What's the Industrial Process of School Education?

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Sally Kohn: I think one thing you can take out of this conversation is how algorithmic our educational system in many parts of the West has become. She says we are making it easier for machines to imitate us right? We'll make what we do easier to kind of be subject to algorithmic imitation, she says. And at some point, maybe the market will come out on the losing side of this bargain, and that's a very real danger. Skelton: It seems more urgent when you see things like GPT chat with people who go, Oh gosh, where did they get all their data from? But if nothing else, there are much more interesting things that

When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer's dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an age that favors the formulaic and generic to the ambiguous, complex, and unexpected, it's no wonder that computers can sound eerily lifelike. Leslie tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts that we should worry less about the lifelike nature of AI and worry more that human beings are being more robotic and predictable. Leslie bolsters his argument with evidence from music and movies. The conversation includes a discussion of the role of education in wearing down the mind's rougher, but more interesting and more authentic, edges as well as how we might strive to be more human in the age of AI.