“I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
By Charles Sosnik
I used to enjoy LinkedIn. I’ve been active for years, and I always enjoyed the insights and thoughtful posts I found there. A few years ago, when Large Language Model Machine Learning first hit the scene, LinkedIn was one of the places where you could find the latest insights, and the conversations on AI were thoughtful and productive.
Not so much anymore. Now, for every thoughtful article in my feed, there are dozens of pedantic feeds laced with fear, most desperate to prove they are written by the author and not by Large Language Models.
Even the articles I read in the education press are increasingly missing the point.
What we call artificial intelligence is a remarkable technology which brings some very promising possibilities to learning. But with that said, we have to remember two very important things.
First, LLM Machine Learning is still only a small fraction of what it will become.
And second, we should all have much bigger concerns. We have lost sight of what education is for. The purpose of education is to facilitate learning. And until we get serious about realigning the education system in our country into something that resembles the learner’s needs in our current century, all the technology in the world won’t save us.
The advances in LLM Machine Learning will happen whether we in the education community are ready for them or not. So let’s stop all the hand-wringing. Just have a little patience, and the technology and we will find our equilibrium.
But do worry about changing education into something that closely resembles a best learning opportunity for every student. That’s the tricky part. And it needs to begin now.
If you’d like to discuss how we can make needed changes, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at editorbytrade@gmail.com and let’s get the conversation going. I’m fortunate to have the ear of most of the publishers in the education media. And I can tell you with some certainty that we are all interested in helping to get the good ideas out there.
Because we’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way to the end.
About the author
Charles Sosnik is the publisher of Educate Al Magazine. He is a long-time writer in American education and has held the position of Editor in Chief for some of education’s top media platforms.
Charles is fortunate to live in the picturesque town of Gastonia, NC. And although Charles is an editor by trade, he is Southern by the Grace of God.
