should have done this when social media rolled out a decade ago and we learned our lesson. And so our task force is collectively with many, many people across the globe asking two questions. One, what are the possible risks to AI and children's learning and education? And get those all out on paper and really imagine. Use your, your big imagination. And then question two, what can we do today to mitigate those risks and harness the really exciting possibilities of AI to help kids learn and grow? And so that's what we're doing.
- [37:15]
Tristan
And do you have any intermediate findings or. We just stay tuned.
- [37:19]
Rebecca Winthrop
Some of the things we are seeing is that people are feeling like AI is inevitable and that they can't say no, we don't want to use it in our classroom at this point or that point, which I think is worrisome because it isn't. We are agentic people. We can decide what we want to do with technology. So that is one thing that has come through loud and clear that concerns me.
- [37:50]
Marianne Wolf
I think our parents need to Know that like last year, JAMA comes out and shows the more digital exposure, the less language development is happening. So. And what is happening between 0 and 5 is this massive distraction. Who was it? Linda Hunter. Someone called this 20 years ago. She called it continuous partial attention of our children.
- [38:12]
Daniel
Linda Stone. It's a continuous partial attention, I think, right, yeah.
- [38:16]
Marianne Wolf
Linda Stone. Yeah, it was 1998. I mean, it was a long time ago, but it was right. And the reality is that our kids are constantly being bombarded by the iPads, which I love, on a plane and nowhere else. But this is not enhancing their ability to have focused attention, to have a better memory for things that will be consolidated and used later in all these other processes. So 0 to 5 is also part of this. We've got to really think about what we can do with our parents, even before school.
- [38:52]
Rebecca Winthrop
Just to pick up on Marianne's point about interactivity and socialization of young people and what technology does. You know, one of the things that people are quite worried about is young kids are being socialized to interact in society with other people. And when they're interacting with an AI, you can interrupt it, you can be rude to it, you can call it names, and that is a form of socialization. And kids have a hard time understanding, do I do that with a chatbot, but not my bra or not my friend? And we saw the damage that social media did to kids interaction. And I think we risk if we don't do it right, really scaling that more broadly.
- [39:34]
Marianne Wolf
But okay, I will ask you a question. Where are both of you headed with this topic? What will you do next with it, with just this conversation?
- [39:46]
Tristan
Well, I'll tell you one thing, which is we here at CHT are very worried about the last thing that Rebecca brought up, which is changing the very nature of what it means to relate to each other, that not just for children, for adults as well as AI begins to insert itself into our relationships, into our institutions, how do we as human beings deal with that? And how do you design the technology such that it's not inadvertently creating huge harms to commons that we haven't even named yet? If in the 2000 teens, it was about the attentional commons, we destroyed all of our attention. And as side effects, we began to not only polarize, but destabilize democracies and so much more. Well, what are the side effects of this AI wave? And can we learn what they are, and can we educate people on what they are before it's 10 years later and we're just learning what we did to ourselves. So that's what keeps Tristan and I up at night. And so having people on like you who can speak to this and trying to make this conversation progress at the speed of change.
- [40:47]
Rebecca Winthrop
And everybody has kids, no matter which political party they are part of, and they see the impacts of technology on their kids.
- [40:54]
Tristan
Yeah, 100%. With children, we really recognize that we have a duty of care. We need to protect our children. We need to design for our children. And that's why we often focus on it at cht.
- [41:05]
Marianne Wolf
I love this sign, the duty of care. You know, because the Pope has been so ill of late, I wanted to quote him at some point about children. And he said that children are our. Our world's best diagnostic for the health not only of our society, but of our whole world. And I think that's, you know, that duty of care is part of that.
- [41:29]
Tristan
Well, that's a good place of any to end it. I'm so thrilled to have both of you on as deep experts here. It's an amazing conversation and thank you for coming on. Your Undivided Attention.
- [41:38]
Daniel
Thank you so much.
- [41:39]
Rebecca Winthrop
Thank you for having us.
- [41:40]
Marianne Wolf
This was fun. It was.
- [41:46]
Daniel
Your Undivided Attention is produced by the center for Humane Technology. We're a nonprofit working to catalyze a humane future. Our senior producer is Julia Scott. Josh Lash is our researcher and producer, and our executive producer is Sascha Fegan. Mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudeikin and original music by Ryan and Hayes Holliday. And a special thanks to the whole center for Humane Technology team for making this show possible. Possible. You can find transcripts from our interviews, bonus content on our substack and much more@humanetech.com and if you like this episode, we'd be truly grateful if you could rate us on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It really does make a difference in helping others join this movement for a more humane future. And if you made it all the way here, let me give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.