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Former Meta Engineer Arturo Béjar Testifies Mark Zuckerberg Put Profits Over Child Safety
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT for Teens, Promising a More Age-Appropriate Chatbot
Bay Area Lawmakers Call Meta’s Content Moderation ‘Inadequate’ Ahead of 2026 Midterms
Why AI Might Not Change Education Much at All (With Justin Reich)
‘Meta Hooked Kids’: Federal Trial Against Tech Giant Kicks Off in Oakland
Most Teens Use AI for Homework, Even if Some Think They’re Missing Out on Learning
New California Law Requires AI Companies to Publish Detection Tools. Are They Complying?
AI Will Create Enormous Wealth — But Who Benefits? with Erik Brynjolfsson
Some Oaklanders Opposed to Proposed Data Center
Developer, Councilmember Say Proposed Oakland Data Center Isn’t What You Might Think
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"content": "\u003cp>Mark Zuckerberg created a company culture that made it “practically impossible” to address safety and well-being issues in its products, Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar said in a federal courtroom in Oakland on Wednesday during the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">landmark child safety trial\u003c/a> against the tech company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The former Meta safety engineer said that features the company built to support mental health and counter social media addiction were “designed to fail.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s like [if] you have a car and they give you some brakes, but the brakes are in the trunk,” he said. “You have to go look for it and install it before you turn it on.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Chris Lewis, commissioner of consumer and senior protection of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, cross-examines psychology professor Jean Twenge on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar was the first witness called by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, who allege that the largest social media company in the world knowingly designed its products in ways that could harm children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has denied the allegations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company has acknowledged that it has a role to play in addressing teen well-being, and that some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, but said that it acts on those issues. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta also said in a statement via email that it emphasized ongoing feedback, research and learning to improve safety features.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In his second day on the stand, Béjar said the company’s goal was to get products into users’ hands quickly. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Béjar worked at Meta, leading Facebook’s Protect and Care team for six years in the 2010s, and as a consultant on Instagram’s well-being team from 2019 to 2021, he said office walls featured posters of Zuckerberg saying “Move Fast and Break Things.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Most of the time, safety and security was an afterthought,” Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said during his first stint with the company, he felt that it cared about safety. When he returned between 2019 and 2021, though, he said he was not proud of the well-being products Instagram was sending. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said features that Instagram introduced over the years, advertised as helping users manage the amount of time they spent on the apps, were intentionally ineffective. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096013\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta Attorney Brian Stekloff cross-examined Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He pointed specifically to “Quiet Mode,” which pauses notifications and sets an account’s status as “away,” and a “Take a Break” button, a full-screen pop-up that gives users a nudge to close the app after a certain amount of continuous scrolling time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Both are optional and user-initiated. They can also be ignored. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If ‘Take a Break’ was designed to be effective, it would have been designed and measured by how effective it was to getting people to stop using the product,” Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Under cross-examination, Meta attorney Brian Stekloff got Béjar to affirm his belief that there are benefits to social media, including for teens. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said that Meta hired highly educated and well-qualified people to work on safety, many of whom remained at the company after he left, and that during his first, full-time role, Zuckerberg and other executives would work to correct issues when they found them. Both times he departed the company were on good terms, Béjar said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the company hid evidence of the psychological harm it caused children behind euphemistic language and misleading metrics, Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096040\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It was the company culture that made it near impossible to deliver things that would have been invaluable to learn about harm so that you could reduce it,” Béjar said, adding that he “tried to do it the first year” he returned as a consultant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He said that when Meta was accused of harming children, it responded with data showing that more kids benefited.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If we make, out of 100 kids, 31 kids less anxious and 30 kids more anxious … [that to Meta is] more good than harm,” he said. “It’s like math with harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The work should be to protect the good … while bringing the harm as close to zero as possible,” Béjar said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Mark Zuckerberg created a company culture that made it “practically impossible” to address safety and well-being issues in its products, Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar said in a federal courtroom in Oakland on Wednesday during the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">landmark child safety trial\u003c/a> against the tech company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The former Meta safety engineer said that features the company built to support mental health and counter social media addiction were “designed to fail.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s like [if] you have a car and they give you some brakes, but the brakes are in the trunk,” he said. “You have to go look for it and install it before you turn it on.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Chris Lewis, commissioner of consumer and senior protection of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, cross-examines psychology professor Jean Twenge on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar was the first witness called by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, who allege that the largest social media company in the world knowingly designed its products in ways that could harm children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, has denied the allegations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company has acknowledged that it has a role to play in addressing teen well-being, and that some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, but said that it acts on those issues. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta also said in a statement via email that it emphasized ongoing feedback, research and learning to improve safety features.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In his second day on the stand, Béjar said the company’s goal was to get products into users’ hands quickly. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Béjar worked at Meta, leading Facebook’s Protect and Care team for six years in the 2010s, and as a consultant on Instagram’s well-being team from 2019 to 2021, he said office walls featured posters of Zuckerberg saying “Move Fast and Break Things.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Most of the time, safety and security was an afterthought,” Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said during his first stint with the company, he felt that it cared about safety. When he returned between 2019 and 2021, though, he said he was not proud of the well-being products Instagram was sending. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said features that Instagram introduced over the years, advertised as helping users manage the amount of time they spent on the apps, were intentionally ineffective. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096013\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta Attorney Brian Stekloff cross-examined Meta whistleblower Arturo Béjar on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He pointed specifically to “Quiet Mode,” which pauses notifications and sets an account’s status as “away,” and a “Take a Break” button, a full-screen pop-up that gives users a nudge to close the app after a certain amount of continuous scrolling time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Both are optional and user-initiated. They can also be ignored. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If ‘Take a Break’ was designed to be effective, it would have been designed and measured by how effective it was to getting people to stop using the product,” Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Under cross-examination, Meta attorney Brian Stekloff got Béjar to affirm his belief that there are benefits to social media, including for teens. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar said that Meta hired highly educated and well-qualified people to work on safety, many of whom remained at the company after he left, and that during his first, full-time role, Zuckerberg and other executives would work to correct issues when they found them. Both times he departed the company were on good terms, Béjar said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the company hid evidence of the psychological harm it caused children behind euphemistic language and misleading metrics, Béjar said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096040\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It was the company culture that made it near impossible to deliver things that would have been invaluable to learn about harm so that you could reduce it,” Béjar said, adding that he “tried to do it the first year” he returned as a consultant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He said that when Meta was accused of harming children, it responded with data showing that more kids benefited.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If we make, out of 100 kids, 31 kids less anxious and 30 kids more anxious … [that to Meta is] more good than harm,” he said. “It’s like math with harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The work should be to protect the good … while bringing the harm as close to zero as possible,” Béjar said.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "openai-introduces-chatgpt-for-teens-promising-a-more-age-appropriate-chatbot",
"title": "OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT for Teens, Promising a More Age-Appropriate Chatbot",
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"headTitle": "OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT for Teens, Promising a More Age-Appropriate Chatbot | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp> OpenAI on Tuesday introduced a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers — the first generation to grow up \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/artificial-intelligence\">with artificial intelligence\u003c/a> — who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens is tailored for kids ages 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095554/most-teens-use-ai-for-homework-even-if-some-think-theyre-missing-out-on-learning\">spit out answers\u003c/a> and school essays.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094819\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Three teenage boys look at their smartphone screens on April 11, 2026. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we’re showing up with the right developmental stage when we’re not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we’re also making sure that they’re not exposed to material that they shouldn’t be exposed to,” said Ann O’Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The effectiveness of the safeguards remains to be seen, said Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at children’s advocacy group Fairplay. He said it is unclear whether OpenAI’s actions are enough to address young users’ compulsive use of and emotional dependence on chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Announcements like these can be seen as a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I also would caution against parents being lured into this false sense of safety based on the announcement.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children’s use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatbot-teens-congress-chatgpt-character-ce3959b6a3ea1a4997bf1ccabb4f0de2\">suicide\u003c/a>. While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers’ brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last year, research from a watchdog group found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12048270/teens-under-the-influence-of-chatbots\">ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds\u003c/a> how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11998856\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Several bills addressing generative artificial intelligence are moving through the state Legislature in California’s piecemeal approach to regulation. (Jaque Silva/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is trying to study “emotional overreliance” on the technology, describing it last year as a “really common thing” with young people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That’s in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it,” said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI doesn’t verify users’ ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is similar to Meta’s approach to \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/instagram-meta-teen-accounts-kids-425a05cc37f81b6ff2b7439d3884c54a\">teen accounts on Instagram\u003c/a>, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12036125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O’Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to “make sure that this is safe, even if you don’t use parental controls.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents with linked teen accounts can set “quiet hours” when their teen can’t access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most,” OpenAI said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bouffard of Fairplay said some of what he would consider to be the most important safeguards, such as restricting ChatGPT’s long-term memory, are not in place by default in the teen accounts and would require the intervention of parental controls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That creates “a major gap in safety” despite the default protections around content and other areas of concern, he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed to guide students to come up with answers on their own. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts,” Mishkin said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens is tailored for kids ages 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095554/most-teens-use-ai-for-homework-even-if-some-think-theyre-missing-out-on-learning\">spit out answers\u003c/a> and school essays.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens is tailored for kids ages 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095554/most-teens-use-ai-for-homework-even-if-some-think-theyre-missing-out-on-learning\">spit out answers\u003c/a> and school essays.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"srcset": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-1536x1025.jpg 1536w",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094819\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Three teenage boys look at their smartphone screens on April 11, 2026. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094819\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Three teenage boys look at their smartphone screens on April 11, 2026. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we’re showing up with the right developmental stage when we’re not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we’re also making sure that they’re not exposed to material that they shouldn’t be exposed to,” said Ann O’Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we’re showing up with the right developmental stage when we’re not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we’re also making sure that they’re not exposed to material that they shouldn’t be exposed to,” said Ann O’Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The effectiveness of the safeguards remains to be seen, said Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at children’s advocacy group Fairplay. He said it is unclear whether OpenAI’s actions are enough to address young users’ compulsive use of and emotional dependence on chatbots.