The Week: AI Is Getting Smarter. Are We?

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Prof G.

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George Hahn (1:35)

Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, September 11th. Today, AI is getting smarter. Are we? Then, Trump wants Canada to fold. Instead, he may be strengthening its hand. And finally, what a divorce attorney says actually keeps a marriage together.

Let's get into it.

First, AI. Ed and Scott spoke with economist Tyler Cowan, an advisor to AI Labs who has been called the man who wants to know everything. The skeptics say AI is overhyped and unprofitable. Cowan isn't buying it. He thinks the technology already works. And when Scott asked where it's changing real work, Cowan pointed first to programming.

Tyler Cowen (2:36)

And I don't think humans will disappear from programming, but they've already taken on a fundamentally different role. They're more like impresarios. And they're consulted in the meantime, like, oh, is this going in the proper loop? Is the work actually being done? Is this the thing I asked it to do?

Over time, more and more of that will be AIs themselves monitoring. But that's the clearest example of a very positive change. The biggest negative, I just think, will be cybersecurity. There'll be a lot more hacks. There's plenty of evidence for this already. Those cost the world a lot. We'll spend more on cybersecurity.

It won't be fixed quickly. And I think it's a very real concern. We need a national, international effort to really firm up all of our major institutions as correctly as possible.

George Hahn (3:24)

The upside may be real, but this week brought another warning about what happens when we let AI do too much of our thinking. The OECD released its latest global assessment of 15-year-olds across 91 education systems. Reading and math scores have fallen to record lows across OECD countries.

AI didn't create that decade-long decline, but emerging research shows it could make the underlying problem worse. Students can appear to perform better with AI, then struggle when the tool disappears. Ed asked the Financial Times' John Byrne Murdoch what the evidence tells us.

John Byrne Murdoch (4:09)

We're seeing this in all sorts of settings. We've seen this come out from US universities as well. So I think at this point, there's a really solid case that relying on AI as part of the learning process is extremely risky in terms of it essentially being used as a crutch, that when taken away, people just collapse at the end. I think it's also just incredibly hard to enforce use of AI in the education setting where that doesn't happen. You can talk about having locked down versions of ChatGPT, that kind of thing, that encourage study hours.

But ultimately, if someone wants to cheat, they're going to find a way to cheat.

And we've seen this with all sorts of different forms of educational technology over the years as well. It's a really, really fine tightrope to try and tread. And we don't seem to be able to do that. I think as well we have this problem where a lot of the people in Silicon Valley who create these tools, they are people who have always worked really hard at school. They're always hyper-focused. They don't struggle with distraction. For them, it maybe seems obvious that well, you know, kids who are giving these tools are going to use them to learn even more. But I think that is just born out of a real disconnect from what real classrooms are like in modern UK, modern America, where just the ability to focus is a huge challenge for a lot of people.