If you're working on building AI into your classroom right now, congratulations, you’re already living in the future, and the future is,well, unpredictable.
Just days ago, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, sat down for a heavy, intense interview on CBS Mornings. The interviewer was actually heavy and intense, Hinton looks like he could be sipping tea and talking about cricket when he mentions the end of humanity. Very calm looking, in a high end cashmere sweater and hair that looks like it was well prepared for the casual messy look, (that’s my envy, not for the sweater, but for the hair), he spoke with the kind of haunted clarity you only hear from people who know more than pretty much everyone and knows it. He was visibly restrained, but you could tell he was frustrated with how fast people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman pushed things forward without enough thought for safety. He warned that while a full global catastrophe is a low-probability event, the impact of AI on fields like education will be immediate, deep, and lasting. Hinton openly wondered whether universities in their current form would even survive. A 10–20% chance that AI wipes out humanity? Maybe. But a near-100% chance that AI tears through fields like education and reshapes them completely? Absolutely.
At the same time, the White House is rolling out policies for AI teacher training, but it feels more like a political flex in response to China than any true strategy to empower teachers on the ground. No roadmap, no scaffolding, just a vague handwave in the general direction of "get ready." The Department of Agriculture is involved? Uh, what?
Meanwhile, The New Yorker just had an article by a Princeton professor who’s just now discovering AI like it’s a new planet. Not discovering it, but letting his student use it, finally. He thinks they weren't according to their explanations of how scary it is if they got caught. (I doubt that Ivy League students are really that scared of getting caught or don’t know how to use it without getting caught.) Those quotes from his classroom are pretty good too, if you read them with the thought balloon above your head that says they’re all lying. He was moved to tears in the article by a student's response to working with Ai on the assignment. That passage is worth the price of the magazine alone.That’s the real story: the gap between the people who are moving and the people who are still trying to understand that the world moved while they were sitting still.
This isn't chaos. This isn't just a trend. This is a paradigm shift on fast-forward, and we’re already on the frontlines.
If you’re experimenting with AI in your teaching, you've gone through your own iterations already. You're standing on the edge where the old education system is starting to crack and the shiny new thing is being reflected in the light around the corner. You didn’t ask for permission. You didn't need a formal policy. You don’t need some consultant telling you what’s “safe.” You started with small experiments, small risks, big potential. You use AI to co-build assignments, to deepen critical thinking, to reinvent collaboration, to blast open creativity.
I was in a Zoom call this morning with about fifty people. There were riffs on AGI, AI glasses, classroom jokes with AI, and more all starting with the pretense of discussing innovation. Someone mentioned the Limitless necklace, I mentioned the Limitless movie. This was the AI Education Connective monthly online meeting of AI education and technology cognoscenti and It turned into pure play and was definitely not about replacing teaching.
It was all about more tools, ideas, and strategies, and the end of the world? Not so much. Thanks.