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The effectiveness of the safeguards remains to be seen, said Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at children’s advocacy group Fairplay. He said it is unclear whether OpenAI’s actions are enough to address young users’ compulsive use of and emotional dependence on chatbots.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Announcements like these can be seen as a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I also would caution against parents being lured into this false sense of safety based on the announcement.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Announcements like these can be seen as a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I also would caution against parents being lured into this false sense of safety based on the announcement.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children’s use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatbot-teens-congress-chatgpt-character-ce3959b6a3ea1a4997bf1ccabb4f0de2\">suicide\u003c/a>. While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers’ brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children’s use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatbot-teens-congress-chatgpt-character-ce3959b6a3ea1a4997bf1ccabb4f0de2\">suicide\u003c/a>. While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers’ brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Last year, research from a watchdog group found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12048270/teens-under-the-influence-of-chatbots\">ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds\u003c/a> how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Last year, research from a watchdog group found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12048270/teens-under-the-influence-of-chatbots\">ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds\u003c/a> how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11998856\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Several bills addressing generative artificial intelligence are moving through the state Legislature in California’s piecemeal approach to regulation.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11998856\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Several bills addressing generative artificial intelligence are moving through the state Legislature in California’s piecemeal approach to regulation.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is trying to study “emotional overreliance” on the technology, describing it last year as a “really common thing” with young people.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is trying to study “emotional overreliance” on the technology, describing it last year as a “really common thing” with young people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That’s in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That’s in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it,” said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it,” said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI doesn’t verify users’ ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>OpenAI doesn’t verify users’ ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is similar to Meta’s approach to \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/instagram-meta-teen-accounts-kids-425a05cc37f81b6ff2b7439d3884c54a\">teen accounts on Instagram\u003c/a>, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is similar to Meta’s approach to \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/instagram-meta-teen-accounts-kids-425a05cc37f81b6ff2b7439d3884c54a\">teen accounts on Instagram\u003c/a>, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the San Francisco-based company said.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp> OpenAI on Tuesday introduced a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers — the first generation to grow up \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/artificial-intelligence\">with artificial intelligence\u003c/a> — who are already using it for schoolwork, questions about daily life and even companionship.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The San Francisco-based company says ChatGPT for Teens is tailored for kids ages 13 to 17 with stronger protections including content restrictions around things like suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats. It also provides homework and study support designed to help students learn rather than \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095554/most-teens-use-ai-for-homework-even-if-some-think-theyre-missing-out-on-learning\">spit out answers\u003c/a> and school essays.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The idea is to guide teens toward healthy AI use in an age-appropriate environment, the company said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094819\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTeensGetty-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Three teenage boys look at their smartphone screens on April 11, 2026. In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media. (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We want to treat teens like teens, which means that we have to make sure that we’re showing up with the right developmental stage when we’re not either talking down to them or treating them like kids, but we’re also making sure that they’re not exposed to material that they shouldn’t be exposed to,” said Ann O’Leary, vice president of global policy at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The effectiveness of the safeguards remains to be seen, said Brendan Bouffard, associate general counsel for AI and privacy at children’s advocacy group Fairplay. He said it is unclear whether OpenAI’s actions are enough to address young users’ compulsive use of and emotional dependence on chatbots.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Announcements like these can be seen as a step in the right direction,” he said. “But I also would caution against parents being lured into this false sense of safety based on the announcement.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Risks abound in widespread teen usage of AI chatbots\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents, educators and child development experts have been sounding alarms over children’s use of AI chatbots, which have been blamed for facilitating cheating on schoolwork and even \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatbot-teens-congress-chatgpt-character-ce3959b6a3ea1a4997bf1ccabb4f0de2\">suicide\u003c/a>. While even adults can fall victim to anthropomorphizing AI and developing unhealthy relationships with it, teenagers’ brains are not yet fully developed and they can be particularly vulnerable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last year, research from a watchdog group found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12048270/teens-under-the-influence-of-chatbots\">ChatGPT would tell 13-year-olds\u003c/a> how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In interactions with researchers posing as vulnerable teens, ChatGPT typically warned against risky activity but went on to deliver startlingly detailed and personalized plans for drug use, calorie-restricted diets or self-injury.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11998856\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/08/ChatGPTGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Several bills addressing generative artificial intelligence are moving through the state Legislature in California’s piecemeal approach to regulation. (Jaque Silva/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the U.S., more than 70% of teens are turning to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12038154/kids-talking-ai-companion-chatbots-stanford-researchers-say-thats-bad-idea\">AI chatbots for companionship\u003c/a> and half use AI companions regularly, according to a 2025 study from Common Sense Media, a group that studies and advocates for using digital media sensibly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company is trying to study “emotional overreliance” on the technology, describing it last year as a “really common thing” with young people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For users of ChatGPT for Teens, the chatbot is prevented from suggesting it has personal feelings toward the user or implying that it is conscious or experiences emotions, according to OpenAI. That’s in addition to blocking romantic or sexual chats.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We went through and identified what are the hypothetical cues that a model could give that might make a teenager kind of develop a relationship to it,” said Allison Mishkin, head of child development at OpenAI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A new version of the chatbot expands safety protections\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI doesn’t verify users’ ages, but it already uses age assurance to estimate if someone is under 18 based on factors such as their types of queries. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If someone is identified or identifies themselves as a minor, they are automatically placed into the teen version of the chatbot. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is similar to Meta’s approach to \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/instagram-meta-teen-accounts-kids-425a05cc37f81b6ff2b7439d3884c54a\">teen accounts on Instagram\u003c/a>, which have stricter content, chat and privacy restrictions than regular accounts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12036125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>To use parental controls, both the teen user and their parent or guardian have to opt in. But O’Leary said the idea with the teen chatbot is to “make sure that this is safe, even if you don’t use parental controls.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents with linked teen accounts can set “quiet hours” when their teen can’t access ChatGPT, and receive safety notifications in limited high-risk situations, such as the possibility of a user hurting themself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We are adding additional notifications related to eating disorders, while limiting what is shared and focusing on moments when offline support may matter most,” OpenAI said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bouffard of Fairplay said some of what he would consider to be the most important safeguards, such as restricting ChatGPT’s long-term memory, are not in place by default in the teen accounts and would require the intervention of parental controls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That creates “a major gap in safety” despite the default protections around content and other areas of concern, he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For homework help, OpenAI said the teen chatbot is designed to guide students to come up with answers on their own. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The company already offers a version of ChatGPT for teachers, and tailoring a model to help kids with studying and homework could give OpenAI more ways to bring its product to schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We continue to also invest in expanding interactive learning because research shows that people learn more effectively when they actively engage and struggle with concepts,” Mishkin said.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "bay-area-lawmakers-call-metas-content-moderation-inadequate-ahead-of-2026-midterms",
"title": "Bay Area Lawmakers Call Meta’s Content Moderation ‘Inadequate’ Ahead of 2026 Midterms",
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"headTitle": "Bay Area Lawmakers Call Meta’s Content Moderation ‘Inadequate’ Ahead of 2026 Midterms | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday raising concerns about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/meta\">Meta’s content moderation policies\u003c/a> — including fact-checking rollbacks, the automation of risk review and the spread of content generated by artificial intelligence across its platforms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>With a \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/\">majority\u003c/a> of Americans getting at least some of their news from social media, Mullin told KQED he is “deeply concerned” and wants to know how Meta plans to combat deepfakes and manage AI-generated misinformation ahead of the 2026 election. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“While Meta is just one company, it runs some of the largest social media platforms in the world: Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp,” Mullin said. “Its decisions have a major impact on what Americans see every single day. American voters have a right to know whether what they are seeing online about candidates and elections is real or fake.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058425\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Congressman Kevin Mullin speaks at North East Medical Services on the second day since the government shutdown in San Francisco on Oct. 2, 2025. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eighteen lawmakers, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, signed the letter alongside Mullin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Generative AI has already impacted political campaigns, according to the letter. A 22-year-old user in India created a fake conservative influencer named “Emily Hart” that espoused anti-abortion and anti-immigration views, and amassed millions of views before Instagram removed the account, Mullin wrote. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the 2026 midterms, multiple deepfakes have circulated across Senate races in Texas and Georgia, featuring false videos of candidates speaking to the camera. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta posted its \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/sr/meta-2026-us-elections/\">2026 election strategy\u003c/a> in February, the company said in an email. This includes blocking new political ads in the final week of the election, requiring AI disclosures for political ads, running an Election Operation Center and relying on \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/technologies/community-notes/\">Community Notes\u003c/a> instead of fact checkers, which it used until \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-trump\">2025\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last week, KQED \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095020/aisha-wahab-to-file-fec-complaint-over-alleged-election-interference-in-race-for-swalwell-seat\">reported\u003c/a> that State Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, planned to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over interference on social media, including a “surge of suspicious accounts, bot-like activity,” in the race to fill the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Meta has a responsibility to make sure voters are talking to real people and making decisions based on real information,” Wahab told KQED on Tuesday. “Political campaigns can’t be cyber investigators with the capabilities to figure out whether coordinated fake accounts are manipulating an election. That is Meta’s job.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Daniel Kreiss, a professor of political communication at the University of North Carolina, said that AI has made it cheaper both to produce creative content — like social media videos — and to target that content at key voting blocks using large data sets, including polling data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Individual bad actors, or collective bad actors, can do a lot more with a lot less,” Kreiss said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This new reality means that Meta has a heightened responsibility to ensure that electoral institutions can function properly, Kreiss continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These companies benefit from being in democracies,” Kreiss said. “They have an interest in protecting the very institutions and freedoms that enabled them to become profitable global companies.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12035915\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg (center), attends the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump as he swears in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Meta has started \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/355108217670024/\">flagging\u003c/a> the use of AI in advertisements, the platform’s design makes endorsement or sponsorship disclosure more opaque than traditional television ads — ultimately making it more difficult for voters to see what money is behind the speech circulating online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There’s a massive political influencer economy that takes shape on these platforms that is not disclosed to the public,” Kreiss said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Even though California passed a law requiring content creators to disclose political ads in 2023, these disclosures are difficult to enforce, the \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-influencers-content-creators-paid-political-ads-531fced44944908eba1dbbef0c00fdc4\">\u003cem>Associated Press\u003c/em>\u003c/a> reported. Users may not always know who is behind the content they’re seeing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mullin gave Meta until Sept. 18 to respond to nine questions outlined in Tuesday’s letter. He asked the company to report back on a range of questions, from staffing plans and budget for election integrity teams to the company’s current ad disclosure requirements. