Everything You Need to Know About AI in the Classroom

Natasha Singer (0:00)

The difference between ChatGPT and a calculator is that the calculator always gave you the right answer, and it didn't encourage kids to self-harm.

And we now see parents suing AI companies saying that their kids harmed themselves or even died by suicide after befriending these chatbots. So I think that the potential is really, really high for AI in education, but like it is not a calculator.

Laurie Segall (0:28)

I'm Laurie Segall, and you're listening to Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens. Natasah, I'm so happy to be here with you today. Thank you for coming on.

Natasha Singer (0:38)

Thank you so much for having me.

Laurie Segall (0:40)

And I'm happy to have you here for both professional and personal reasons, I have to say.

To set it up, this fall, my husband and I are going to be applying for schools for my 18-month-old which is wild to think about for the following year. And the whole thing, trying to figure out where your child is going to go to school, trying to figure out what kind of environment they're going to be in. These are weighted decisions that weigh on me every single night.

And it also kind of collides with what I do professionally, which is talking about the future of technology and humanity. And so we've heard over the last years, I mean, AI is going to change everything. And I think where I really get nervous is like, what does this mean for my son? And what does this mean for our children? And for growing brains, which is why I am so happy that you wrote Coding Kids, a book that really looks into some of what's coming next and the promises that some of Big Tech is telling us about education. So your book Coding Kids, it discusses how children are influenced by Big Tech. You write, at its heart, this is a story about power. So just let's start out with, tell me why you decided to write the book. And what do you mean when you say this is a story about power?

Natasha Singer (2:02)

So the book is called Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools. And it started because I've been covering tech in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade.

And first of all, I'm just super interested by how science and tech subjects get into schools and how they become big phenomena. So that whole thing per se is fascinating. But then when you add the fact that we have these giant tech companies that are now both supplying the technology but driving technology education in schools, I just thought we ought to understand how this works. Because as Americans, we generally know how Amazon completely remade meat tail or how Uber completely remade and took over the taxi industry. But as a nation, until this year, we haven't really started having a discussion about how Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple have influenced and can shape schools. And so what I mean about, at its heart, this book is about power is that the book takes you inside all the ways that tech companies have been able to influence what and how millions of school kids learn.

And this is both a benefit, of course, we all want kids to learn the latest tools and have career skills to thrive in the future. But if you have giant tech companies shaping both the tools that kids use and what they learn about it, then you are learning often information and skills that benefit the tech industry. And one of the concerns is, are we leaving out important critical thinking and teaching kids to question and navigate and be able to have agency in this tech-fueled world? And that's what I meant by power.

Laurie Segall (3:46)

Yeah. What a fascinating moment of really digging in to who is actually influencing our children and how do we best set them up to allow them to grow into the humans that they can be. I would love to get into specifics because, and you know, I will admit, I always love interviewing other journalists because so many times people and experts can come on and talk about these things and these platitudes. But you've really dug in. You've been knee deep in this, not for a couple years, but for over a decade, right? Of really understanding these data points. So take me back, based off of your research and what you've learned, where does the influence between technology and education start and how does that manifest?

Natasha Singer (4:34)

So one of the great things about being able to take some time to write a book is you can go down these historical rabbit holes and learn things that you don't, as a journalist, have time to learn in your day job. Yeah. And so I did some archival research and you can go back to the early 1900s and you have Thomas Edison, right? And he's invented this motion moving picture machine is called a kinetoscope. And basically it's just showing you the short reels of images.