AI and the expansion of meaningful work.
Most of today’s discussion about the impact of AI on education focus on perceived problems in teaching and evaluating students. Yet there is a fa larger effect of A’s advance: Many types of work will be taken over by machines, and jobs will vanish.
This change is typically seen as a cause for gloom. I suggest we see is as an opportunity to revitalize education by replacing unsatisfying wok with meaningful labor. Education aims to help young people develop as individuals and as citizens, not simply to become cogs in the machinery of national production. IF the cogs can be made by ingenious AI systems, so much the better. The previously employed people can be liberated to do something else. Not necessarily to expand productivity, but to advance educational goals that we neglect.
Let’s do that by vastly increasing the number of people who educate the young and raining the party of those who undertake these important tasks – the
main enterprise of the world.” As Emerson once characterized it. Let’s remove the stigma from service work and [appreciate its enormous worth. Let’s train more adults and put more of them in the classroom. Let’s give them the opportunity to recognize each child
Individuality, to help young p[people understand themselves, overcome the difficulties they encounter, and work with one another.
During the past few decades, educations in the affluent world ahs been largely dominated y a crude economic imperative. But children are not vehicles to be sent into some global demolition derby. F students are to have fulfilled lives, in which they can take on civic responsibilities and build healthy communities, they need far more than a collection for technical skills based on contemporary understandings of what ventures may equip a nation with some competitive edge. Givin teachers the respect and social standing they diverse, and recruiting a larges group of adults to join them and assist them in the classroom, would advance the goals serious thinkers about education, from Plato to ether present, have always recognized. AI’s displacement of labor can be an opportunity for liberation.
Pilip Kitcher is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Columba University