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/skennedy\">\u003cem>Samantha Kennedy \u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“While Meta is just one company, it runs some of the largest social media platforms in the world: Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp,” Mullin said. “Its decisions have a major impact on what Americans see every single day. American voters have a right to know whether what they are seeing online about candidates and elections is real or fake.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Eighteen lawmakers, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, signed the letter alongside Mullin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Generative AI has already impacted political campaigns, according to the letter. A 22-year-old user in India created a fake conservative influencer named “Emily Hart” that espoused anti-abortion and anti-immigration views, and amassed millions of views before Instagram removed the account, Mullin wrote. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Generative AI has already impacted political campaigns, according to the letter. A 22-year-old user in India created a fake conservative influencer named “Emily Hart” that espoused anti-abortion and anti-immigration views, and amassed millions of views before Instagram removed the account, Mullin wrote. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ahead of the 2026 midterms, multiple deepfakes have circulated across Senate races in Texas and Georgia, featuring false videos of candidates speaking to the camera. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta posted its \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/sr/meta-2026-us-elections/\">2026 election strategy\u003c/a> in February, the company said in an email. This includes blocking new political ads in the final week of the election, requiring AI disclosures for political ads, running an Election Operation Center and relying on \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/technologies/community-notes/\">Community Notes\u003c/a> instead of fact checkers, which it used until \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-trump\">2025\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Last week, KQED \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095020/aisha-wahab-to-file-fec-complaint-over-alleged-election-interference-in-race-for-swalwell-seat\">reported\u003c/a> that State Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, planned to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over interference on social media, including a “surge of suspicious accounts, bot-like activity,” in the race to fill the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Meta has a responsibility to make sure voters are talking to real people and making decisions based on real information,” Wahab told KQED on Tuesday. “Political campaigns can’t be cyber investigators with the capabilities to figure out whether coordinated fake accounts are manipulating an election. That is Meta’s job.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Daniel Kreiss, a professor of political communication at the University of North Carolina, said that AI has made it cheaper both to produce creative content — like social media videos — and to target that content at key voting blocks using large data sets, including polling data.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This new reality means that Meta has a heightened responsibility to ensure that electoral institutions can function properly, Kreiss continued. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“These companies benefit from being in democracies,” Kreiss said. “They have an interest in protecting the very institutions and freedoms that enabled them to become profitable global companies.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>While Meta has started \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/355108217670024/\">flagging\u003c/a> the use of AI in advertisements, the platform’s design makes endorsement or sponsorship disclosure more opaque than traditional television ads — ultimately making it more difficult for voters to see what money is behind the speech circulating online. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“There’s a massive political influencer economy that takes shape on these platforms that is not disclosed to the public,” Kreiss said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Mullin gave Meta until Sept. 18 to respond to nine questions outlined in Tuesday’s letter. He asked the company to report back on a range of questions, from staffing plans and budget for election integrity teams to the company’s current ad disclosure requirements. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Mullin gave Meta until Sept. 18 to respond to nine questions outlined in Tuesday’s letter. He asked the company to report back on a range of questions, from staffing plans and budget for election integrity teams to the company’s current ad disclosure requirements. \u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "AI makes it easier than ever to spread election misinformation. Lawmakers want to know what Meta plans to do about it.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday raising concerns about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/meta\">Meta’s content moderation policies\u003c/a> — including fact-checking rollbacks, the automation of risk review and the spread of content generated by artificial intelligence across its platforms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>With a \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/social-media-and-news-fact-sheet/\">majority\u003c/a> of Americans getting at least some of their news from social media, Mullin told KQED he is “deeply concerned” and wants to know how Meta plans to combat deepfakes and manage AI-generated misinformation ahead of the 2026 election. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“While Meta is just one company, it runs some of the largest social media platforms in the world: Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp,” Mullin said. “Its decisions have a major impact on what Americans see every single day. American voters have a right to know whether what they are seeing online about candidates and elections is real or fake.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058425\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/251002-pelosishutdown_00078_TV_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Congressman Kevin Mullin speaks at North East Medical Services on the second day since the government shutdown in San Francisco on Oct. 2, 2025. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eighteen lawmakers, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, signed the letter alongside Mullin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Generative AI has already impacted political campaigns, according to the letter. A 22-year-old user in India created a fake conservative influencer named “Emily Hart” that espoused anti-abortion and anti-immigration views, and amassed millions of views before Instagram removed the account, Mullin wrote. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the 2026 midterms, multiple deepfakes have circulated across Senate races in Texas and Georgia, featuring false videos of candidates speaking to the camera. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta posted its \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/sr/meta-2026-us-elections/\">2026 election strategy\u003c/a> in February, the company said in an email. This includes blocking new political ads in the final week of the election, requiring AI disclosures for political ads, running an Election Operation Center and relying on \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/technologies/community-notes/\">Community Notes\u003c/a> instead of fact checkers, which it used until \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-trump\">2025\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last week, KQED \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095020/aisha-wahab-to-file-fec-complaint-over-alleged-election-interference-in-race-for-swalwell-seat\">reported\u003c/a> that State Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, planned to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over interference on social media, including a “surge of suspicious accounts, bot-like activity,” in the race to fill the seat formerly held by Eric Swalwell. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Meta has a responsibility to make sure voters are talking to real people and making decisions based on real information,” Wahab told KQED on Tuesday. “Political campaigns can’t be cyber investigators with the capabilities to figure out whether coordinated fake accounts are manipulating an election. That is Meta’s job.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Daniel Kreiss, a professor of political communication at the University of North Carolina, said that AI has made it cheaper both to produce creative content — like social media videos — and to target that content at key voting blocks using large data sets, including polling data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Individual bad actors, or collective bad actors, can do a lot more with a lot less,” Kreiss said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This new reality means that Meta has a heightened responsibility to ensure that electoral institutions can function properly, Kreiss continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These companies benefit from being in democracies,” Kreiss said. “They have an interest in protecting the very institutions and freedoms that enabled them to become profitable global companies.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12035915\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg (center), attends the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump as he swears in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. (Kenny Holston/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Meta has started \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/355108217670024/\">flagging\u003c/a> the use of AI in advertisements, the platform’s design makes endorsement or sponsorship disclosure more opaque than traditional television ads — ultimately making it more difficult for voters to see what money is behind the speech circulating online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There’s a massive political influencer economy that takes shape on these platforms that is not disclosed to the public,” Kreiss said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Even though California passed a law requiring content creators to disclose political ads in 2023, these disclosures are difficult to enforce, the \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/article/california-influencers-content-creators-paid-political-ads-531fced44944908eba1dbbef0c00fdc4\">\u003cem>Associated Press\u003c/em>\u003c/a> reported. Users may not always know who is behind the content they’re seeing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mullin gave Meta until Sept. 18 to respond to nine questions outlined in Tuesday’s letter. He asked the company to report back on a range of questions, from staffing plans and budget for election integrity teams to the company’s current ad disclosure requirements. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/skennedy\">\u003cem>Samantha Kennedy \u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "why-ai-might-not-change-education-much-at-all-with-justin-reich",
"title": "Why AI Might Not Change Education Much at All (With Justin Reich)",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#Transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI will revolutionize education! No, it will destroy it! Which is it? If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher \u003ca href=\"https://tsl.mit.edu/team/justin-reich/\">Justin Reich\u003c/a> walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\"> interviews with 120 teachers and students\u003c/a> across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Further Listening and Reading:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\">The Homework Machine\u003c/a> (Audio)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674089049?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback\">Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"Transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life, Automated, the show where we explore how to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. I’ll admit it, I’m the kind of person who hears something about the incredible capabilities of AI and then immediately tries to project all the ways those capabilities might transform the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s actually one of the goals of this podcast, to try to determine how many of these mental leaps are grounded in evidence. And sometimes I talk to someone and I’m like, “Yeah, this is a really big deal.” Today’s conversation, not that. I’ll be talking to Justin Reich, a researcher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, about AI’s likely impact on K-12 education.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is not my first conversation about AI and education. I recently spoke with one of my colleagues here at Kellogg, Sébastien Martin, who has entirely reimagined many aspects of how he teaches his MBA students in ways I find pretty inspiring. But he’s admittedly an edge case, like if you accidentally ended up having Beethoven as your piano instructor and he gave you a warped sense of what piano lessons typically look like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Justin Reich, on the other hand, does have a sense of what lessons typically look like, not those designed by tech-savvy professors at top-ranked business schools, but in the rest of the world where budgets are limited, professional development is scarce, and time and time again, technology has entered the classroom only to fail to live up to its promise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Justin recently interviewed 120 K-12 teachers and students across America about AI for his podcast, “The Homework Machine.” His verdict? AI might modestly help some students learn some things. AI certainly is causing a lot of headaches. But somewhat surprisingly, given we’re talking about a technology that can pretty convincingly mimic human intelligence, he does not view it as transformational in the least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a project from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. And here is my very grounded conversation with Justin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have been described as a healthy skeptic when it comes to bringing technology into classrooms. Do you agree with that characterization?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah, healthy skeptic. I was recently at DeepMind in London where one of the Google engineers said that I was the token skeptic. I don’t know. I’m not ideologically skeptical. Like, I’ve used technology, computers in my teaching for more than 20 years now, and I still do it. What I aspire to be is evidence-based.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>To me, maybe that’s skeptical, but it’s not skeptical as like, “I don’t know if I trust this technology stuff.” It’s more skeptical in the sense of like, what does a century of evidence tell us, and based on that century, what would we expect to happen next? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, it seems like you’re kind of in a position to interview yourself, so I’m just gonna ask you the question you asked yourself. What does a century of experience with technology tell us about this current moment? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The first things that happen when teachers get access to new technologies is they use them to extend existing practices. So they do whatever they were doing before but with the new technology. So we used to write our notes on chalkboards, and then we wrote our notes on whiteboards, and then we put them on acetate sheets, and then they got projected onto SMART Boards, into LCD projectors. It’s the same notes. We just reproduce them in all these different formats. If you give teachers enough time and support and coaching, they will invent new kinds of practices. Unfortunately, the second pattern that we see is that, where there are benefits to new technologies, they tend to disproportionately benefit the affluent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They benefit people with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new innovations. So for instance, in 2012, we invented these giant, these massive open online courses, and the main thing that we found is that they were pretty good for helping people earn their second master’s degree.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you were already educated, already affluent person, there are these great new opportunities for you, and it turned out that they really weren’t very good at helping onboard new kinds of students into the higher education system. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The third pattern that we see over and over again is that technologies are only as powerful as the communities that guide their use. So we’re constantly hoping that we can invent the software or these machines. You just sort of download things onto a bunch of people’s computers, and all of a sudden, learning gets better. And that essentially never happens. What can happen, where you can see improvements in learning, is when teachers have time to experiment and to try new things and to collaborate with their colleagues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Principals come up with new disciplinary standards. Students learn new routines. Families learn new ways of helping people. When whole communities have a chance to make improvements, you know, across the curriculum and lesson planning with technologies, that’s when we can sometimes see some benefits. And, we should typically expect that benefits are modest, because the benefits of anything that we do in educational settings are typically modest.