We are the Robots
People sometimes think I became a professor because I am smart. That might be true, but what’s more true is that I was good at school. So I just kept going, and now going to school is my job.
Along that journey the most challenging step was the transition from answering to asking questions. Answering questions well is what made me a good student. But asking questions is a different thing altogether. It requires the ability to recognize the unknown.
Asking questions is an act of agency. You get to decide what you think is interesting and figure out a way to investigate it. Asking questions, in many ways, is one of the highest expressions of freedom.
In our college we spend a lot of time thinking about how to prepare our students for the job market. This concern shapes our curriculum, informs investments we make in advising and career services, and drives a lot of our pitch to students and their families. Come here and get a useful degree that can land you a job and help you thrive in it.
That’s the general idea. Within it there are reasonable debates about how best to deliver on the promise. Some folks think we should focus on specific skills and capabilities, others (like me) argue we should focus on teaching students how to think, write, and speak. These viewpoints are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The tension between them is a feature of higher education, not a bug.
With technology ubiquitous in the workplace, students no doubt need some level of basic fluency in the tools of their trade. For a long time this meant understanding things like spreadsheets and databases. Then it meant knowing how to write some code. Now it means AI. But AI seems different in that you can’t ask Excel to think for you, but you can certainly use AI to avoid thinking.
Employers tell us that students need to use AI first and then humanize the output. This has some intuitive appeal—it’s likely reflective of the sort of work our graduates will be doing. But it also means bypassing the step where you go from nothing to something. That precious step requires novel thought and is often the most difficult. It’s akin to moving from answering to asking questions.
Teaching students to use AI first feels like helping them train their replacements. Specific jobs are always in flux (e.g., elevator operators and travel agents), but AI is currently displacing one critical genre—apprenticeships, as in junior copy-writer, fact-checker, production assistant, etc.
These are the sorts of jobs many of our graduates start out with. They get experience doing a thing, often poorly, in order to learn, improve, and move up the ranks. You need to be bad at something before you can be good at it. The trouble is, AI is eliminating the need to pay a human to struggle and learn. Claude can be just as bad at the job for a lot less.
This battle might already be lost, but teaching our students to bypass thinking and skip practice is the educational equivalent to an e-bike. It might get you somewhere, but it won’t make you stronger. At some point, the battery dies and the only engine you have is you.
We’ve stumbled into a dangerous race to the bottom—participating in our own obsolescence. We’ve surrendered our freedom to technology and hidden behind the job market for cover. But why trust the job market when all it really wants is profit margin? This is not a new argument; it’s been a critique of professional education for decades. I used to dismiss the critique, but now I find it much more convincing.
My introductory business class has gradually morphed into a class on how to achieve the Good Life. Yes, I do teach some spreadsheet stuff and other technical bits, but I all but forbid AI. Not because I don’t think it’s useful or relevant, but because my students need to first develop the muscles of individual thought, along with its beauty, blemishes, and happy accidents. Without such practice they won’t know themselves, what they want, or what they’re capable of.
It’s not that we’ll be replaced by robots, it’s that we will become the robots.