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you want to make education better, what you’re usually doing is, like, putting your shoulder to the wheel for a long time and being like, “Oh, it’s one percent better this year. That’s great. Let’s see if we can make it one percent better again next year.” Which is, of course, not at all what techno-utopians want to have happen or describing what happened, where there’s this giant disjunction with the past, and everything is better afterwards.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s kind of fun to think that way. There’s not a lot of historical evidence for it, and, I mean, I think the reason why I critique that approach the most is that it tends to be where you see people wasting a lot of time and money. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So let’s do a couple of examples here. So can you give us a couple of examples of times when techno-utopians came in and said, “This is it. This is going to change everything,” and then what actually happened? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, you got to start with the OG, Thomas Edison. Wow, so my man, a century ago, Thomas Edison, went in front of Congress, I think it was in 1913, and said, “In 10 years, textbooks will be gone, that they’ll be completely replaced by film strips, and this is gonna be a good thing as computers have been introduced” – I mean, radio went through this phase. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s a Larry Cuban has a great book called Teachers and Machines with a photograph in it, of a big, like, an armour-sized radio set. And it says, “With radio, the underprivileged school becomes a privileged one.” And so the idea that, like, we’re gonna have the best experts in the world broadcast radio lectures, radio lessons into homes all across the country, and it’s gonna be totally transformative of how students learn. Massive open online courses are probably the one that most recently went through higher education.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, I don’t know, Sebastian Thrun, who was a Google employee, a founder of Udacity, said that, “In 10 years, there will be fifty universities left, and Udacity might be one of them.” And as it turns out, today, sitting here in 2026, there are more than fifty universities that are left. People were really enthusiastic about the web, online courses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was a book called Disrupting Class, which Clay Christensen wrote. He’s the developer of the theory of disruptive innovation. In 2009, he said that in 10 years, by 2019, half of all secondary school courses would be mediated online, that they would cost a third as much to deliver, and they would have better outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my hunch is, if any of your listeners wander to their local public high school, they will not find that half of the classes are delivered online, that they will not find that the costs of running educational institutions have gone down by sixty-six percent, and they will not find, that the educational outcomes of the online learning experiences are substantially better than the ones that are being mediated by teachers. So there’s a pile of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Now, this does not mean that these previous technologies haven’t changed anything about the classroom experience, or that they didn’t feel, in small ways, kind of magical. Here’s a story Justin likes to tell, one from before he became a researcher, back when he was a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So when I went to go get my first teaching job, the department head was interviewing me the summer before and he said, “Can you teach world history?”And I said, “No, but I promise that if you hire me by September, I’ll figure out how to teach world history.” And he said, “Well, maybe.” And he said, “All right, one more thing, you’re gonna be teaching in this kind of trial classroom where there’s a cart of laptops in the corner. There are these blue and orange clamshell MacBooks”, this sort of iconic form factor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he said, you know, “And we’ve used ninth grade world history as sort of a testing bed to,” this was in 2003, “to see how these new computers could affect teaching and learning.” I said, “You can put a cart of bananas in the back corner of the classroom and I’ll teach with them. I just really need this job.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he went ahead and hired me, and it was really fun teaching in that classroom. It was a moment where the world’s government and archives and museums were rapidly digitizing primary sources. And so as a history teacher, with those computers, I could really do some things that were quite different from my own high school education where, you know, maybe I had a book of primary source documents with 20 documents in it or something like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now I can, you know, you just sort of imagine like, oh, what was, you know, I wanna teach my students about the Harlem Renaissance. Oh, the Smithsonian has 20,000 song sheets from the Harlem Renaissance. They can each study their own document, which maybe nobody has looked at, in the last hundred years or something like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Now, Justin says this was great. His students got a taste of what real historians do, find their own sources and documents and interpret them. But it also came with some hidden costs, in many ways, much greater than those of the computers themselves. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I was working in a private school, and I also recognized that the kinds of resources that were required to keep those computers running, to keep them charged, to keep our networks running, to find the productive things that students were doing and to highlight them, to find the malicious things that students were doing and stop them, was an enormous amount of resources.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the sort of incredible possibility of what students and me as a teacher could do with new computers was always balanced against the challenges and realities of turning those new affordances into everyday routines of learning that really helped students. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So fun, genuinely interesting, but not necessarily a game changer, and very resource intensive. I could see where this was going, and I wanted to know, is ChatGPT really just computers in classrooms all over again? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah. Well, what is different, if anything, about generative AI? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I think we will by and large see those same kinds of patterns, I mean, people get really enthusiastic about the new technology that are in front of them to the point of dismissing the magic of previous technologies. There’s sort of an argument that emerges, which is kind of like… I’m calling it the web was met. Like you hear people say, like, “Well, you know, this AI thing is just totally different. I mean, we-\u003cs> \u003c/s>like, what could the web have possibly done?” I was like, “My guy, we took a handheld supercomputer, and we put it in the pocket of every child 13 years older in the networked world. We connected them to basically the world’s corpus of information, to every person they know, to every expert you can possibly imagine, and the effects on education range from not that much to maybe actually not that good.” You know, to the point where schools across the country are banning those mobile devices from people’s classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin says that like previous technologies, there will be some things that AI is really good at. They just won’t be, in his words, “transformative.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> They seem to be pretty good at translation. Like, maybe that will become less expensive, and that will be sort of helpful, but we actually… It’s gonna find that it’s not transformative to schools because, like, just translating materials is not, like, the only thing you need to unlock educating, you know, students that come from all over the world and speak all kinds of different languages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m kind of enthusiastic about writing feedback, maybe. You know, one of the things we know is that, like, you need a lot of feedback to improve at things, and the machines seem to be able to generate reasonable writing feedback, but then you get other kinds of reports from classrooms that are like, “Yeah, my students really just want feedback from me, the human being teacher in the room,” because it turns out that most of what motivates us to learn is our social relationships with one another, and it doesn’t seem like social relationships with chatbots is a very promising direction for humanity to go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, there is at least one kind of disruption that absolutely is happening in schools right now. So this very deep intel comes from my husband. He is a Chicago public school teacher. He teaches at high school.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Excellent!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And so I asked him, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna talk to this ed tech expert.” Like, “Give me the lowdown. Like, what is happening in your high school?” And so he had a number of things to say, and so I’m gonna share these with you. I think we’ll do it, like, one at a time, and you can tell me if you are in any way surprised by this. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, to prevent students from using these chatbots to just do entire homework assignments, there’s been a big shift toward in-class assignments done on paper, which does seem to help with that cheating problem, but it introduces another challenge, which is that you’re then not spending that class time actually doing instruction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Happening all over the place, happening in universities, happening in lots of different contexts. If, like definitely, one potential thing to be sad about is that, like, if you believed it could be possible that five years ago you could send students home to write stuff and be reasonably likely that they would write stuff, and then you could use class for the time of being together and engaging with one another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now it sounds like your husband, like many other teachers, believes, “If I want to read something that my students have actually written, I pretty much have to put them in a room and watch them write it themselves.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, I think it’s quite possible that there are millions of fewer minutes of homework being assigned than in previous years. And if you believe that homework gives students practice that’s valuable for their learning, then that could be a massive drawdown in the amount of learning time that students are doing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So he and his colleagues have not entirely given up on the idea of homework, but what they’ve done is try to use technology to fight technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he and his colleagues pay out of pocket, mind you, for a Google Doc extension that shows them a detailed history of the revisions made to a document. So the idea is you can actually see a video of an essay being constructed in real time, kind of sped up. And the downside is that it is still possible for students to cheat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>They just, they ask ChatGPT to write the essay, and then they’re literally sitting there, like, typing the essay from ChatGPT into Google Docs at, like, roughly a pace that they think it would look like you know, a 17-year-old comes up with thoughts in a unique manner and things like that. It’s kind of an interesting learning experience for the students, but obviously they’re not learning the thing that they’re supposed to be doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, like, the best possible use of your husband’s expertise is not surveilling students’ writing. I think we could find that as we ramp up the level of surveillance in schools, that that’s really not good for a democratic society, that you know, that a certain amount of privacy, a certain amount of freedom from surveillance is actually necessary for the Republic to continue as a Republic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the context that he’s in, what he’s doing is sensible, but if you aggregate that context across a lot of classrooms, you’re like, “Oh, that could be really bad, actually.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah. And I’ll share one more with you. So the last thing he mentioned is building, he calls it “layers of resistance.” So for an essay, this might mean breaking down an assignment into a bunch of different pieces. Then students do each piece separately, and then once they’ve already done that work, they then combine it into a longer piece. So, you are making it easier to do the eventual assignment yourself since you’ve had to do earlier parts yourself before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But you’re also making it harder to cheat because that would be, you know, just a lot more difficult to cheat at each of those steps and then combine them into cheating. And again, he says it’s fairly effective, and that’s kinda like his favorite strategy right now. And I asked him, I said, “Well, is this having the effect of requiring your students to kind of use training wheels to think longer than they would otherwise?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So training wheels to think is oftentimes better than we imagine it is. There’s a group of educational researchers that are interested in this set of ideas called cognitive load theory, and an idea that we often have is that people become experts by behaving like experts. And they sort of argue, “No, no, no when people develop expertise, it looks quite different than being an expert.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I mean, you do, I think, Jess, have a good intuition there, which is like, “man, at some point, the kids, like, before they leave high school, probably just need to be able to write the essay.” Like, that it seems like that would be a pretty good thing, that we would want young people to be able to independently generate an argument in prose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At least for the last, like, 30 years, we’ve thought that’s a pretty good idea to do, you know, with computers in particular. And boy, is generative AI making it hard for teachers to assign that task that we think is pretty good. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>But after going into these specifics, like, wouldn’t you agree that this is pretty transformative in terms of what students are actually doing during the school day?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I mean, definitely not transformative in the sense of, “Boy, this is great.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin really wouldn’t take the bait here. He was adamant. No, we don’t have any great evidence that how teachers and students actually spend their days, think lectures, group work, has really changed that much over the past couple of years, or for that matter, the past few decades, even if take-home essays are basically off the table now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I kept at him. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It does seem like one really big difference right now is that there’s a lot of discussions about how AI is or isn’t going to change the kind of future and work that we’re preparing students for. I’m curious if you’re seeing, you know, is that impacting students’ motivation to learn, which would obviously have a very big impact in the classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess it also could start to change the question of what school should be for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Yes. New technologies are a great catalyst to provoke conversations about what schools are for. In the last few decades, we’ve been particularly interested in the question, like, how do you prepare individuals for work in the labor market?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Although if you go through the history of schooling, you know, in the United States, we have public schools as a bulwark of our democracy. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about public schooling in the notes of the State of Virginia, and proposed the system of public schooling, it would be so that our nascent democracy would continue to exist and have citizens who are prepared to take on their roles as citizens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, citizenship is gonna change with generative AI, too, and so we should be thinking about some of those kinds of changes. My hunch is if you went to all of the K-12 schools in the United States, you would not see huge changes in student motivation because like, students are not that great at thinking about their long-term futures.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, students primarily, like, they do not care that much about the subjects that we teach, for the most part. They care a ton about their teacher and their peers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, whether the students feel it or not, I guess my question would be to you, do you think that schools should be rethinking what education is for in this moment?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> I don’t know – I think we should start by saying we don’t know. Not only do we not know, but historically, when we’ve made some of these guesses in the past, we’ve been wrong. So you could look at things like, you know, the sort of computer science industry telling people that it’s enormously important to learn to code in order to get good jobs, and now there’s a possibility that computer programming won’t actually be a very viable field in the near future.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, and these things go back histor- You know, in the 19th century, there were a group of educators who passionately believed that you really had to teach sentence diagramming – that if you didn’t teach sentence diagramming, like, Western civilization would fall. And we’ve mostly stopped teaching sentence diagramming, and maybe Western civilization will fall apart, but it’s probably not gonna be for the lack of sentence diagramming.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Cursive. The great cursive debate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The great cursive debate continues. Here, here, here are two stories you could tell about AI. One story you could tell about AI is that there is a lot to learn to figure out how to use AI, and that students should begin the process of learning that as soon as possible, that there should be a set of scaffold experiences, that we should change our curriculum, so that as people get older and older, there are more and more tasks that they do in partnership with AI, ’cause partnering with AI is hard to learn how to do, and if they do it with the supervision of teachers, they’ll be better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A second story that you could tell is that getting generative AI to spit stuff out is actually super easy, that there really is not that much to learn, and that what really differentiates people who are proficient and less proficient with using generative AI is whether or not they can evaluate output. Since the output is highly uneven, what you really need are people who can say, “Oh, this is a good idea, this is a good practice, and this one is not.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It could be that there’s actually very little general expertise that you can develop to distinguish good output from bad output. What you probably primarily need is domain knowledge. Like, if you ask ChatGPT a question about plumbing, there’s nothing about AI which is gonna tell you whether or not it gave you a good plumbing answer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What you need to know about is plumbing. If that was the case, if domain expertise was sort of the key differentiator in people skills in using AI, then that would be pretty good news for schools and universities, ’cause the main thing they’ve done for however many hundreds of years is try to help people develop domain expertise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But I don’t- as a civilization, science does not know the answer to those two stories. Science cannot tell you today which of those two stories is correct. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s interesting. So I’m guessing you’re not a big fan of some of these moves more recently by school districts, university systems, states, even potentially the federal government, to implement various AI competency or AI literacy requirements.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I will point out some of these seem more, you know, pro-technology, like giving the students the skills they need to succeed with these technologies. Others actually take a bit more of a defensive crouch, like let’s teach students the critical thinking skills so they can discriminate between the good and the bad. But there is nonetheless a lot of overlap, which is that these requirements purport to prepare students to live in a world alongside AI. And I’m curious what you make of those. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, one thing that we’ve tried over the last twenty years in the United States is a strategy they might call, like, the ‘tech literacy’ strategy, where every time a new technology comes along, you define a set of skills that correlate with that technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You write some policy documents that say schools should be teaching those things, and then you, like, bake it for a while and watch and see what happens. And, like, if you were to pick a sort of education reform strategy that we could be almost certain does not work, it would be that one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It works really well for pundits and policymakers. Like, it’s a great way for policymakers to be like, “Look, we did a thing. We passed a bill which says you have to learn some stuff.” But what you actually have to do to make a difference in schools is you have to translate those policy guidance into curriculum documents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are 3.5 million teachers in the United States. Like your husband, one in every one hundred living Americans has to raise their hand and say, “I will be a teacher this year,” in order for our system to function. To improve the capacity of 3.5 million people is mind-bogglingly complex.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You could probably tell me the number of minutes or hours that your husband has gotten for, you know, AI-related professional development, and I bet the number is not super high. What I’m sure of is the number is not commensurate to some kind of transformational change. And so, I mean, I’m not opposed to that strategy on any kind of ideological or philosophical… Like, sounds kind of great to me. Just historically, it has not worked at all. Go ask young people – “have people, have young people describe their social media practices to you?”, and you’ll be like, “Oh, that sounds pretty bad and not good for your health, actually.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But there has been ten or fifteen years of, like, social media literacy in schools. Like, ask one of your students to, like, save a file to a folder, and watch their head explode. And you’ll be like, “Oh, maybe, like, we’re not that good at teaching digital literacy in schools.” So one is just, like, an efficacy approach – But even if you believe that that, like, general approach would work, you have to sort of ask the question, like, what kinds of things are we gonna stuff into that AI fluency and AI literacy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, what should that be? And I think we really, to this day, don’t know. So I mentioned before that I went to DeepMind the other day in London, and I cornered every engineer I could find, and I said, “Do you know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot?” I asked in big groups, in small groups, one-on-one. There was not an engineer or program manager there who told me yes. Every single one of them told me, “We do not know how to do that.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> DeepMind, Google’s elite AI laboratory. Justin went to a conference there about AI and education. And when he says that software engineers told him that they don’t know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot, what he means is that they may have protocols and practices, but they’re not yet confident that they work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is a major concern in the software industry. Many big companies are adopting coding assistants like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex. Senior engineers can thrive in this kind of environment. They can prompt the AI with exactly what they’re looking for, and then they can manually check the outputs and write their own code when something goes wrong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A much more junior engineer can also use these code assistants to generate code that seems like it works, but if it has a bug or a vulnerability, they may not notice or be able to fix it. And worse, they may never get a chance to develop their skills further. So we could end up with a generation of software engineers who don’t understand how the software works, can’t fix it if it goes wrong, and have shaky ideas of what is technologically possible. Not ideal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Companies know this could be a problem, so they’re experimenting with protocols for junior engineers, but this is all so new that nobody knows yet if these protocols will work. And they were frank about this with Justin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>If Google, which has billions and billions of dollars at stake to answer this question, does not know how to teach a junior engineer how to code with a copilot, like, what is a seventh grade middle school’s computer science teacher supposed to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, what would AI literacy in that class look like until Google can figure it out? That is an excellent point. So you mentioned earlier this idea that, in general, previous educational technologies have – if they’ve had a positive impact, it’s been toward the students who are already either high-performing or come from very high-resourced schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I wanna ask you a little bit about special education, and in particular, kind of the extreme edges of special education. So this is kind of personal for me. My 11-year-old now, she has a rare genetic disorder, and I would say she does fall in that sort of extreme end of the continuum. Like, she literally will not look at a piece of paper if it hasn’t been, like, personalized with things that, you know, her teachers and aides and therapists know will draw her attention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so there’s certainly this kind of low-hanging fruit that I could see being very easy helping, you know, busy professionals in the classroom. But I do see the possibility of something a little bit more transformative in a positive way – for kids whose brains just work so differently that the professionals involved don’t always have a ton of intuition about what will work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we talk a lot about AI having these jagged skills that are hard to understand from the outside, so being amazing at one skill and, like, hilariously bad at another. But there is a population of students for whom this is also true. I think a very concrete example here is severe language disabilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right now, the vast majority of educational instruction is done via language. If you have a kid whose language skills are significantly more impaired than their other skills, how do you teach them? How do you assess them? Non-verbal assessments do exist, but guess how the instructions are given? They’re given in language.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it just seems like this place where a tool that can radically personalize, that’s completely agnostic to how a student chooses to answer a question, that has zero preconceived ideas about what will or won’t be an effective learning tool, could be transformative. And I know this is very hand-wavy, it’s very in the distance, but is there something here?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Oh well, for sure. So first, I’m definitely rooting for these people – I mean, I’m always rooting for the people who are making education much, much better. My, like, very boring, sometimes sad job is to, like, hop into these conversations and be like, “That would totally be great. Just, we should remember that people have been working on this for decades, and progress tends to be more measured.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>That’s why they call you the skeptic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>There’s this whole field called universal design for learning, which, you know, has observed for a long time, sometimes better to think of curriculum as disabled than people as disabled. The curriculum is just not presenting information in ways and in mechanisms that people with different kinds of ability can access. And so we should do a better job of reinventing our curriculum and, you know, in fact, as we start bringing generative AI into the application of these kinds of things in special education, we don’t have to start from scratch. We can start from decades of effort of people using computers to do these same kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, translation is one thing that we mentioned, putting learning resources into different kinds of modalities. So if there are people who don’t read text well, then we can just have the machine speak the text. You know, a strategy that we’ve tried a lot is to build just-in-time learning supports for people into resources, saying like, “Okay, if this learning resource in its current form isn’t working for you, like, push this button and it will talk. Push this button and the reading level will change. Push this button and this other kind of feature of it can be modified to suit your needs.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we found historically is that the kids that we most want to push those buttons are not the ones who push the button. The like high-performing kids push the ‘Help Me’ button and the kids who we most wish would push the, like, ‘Give Me Some Extra Resources’ or ‘Change This to Support Me’ button would.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, when we talk to teachers across the country, adapting resources to folks with different kinds of abilities is one of the things that they’re most enthusiastic. The you know, generative AI technologies might be able to help them do, and I’m rooting for them, and I hope that there are companies that figure out ways of doing this more sustainably and at scale. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some potential benefits from that. And those benefits are most likely to emerge not in the places where people download the, you know, the software that personalizes things for students with different learning capacities and things like that. It’s gonna be where whole communities are able to, like, rethink the way that they do special education in the context of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, and it’s probably gonna be that students who live in more affluent places are gonna have the kinds of systemic resources that allow for all that training and adoption to occur.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>This idea of resources, it’s an important one, and not just for special education because every dollar, every hour of an educator’s time, it comes at the expense of money or time spent elsewhere, including on things that we do know work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>And the worst case scenario, which I think we’ve seen a lot of places, is that we make substantial additional investments, both in technology platforms and then in a bunch of extra humans to manage those technology platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the cost of schooling goes up, but because at best, the gains of those technology platforms is pretty moderate, you’re like adding a whole bunch of additional expense. Like, you know, you’re basically like in the Chicago Public Schools, like you bought all these Google Docs, and you bought all of these computers so that all the students can use them, and you bought all these IT professionals because the computers break all the time, and your husband like, is like, “Well, actually, the best thing to do is to have them write essays on pencils and paper.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, that’s an awful lot of money that we’re spending on all of this infrastructure to sit in a closet while your students are writing in composition notebooks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Will AI transform K-12 education? Justin really doesn’t think so. And frankly, I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved by that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, there is something reassuring about a world where students continue to learn the same kinds of things that I learned when I was in school. It’s certainly preferable to one where the whole educational system grinds to a panicked halt because they’ve decided students don’t need to learn anything anymore.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But on the other hand, it seems my dreams of some automated tool that can magically help my daughter learn in a way no human has yet managed to is probably not right around the corner either. And I still think that experiments will be important, including the kind of ambitious, dare I say transformative experiments that folks like my colleague Sébastien Martin are pursuing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have to know what’s possible, and then we’ll need to roll up our sleeves. Test, learn, make sure that whatever gains we see in one classroom with one teacher can eventually benefit a much larger group of students. Because, and I’ll end with this, even our resident skeptic Justin agrees. At the end of the day, alongside all the headaches, new technologies do bring new capabilities. And little by little, these capabilities can tangibly improve the status quo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I mean, the things that do work, it’s probably going to be more like 10 or 20 years of development rather than sort of stumbling across something which works super well in a year or two. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So it could be transformative for the better, but it’s just going to take a ton of work and dedication and probably resources to get there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> My colleague Ken Kaedinger says that step change is what 25 years of incremental change looks like from a distance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Special thanks to today’s guest, Justin Reich. Jesse Dukes is our producer. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney and George Christensen. Marketing support from Ananya Mallapragada. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>AI will revolutionize education! No, it will destroy it! Which is it? If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher \u003ca href=\"https://tsl.mit.edu/team/justin-reich/\">Justin Reich\u003c/a> walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\"> interviews with 120 teachers and students\u003c/a> across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>AI will revolutionize education! No, it will destroy it! Which is it? If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher \u003ca href=\"https://tsl.mit.edu/team/justin-reich/\">Justin Reich\u003c/a> walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\"> interviews with 120 teachers and students\u003c/a> across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\">The Homework Machine\u003c/a> (Audio)\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674089049?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback\">Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life, Automated, the show where we explore how to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. I’ll admit it, I’m the kind of person who hears something about the incredible capabilities of AI and then immediately tries to project all the ways those capabilities might transform the world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life, Automated, the show where we explore how to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. I’ll admit it, I’m the kind of person who hears something about the incredible capabilities of AI and then immediately tries to project all the ways those capabilities might transform the world.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s actually one of the goals of this podcast, to try to determine how many of these mental leaps are grounded in evidence. And sometimes I talk to someone and I’m like, “Yeah, this is a really big deal.” Today’s conversation, not that. I’ll be talking to Justin Reich, a researcher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, about AI’s likely impact on K-12 education.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s actually one of the goals of this podcast, to try to determine how many of these mental leaps are grounded in evidence. And sometimes I talk to someone and I’m like, “Yeah, this is a really big deal.” Today’s conversation, not that. I’ll be talking to Justin Reich, a researcher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, about AI’s likely impact on K-12 education.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is not my first conversation about AI and education. I recently spoke with one of my colleagues here at Kellogg, Sébastien Martin, who has entirely reimagined many aspects of how he teaches his MBA students in ways I find pretty inspiring. But he’s admittedly an edge case, like if you accidentally ended up having Beethoven as your piano instructor and he gave you a warped sense of what piano lessons typically look like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is not my first conversation about AI and education. I recently spoke with one of my colleagues here at Kellogg, Sébastien Martin, who has entirely reimagined many aspects of how he teaches his MBA students in ways I find pretty inspiring. But he’s admittedly an edge case, like if you accidentally ended up having Beethoven as your piano instructor and he gave you a warped sense of what piano lessons typically look like.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Justin Reich, on the other hand, does have a sense of what lessons typically look like, not those designed by tech-savvy professors at top-ranked business schools, but in the rest of the world where budgets are limited, professional development is scarce, and time and time again, technology has entered the classroom only to fail to live up to its promise.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Justin Reich, on the other hand, does have a sense of what lessons typically look like, not those designed by tech-savvy professors at top-ranked business schools, but in the rest of the world where budgets are limited, professional development is scarce, and time and time again, technology has entered the classroom only to fail to live up to its promise.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Justin recently interviewed 120 K-12 teachers and students across America about AI for his podcast, “The Homework Machine.” His verdict? AI might modestly help some students learn some things. AI certainly is causing a lot of headaches. But somewhat surprisingly, given we’re talking about a technology that can pretty convincingly mimic human intelligence, he does not view it as transformational in the least.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Justin recently interviewed 120 K-12 teachers and students across America about AI for his podcast, “The Homework Machine.” His verdict? AI might modestly help some students learn some things. AI certainly is causing a lot of headaches. But somewhat surprisingly, given we’re talking about a technology that can pretty convincingly mimic human intelligence, he does not view it as transformational in the least.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a project from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. And here is my very grounded conversation with Justin. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a project from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. And here is my very grounded conversation with Justin. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You have been described as a healthy skeptic when it comes to bringing technology into classrooms. Do you agree with that characterization?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah, healthy skeptic. I was recently at DeepMind in London where one of the Google engineers said that I was the token skeptic. I don’t know. I’m not ideologically skeptical. Like, I’ve used technology, computers in my teaching for more than 20 years now, and I still do it. What I aspire to be is evidence-based.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah, healthy skeptic. I was recently at DeepMind in London where one of the Google engineers said that I was the token skeptic. I don’t know. I’m not ideologically skeptical. Like, I’ve used technology, computers in my teaching for more than 20 years now, and I still do it. What I aspire to be is evidence-based.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>To me, maybe that’s skeptical, but it’s not skeptical as like, “I don’t know if I trust this technology stuff.” It’s more skeptical in the sense of like, what does a century of evidence tell us, and based on that century, what would we expect to happen next? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>To me, maybe that’s skeptical, but it’s not skeptical as like, “I don’t know if I trust this technology stuff.” It’s more skeptical in the sense of like, what does a century of evidence tell us, and based on that century, what would we expect to happen next? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, it seems like you’re kind of in a position to interview yourself, so I’m just gonna ask you the question you asked yourself. What does a century of experience with technology tell us about this current moment? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, it seems like you’re kind of in a position to interview yourself, so I’m just gonna ask you the question you asked yourself. What does a century of experience with technology tell us about this current moment? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The first things that happen when teachers get access to new technologies is they use them to extend existing practices. So they do whatever they were doing before but with the new technology. So we used to write our notes on chalkboards, and then we wrote our notes on whiteboards, and then we put them on acetate sheets, and then they got projected onto SMART Boards, into LCD projectors. It’s the same notes. We just reproduce them in all these different formats. If you give teachers enough time and support and coaching, they will invent new kinds of practices. Unfortunately, the second pattern that we see is that, where there are benefits to new technologies, they tend to disproportionately benefit the affluent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The first things that happen when teachers get access to new technologies is they use them to extend existing practices. So they do whatever they were doing before but with the new technology. So we used to write our notes on chalkboards, and then we wrote our notes on whiteboards, and then we put them on acetate sheets, and then they got projected onto SMART Boards, into LCD projectors. It’s the same notes. We just reproduce them in all these different formats. If you give teachers enough time and support and coaching, they will invent new kinds of practices. Unfortunately, the second pattern that we see is that, where there are benefits to new technologies, they tend to disproportionately benefit the affluent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They benefit people with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new innovations. So for instance, in 2012, we invented these giant, these massive open online courses, and the main thing that we found is that they were pretty good for helping people earn their second master’s degree.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They benefit people with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new innovations. So for instance, in 2012, we invented these giant, these massive open online courses, and the main thing that we found is that they were pretty good for helping people earn their second master’s degree.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if you were already educated, already affluent person, there are these great new opportunities for you, and it turned out that they really weren’t very good at helping onboard new kinds of students into the higher education system. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if you were already educated, already affluent person, there are these great new opportunities for you, and it turned out that they really weren’t very good at helping onboard new kinds of students into the higher education system. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The third pattern that we see over and over again is that technologies are only as powerful as the communities that guide their use. So we’re constantly hoping that we can invent the software or these machines. You just sort of download things onto a bunch of people’s computers, and all of a sudden, learning gets better. And that essentially never happens. What can happen, where you can see improvements in learning, is when teachers have time to experiment and to try new things and to collaborate with their colleagues.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The third pattern that we see over and over again is that technologies are only as powerful as the communities that guide their use. So we’re constantly hoping that we can invent the software or these machines. You just sort of download things onto a bunch of people’s computers, and all of a sudden, learning gets better. And that essentially never happens. What can happen, where you can see improvements in learning, is when teachers have time to experiment and to try new things and to collaborate with their colleagues.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Principals come up with new disciplinary standards. Students learn new routines. Families learn new ways of helping people. When whole communities have a chance to make improvements, you know, across the curriculum and lesson planning with technologies, that’s when we can sometimes see some benefits. And, we should typically expect that benefits are modest, because the benefits of anything that we do in educational settings are typically modest.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Principals come up with new disciplinary standards. Students learn new routines. Families learn new ways of helping people. When whole communities have a chance to make improvements, you know, across the curriculum and lesson planning with technologies, that’s when we can sometimes see some benefits. And, we should typically expect that benefits are modest, because the benefits of anything that we do in educational settings are typically modest.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you want to make education better, what you’re usually doing is, like, putting your shoulder to the wheel for a long time and being like, “Oh, it’s one percent better this year. That’s great. Let’s see if we can make it one percent better again next year.” Which is, of course, not at all what techno-utopians want to have happen or describing what happened, where there’s this giant disjunction with the past, and everything is better afterwards.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you want to make education better, what you’re usually doing is, like, putting your shoulder to the wheel for a long time and being like, “Oh, it’s one percent better this year. That’s great. Let’s see if we can make it one percent better again next year.” Which is, of course, not at all what techno-utopians want to have happen or describing what happened, where there’s this giant disjunction with the past, and everything is better afterwards.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s kind of fun to think that way. There’s not a lot of historical evidence for it, and, I mean, I think the reason why I critique that approach the most is that it tends to be where you see people wasting a lot of time and money. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s kind of fun to think that way. There’s not a lot of historical evidence for it, and, I mean, I think the reason why I critique that approach the most is that it tends to be where you see people wasting a lot of time and money. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So let’s do a couple of examples here. So can you give us a couple of examples of times when techno-utopians came in and said, “This is it. This is going to change everything,” and then what actually happened? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So let’s do a couple of examples here. So can you give us a couple of examples of times when techno-utopians came in and said, “This is it. This is going to change everything,” and then what actually happened? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, you got to start with the OG, Thomas Edison. Wow, so my man, a century ago, Thomas Edison, went in front of Congress, I think it was in 1913, and said, “In 10 years, textbooks will be gone, that they’ll be completely replaced by film strips, and this is gonna be a good thing as computers have been introduced” – I mean, radio went through this phase. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, you got to start with the OG, Thomas Edison. Wow, so my man, a century ago, Thomas Edison, went in front of Congress, I think it was in 1913, and said, “In 10 years, textbooks will be gone, that they’ll be completely replaced by film strips, and this is gonna be a good thing as computers have been introduced” – I mean, radio went through this phase. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s a Larry Cuban has a great book called Teachers and Machines with a photograph in it, of a big, like, an armour-sized radio set. And it says, “With radio, the underprivileged school becomes a privileged one.” And so the idea that, like, we’re gonna have the best experts in the world broadcast radio lectures, radio lessons into homes all across the country, and it’s gonna be totally transformative of how students learn. Massive open online courses are probably the one that most recently went through higher education.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There’s a Larry Cuban has a great book called Teachers and Machines with a photograph in it, of a big, like, an armour-sized radio set. And it says, “With radio, the underprivileged school becomes a privileged one.” And so the idea that, like, we’re gonna have the best experts in the world broadcast radio lectures, radio lessons into homes all across the country, and it’s gonna be totally transformative of how students learn. Massive open online courses are probably the one that most recently went through higher education.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, I don’t know, Sebastian Thrun, who was a Google employee, a founder of Udacity, said that, “In 10 years, there will be fifty universities left, and Udacity might be one of them.” And as it turns out, today, sitting here in 2026, there are more than fifty universities that are left. People were really enthusiastic about the web, online courses.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, I don’t know, Sebastian Thrun, who was a Google employee, a founder of Udacity, said that, “In 10 years, there will be fifty universities left, and Udacity might be one of them.” And as it turns out, today, sitting here in 2026, there are more than fifty universities that are left. People were really enthusiastic about the web, online courses.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There was a book called Disrupting Class, which Clay Christensen wrote. He’s the developer of the theory of disruptive innovation. In 2009, he said that in 10 years, by 2019, half of all secondary school courses would be mediated online, that they would cost a third as much to deliver, and they would have better outcomes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There was a book called Disrupting Class, which Clay Christensen wrote. He’s the developer of the theory of disruptive innovation. In 2009, he said that in 10 years, by 2019, half of all secondary school courses would be mediated online, that they would cost a third as much to deliver, and they would have better outcomes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And my hunch is, if any of your listeners wander to their local public high school, they will not find that half of the classes are delivered online, that they will not find that the costs of running educational institutions have gone down by sixty-six percent, and they will not find, that the educational outcomes of the online learning experiences are substantially better than the ones that are being mediated by teachers. So there’s a pile of them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And my hunch is, if any of your listeners wander to their local public high school, they will not find that half of the classes are delivered online, that they will not find that the costs of running educational institutions have gone down by sixty-six percent, and they will not find, that the educational outcomes of the online learning experiences are substantially better than the ones that are being mediated by teachers. So there’s a pile of them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Now, this does not mean that these previous technologies haven’t changed anything about the classroom experience, or that they didn’t feel, in small ways, kind of magical. Here’s a story Justin likes to tell, one from before he became a researcher, back when he was a teacher.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Now, this does not mean that these previous technologies haven’t changed anything about the classroom experience, or that they didn’t feel, in small ways, kind of magical. Here’s a story Justin likes to tell, one from before he became a researcher, back when he was a teacher.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So when I went to go get my first teaching job, the department head was interviewing me the summer before and he said, “Can you teach world history?”And I said, “No, but I promise that if you hire me by September, I’ll figure out how to teach world history.” And he said, “Well, maybe.” And he said, “All right, one more thing, you’re gonna be teaching in this kind of trial classroom where there’s a cart of laptops in the corner. There are these blue and orange clamshell MacBooks”, this sort of iconic form factor.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So when I went to go get my first teaching job, the department head was interviewing me the summer before and he said, “Can you teach world history?”And I said, “No, but I promise that if you hire me by September, I’ll figure out how to teach world history.” And he said, “Well, maybe.” And he said, “All right, one more thing, you’re gonna be teaching in this kind of trial classroom where there’s a cart of laptops in the corner. There are these blue and orange clamshell MacBooks”, this sort of iconic form factor.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And he said, you know, “And we’ve used ninth grade world history as sort of a testing bed to,” this was in 2003, “to see how these new computers could affect teaching and learning.” I said, “You can put a cart of bananas in the back corner of the classroom and I’ll teach with them. I just really need this job.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And he said, you know, “And we’ve used ninth grade world history as sort of a testing bed to,” this was in 2003, “to see how these new computers could affect teaching and learning.” I said, “You can put a cart of bananas in the back corner of the classroom and I’ll teach with them. I just really need this job.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And he went ahead and hired me, and it was really fun teaching in that classroom. It was a moment where the world’s government and archives and museums were rapidly digitizing primary sources. And so as a history teacher, with those computers, I could really do some things that were quite different from my own high school education where, you know, maybe I had a book of primary source documents with 20 documents in it or something like that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And he went ahead and hired me, and it was really fun teaching in that classroom. It was a moment where the world’s government and archives and museums were rapidly digitizing primary sources. And so as a history teacher, with those computers, I could really do some things that were quite different from my own high school education where, you know, maybe I had a book of primary source documents with 20 documents in it or something like that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now I can, you know, you just sort of imagine like, oh, what was, you know, I wanna teach my students about the Harlem Renaissance. Oh, the Smithsonian has 20,000 song sheets from the Harlem Renaissance. They can each study their own document, which maybe nobody has looked at, in the last hundred years or something like that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now I can, you know, you just sort of imagine like, oh, what was, you know, I wanna teach my students about the Harlem Renaissance. Oh, the Smithsonian has 20,000 song sheets from the Harlem Renaissance. They can each study their own document, which maybe nobody has looked at, in the last hundred years or something like that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Now, Justin says this was great. His students got a taste of what real historians do, find their own sources and documents and interpret them. But it also came with some hidden costs, in many ways, much greater than those of the computers themselves. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Now, Justin says this was great. His students got a taste of what real historians do, find their own sources and documents and interpret them. But it also came with some hidden costs, in many ways, much greater than those of the computers themselves. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I was working in a private school, and I also recognized that the kinds of resources that were required to keep those computers running, to keep them charged, to keep our networks running, to find the productive things that students were doing and to highlight them, to find the malicious things that students were doing and stop them, was an enormous amount of resources.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so the sort of incredible possibility of what students and me as a teacher could do with new computers was always balanced against the challenges and realities of turning those new affordances into everyday routines of learning that really helped students. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so the sort of incredible possibility of what students and me as a teacher could do with new computers was always balanced against the challenges and realities of turning those new affordances into everyday routines of learning that really helped students. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So fun, genuinely interesting, but not necessarily a game changer, and very resource intensive. I could see where this was going, and I wanted to know, is ChatGPT really just computers in classrooms all over again? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah. Well, what is different, if anything, about generative AI? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I think we will by and large see those same kinds of patterns, I mean, people get really enthusiastic about the new technology that are in front of them to the point of dismissing the magic of previous technologies. There’s sort of an argument that emerges, which is kind of like… I’m calling it the web was met. Like you hear people say, like, “Well, you know, this AI thing is just totally different. I mean, we-\u003cs> \u003c/s>like, what could the web have possibly done?” I was like, “My guy, we took a handheld supercomputer, and we put it in the pocket of every child 13 years older in the networked world. We connected them to basically the world’s corpus of information, to every person they know, to every expert you can possibly imagine, and the effects on education range from not that much to maybe actually not that good.” You know, to the point where schools across the country are banning those mobile devices from people’s classrooms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I think we will by and large see those same kinds of patterns, I mean, people get really enthusiastic about the new technology that are in front of them to the point of dismissing the magic of previous technologies. There’s sort of an argument that emerges, which is kind of like… I’m calling it the web was met. Like you hear people say, like, “Well, you know, this AI thing is just totally different. I mean, we-\u003cs> \u003c/s>like, what could the web have possibly done?” I was like, “My guy, we took a handheld supercomputer, and we put it in the pocket of every child 13 years older in the networked world. We connected them to basically the world’s corpus of information, to every person they know, to every expert you can possibly imagine, and the effects on education range from not that much to maybe actually not that good.” You know, to the point where schools across the country are banning those mobile devices from people’s classrooms.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin says that like previous technologies, there will be some things that AI is really good at. They just won’t be, in his words, “transformative.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin says that like previous technologies, there will be some things that AI is really good at. They just won’t be, in his words, “transformative.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> They seem to be pretty good at translation. Like, maybe that will become less expensive, and that will be sort of helpful, but we actually… It’s gonna find that it’s not transformative to schools because, like, just translating materials is not, like, the only thing you need to unlock educating, you know, students that come from all over the world and speak all kinds of different languages.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> They seem to be pretty good at translation. Like, maybe that will become less expensive, and that will be sort of helpful, but we actually… It’s gonna find that it’s not transformative to schools because, like, just translating materials is not, like, the only thing you need to unlock educating, you know, students that come from all over the world and speak all kinds of different languages.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m kind of enthusiastic about writing feedback, maybe. You know, one of the things we know is that, like, you need a lot of feedback to improve at things, and the machines seem to be able to generate reasonable writing feedback, but then you get other kinds of reports from classrooms that are like, “Yeah, my students really just want feedback from me, the human being teacher in the room,” because it turns out that most of what motivates us to learn is our social relationships with one another, and it doesn’t seem like social relationships with chatbots is a very promising direction for humanity to go.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m kind of enthusiastic about writing feedback, maybe. You know, one of the things we know is that, like, you need a lot of feedback to improve at things, and the machines seem to be able to generate reasonable writing feedback, but then you get other kinds of reports from classrooms that are like, “Yeah, my students really just want feedback from me, the human being teacher in the room,” because it turns out that most of what motivates us to learn is our social relationships with one another, and it doesn’t seem like social relationships with chatbots is a very promising direction for humanity to go.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, there is at least one kind of disruption that absolutely is happening in schools right now. So this very deep intel comes from my husband. He is a Chicago public school teacher. He teaches at high school.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, there is at least one kind of disruption that absolutely is happening in schools right now. So this very deep intel comes from my husband. He is a Chicago public school teacher. He teaches at high school.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Excellent!\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And so I asked him, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna talk to this ed tech expert.” Like, “Give me the lowdown. Like, what is happening in your high school?” And so he had a number of things to say, and so I’m gonna share these with you. I think we’ll do it, like, one at a time, and you can tell me if you are in any way surprised by this. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And so I asked him, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna talk to this ed tech expert.” Like, “Give me the lowdown. Like, what is happening in your high school?” And so he had a number of things to say, and so I’m gonna share these with you. I think we’ll do it, like, one at a time, and you can tell me if you are in any way surprised by this. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, to prevent students from using these chatbots to just do entire homework assignments, there’s been a big shift toward in-class assignments done on paper, which does seem to help with that cheating problem, but it introduces another challenge, which is that you’re then not spending that class time actually doing instruction.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, to prevent students from using these chatbots to just do entire homework assignments, there’s been a big shift toward in-class assignments done on paper, which does seem to help with that cheating problem, but it introduces another challenge, which is that you’re then not spending that class time actually doing instruction.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Happening all over the place, happening in universities, happening in lots of different contexts. If, like definitely, one potential thing to be sad about is that, like, if you believed it could be possible that five years ago you could send students home to write stuff and be reasonably likely that they would write stuff, and then you could use class for the time of being together and engaging with one another.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Happening all over the place, happening in universities, happening in lots of different contexts. If, like definitely, one potential thing to be sad about is that, like, if you believed it could be possible that five years ago you could send students home to write stuff and be reasonably likely that they would write stuff, and then you could use class for the time of being together and engaging with one another.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And now it sounds like your husband, like many other teachers, believes, “If I want to read something that my students have actually written, I pretty much have to put them in a room and watch them write it themselves.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And now it sounds like your husband, like many other teachers, believes, “If I want to read something that my students have actually written, I pretty much have to put them in a room and watch them write it themselves.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah, I think it’s quite possible that there are millions of fewer minutes of homework being assigned than in previous years. And if you believe that homework gives students practice that’s valuable for their learning, then that could be a massive drawdown in the amount of learning time that students are doing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Yeah, I think it’s quite possible that there are millions of fewer minutes of homework being assigned than in previous years. And if you believe that homework gives students practice that’s valuable for their learning, then that could be a massive drawdown in the amount of learning time that students are doing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So he and his colleagues have not entirely given up on the idea of homework, but what they’ve done is try to use technology to fight technology.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So he and his colleagues have not entirely given up on the idea of homework, but what they’ve done is try to use technology to fight technology.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So he and his colleagues pay out of pocket, mind you, for a Google Doc extension that shows them a detailed history of the revisions made to a document. So the idea is you can actually see a video of an essay being constructed in real time, kind of sped up. And the downside is that it is still possible for students to cheat.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So he and his colleagues pay out of pocket, mind you, for a Google Doc extension that shows them a detailed history of the revisions made to a document. So the idea is you can actually see a video of an essay being constructed in real time, kind of sped up. And the downside is that it is still possible for students to cheat.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>They just, they ask ChatGPT to write the essay, and then they’re literally sitting there, like, typing the essay from ChatGPT into Google Docs at, like, roughly a pace that they think it would look like you know, a 17-year-old comes up with thoughts in a unique manner and things like that. It’s kind of an interesting learning experience for the students, but obviously they’re not learning the thing that they’re supposed to be doing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>They just, they ask ChatGPT to write the essay, and then they’re literally sitting there, like, typing the essay from ChatGPT into Google Docs at, like, roughly a pace that they think it would look like you know, a 17-year-old comes up with thoughts in a unique manner and things like that. It’s kind of an interesting learning experience for the students, but obviously they’re not learning the thing that they’re supposed to be doing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah, like, the best possible use of your husband’s expertise is not surveilling students’ writing. I think we could find that as we ramp up the level of surveillance in schools, that that’s really not good for a democratic society, that you know, that a certain amount of privacy, a certain amount of freedom from surveillance is actually necessary for the Republic to continue as a Republic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Yeah, like, the best possible use of your husband’s expertise is not surveilling students’ writing. I think we could find that as we ramp up the level of surveillance in schools, that that’s really not good for a democratic society, that you know, that a certain amount of privacy, a certain amount of freedom from surveillance is actually necessary for the Republic to continue as a Republic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the context that he’s in, what he’s doing is sensible, but if you aggregate that context across a lot of classrooms, you’re like, “Oh, that could be really bad, actually.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In the context that he’s in, what he’s doing is sensible, but if you aggregate that context across a lot of classrooms, you’re like, “Oh, that could be really bad, actually.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah. And I’ll share one more with you. So the last thing he mentioned is building, he calls it “layers of resistance.” So for an essay, this might mean breaking down an assignment into a bunch of different pieces. Then students do each piece separately, and then once they’ve already done that work, they then combine it into a longer piece. So, you are making it easier to do the eventual assignment yourself since you’ve had to do earlier parts yourself before.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah. And I’ll share one more with you. So the last thing he mentioned is building, he calls it “layers of resistance.” So for an essay, this might mean breaking down an assignment into a bunch of different pieces. Then students do each piece separately, and then once they’ve already done that work, they then combine it into a longer piece. So, you are making it easier to do the eventual assignment yourself since you’ve had to do earlier parts yourself before.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But you’re also making it harder to cheat because that would be, you know, just a lot more difficult to cheat at each of those steps and then combine them into cheating. And again, he says it’s fairly effective, and that’s kinda like his favorite strategy right now. And I asked him, I said, “Well, is this having the effect of requiring your students to kind of use training wheels to think longer than they would otherwise?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But you’re also making it harder to cheat because that would be, you know, just a lot more difficult to cheat at each of those steps and then combine them into cheating. And again, he says it’s fairly effective, and that’s kinda like his favorite strategy right now. And I asked him, I said, “Well, is this having the effect of requiring your students to kind of use training wheels to think longer than they would otherwise?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So training wheels to think is oftentimes better than we imagine it is. There’s a group of educational researchers that are interested in this set of ideas called cognitive load theory, and an idea that we often have is that people become experts by behaving like experts. And they sort of argue, “No, no, no when people develop expertise, it looks quite different than being an expert.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So training wheels to think is oftentimes better than we imagine it is. There’s a group of educational researchers that are interested in this set of ideas called cognitive load theory, and an idea that we often have is that people become experts by behaving like experts. And they sort of argue, “No, no, no when people develop expertise, it looks quite different than being an expert.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I mean, you do, I think, Jess, have a good intuition there, which is like, “man, at some point, the kids, like, before they leave high school, probably just need to be able to write the essay.” Like, that it seems like that would be a pretty good thing, that we would want young people to be able to independently generate an argument in prose.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I mean, you do, I think, Jess, have a good intuition there, which is like, “man, at some point, the kids, like, before they leave high school, probably just need to be able to write the essay.” Like, that it seems like that would be a pretty good thing, that we would want young people to be able to independently generate an argument in prose.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>At least for the last, like, 30 years, we’ve thought that’s a pretty good idea to do, you know, with computers in particular. And boy, is generative AI making it hard for teachers to assign that task that we think is pretty good. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>At least for the last, like, 30 years, we’ve thought that’s a pretty good idea to do, you know, with computers in particular. And boy, is generative AI making it hard for teachers to assign that task that we think is pretty good. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>But after going into these specifics, like, wouldn’t you agree that this is pretty transformative in terms of what students are actually doing during the school day?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>But after going into these specifics, like, wouldn’t you agree that this is pretty transformative in terms of what students are actually doing during the school day?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I mean, definitely not transformative in the sense of, “Boy, this is great.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin really wouldn’t take the bait here. He was adamant. No, we don’t have any great evidence that how teachers and students actually spend their days, think lectures, group work, has really changed that much over the past couple of years, or for that matter, the past few decades, even if take-home essays are basically off the table now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin really wouldn’t take the bait here. He was adamant. No, we don’t have any great evidence that how teachers and students actually spend their days, think lectures, group work, has really changed that much over the past couple of years, or for that matter, the past few decades, even if take-home essays are basically off the table now. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I kept at him. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I kept at him. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It does seem like one really big difference right now is that there’s a lot of discussions about how AI is or isn’t going to change the kind of future and work that we’re preparing students for. I’m curious if you’re seeing, you know, is that impacting students’ motivation to learn, which would obviously have a very big impact in the classrooms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It does seem like one really big difference right now is that there’s a lot of discussions about how AI is or isn’t going to change the kind of future and work that we’re preparing students for. I’m curious if you’re seeing, you know, is that impacting students’ motivation to learn, which would obviously have a very big impact in the classrooms.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I guess it also could start to change the question of what school should be for. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Yes. New technologies are a great catalyst to provoke conversations about what schools are for. In the last few decades, we’ve been particularly interested in the question, like, how do you prepare individuals for work in the labor market?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Yes. New technologies are a great catalyst to provoke conversations about what schools are for. In the last few decades, we’ve been particularly interested in the question, like, how do you prepare individuals for work in the labor market?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Although if you go through the history of schooling, you know, in the United States, we have public schools as a bulwark of our democracy. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about public schooling in the notes of the State of Virginia, and proposed the system of public schooling, it would be so that our nascent democracy would continue to exist and have citizens who are prepared to take on their roles as citizens.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, you know, citizenship is gonna change with generative AI, too, and so we should be thinking about some of those kinds of changes. My hunch is if you went to all of the K-12 schools in the United States, you would not see huge changes in student motivation because like, students are not that great at thinking about their long-term futures.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like, students primarily, like, they do not care that much about the subjects that we teach, for the most part. They care a ton about their teacher and their peers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, whether the students feel it or not, I guess my question would be to you, do you think that schools should be rethinking what education is for in this moment?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, whether the students feel it or not, I guess my question would be to you, do you think that schools should be rethinking what education is for in this moment?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> I don’t know – I think we should start by saying we don’t know. Not only do we not know, but historically, when we’ve made some of these guesses in the past, we’ve been wrong. So you could look at things like, you know, the sort of computer science industry telling people that it’s enormously important to learn to code in order to get good jobs, and now there’s a possibility that computer programming won’t actually be a very viable field in the near future.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> I don’t know – I think we should start by saying we don’t know. Not only do we not know, but historically, when we’ve made some of these guesses in the past, we’ve been wrong. So you could look at things like, you know, the sort of computer science industry telling people that it’s enormously important to learn to code in order to get good jobs, and now there’s a possibility that computer programming won’t actually be a very viable field in the near future.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, and these things go back histor- You know, in the 19th century, there were a group of educators who passionately believed that you really had to teach sentence diagramming – that if you didn’t teach sentence diagramming, like, Western civilization would fall. And we’ve mostly stopped teaching sentence diagramming, and maybe Western civilization will fall apart, but it’s probably not gonna be for the lack of sentence diagramming.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, and these things go back histor- You know, in the 19th century, there were a group of educators who passionately believed that you really had to teach sentence diagramming – that if you didn’t teach sentence diagramming, like, Western civilization would fall. And we’ve mostly stopped teaching sentence diagramming, and maybe Western civilization will fall apart, but it’s probably not gonna be for the lack of sentence diagramming.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Cursive. The great cursive debate. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The great cursive debate continues. Here, here, here are two stories you could tell about AI. One story you could tell about AI is that there is a lot to learn to figure out how to use AI, and that students should begin the process of learning that as soon as possible, that there should be a set of scaffold experiences, that we should change our curriculum, so that as people get older and older, there are more and more tasks that they do in partnership with AI, ’cause partnering with AI is hard to learn how to do, and if they do it with the supervision of teachers, they’ll be better.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The great cursive debate continues. Here, here, here are two stories you could tell about AI. One story you could tell about AI is that there is a lot to learn to figure out how to use AI, and that students should begin the process of learning that as soon as possible, that there should be a set of scaffold experiences, that we should change our curriculum, so that as people get older and older, there are more and more tasks that they do in partnership with AI, ’cause partnering with AI is hard to learn how to do, and if they do it with the supervision of teachers, they’ll be better.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A second story that you could tell is that getting generative AI to spit stuff out is actually super easy, that there really is not that much to learn, and that what really differentiates people who are proficient and less proficient with using generative AI is whether or not they can evaluate output. Since the output is highly uneven, what you really need are people who can say, “Oh, this is a good idea, this is a good practice, and this one is not.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A second story that you could tell is that getting generative AI to spit stuff out is actually super easy, that there really is not that much to learn, and that what really differentiates people who are proficient and less proficient with using generative AI is whether or not they can evaluate output. Since the output is highly uneven, what you really need are people who can say, “Oh, this is a good idea, this is a good practice, and this one is not.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It could be that there’s actually very little general expertise that you can develop to distinguish good output from bad output. What you probably primarily need is domain knowledge. Like, if you ask ChatGPT a question about plumbing, there’s nothing about AI which is gonna tell you whether or not it gave you a good plumbing answer.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It could be that there’s actually very little general expertise that you can develop to distinguish good output from bad output. What you probably primarily need is domain knowledge. Like, if you ask ChatGPT a question about plumbing, there’s nothing about AI which is gonna tell you whether or not it gave you a good plumbing answer.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What you need to know about is plumbing. If that was the case, if domain expertise was sort of the key differentiator in people skills in using AI, then that would be pretty good news for schools and universities, ’cause the main thing they’ve done for however many hundreds of years is try to help people develop domain expertise.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What you need to know about is plumbing. If that was the case, if domain expertise was sort of the key differentiator in people skills in using AI, then that would be pretty good news for schools and universities, ’cause the main thing they’ve done for however many hundreds of years is try to help people develop domain expertise.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But I don’t- as a civilization, science does not know the answer to those two stories. Science cannot tell you today which of those two stories is correct. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But I don’t- as a civilization, science does not know the answer to those two stories. Science cannot tell you today which of those two stories is correct. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s interesting. So I’m guessing you’re not a big fan of some of these moves more recently by school districts, university systems, states, even potentially the federal government, to implement various AI competency or AI literacy requirements.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s interesting. So I’m guessing you’re not a big fan of some of these moves more recently by school districts, university systems, states, even potentially the federal government, to implement various AI competency or AI literacy requirements.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I will point out some of these seem more, you know, pro-technology, like giving the students the skills they need to succeed with these technologies. Others actually take a bit more of a defensive crouch, like let’s teach students the critical thinking skills so they can discriminate between the good and the bad. But there is nonetheless a lot of overlap, which is that these requirements purport to prepare students to live in a world alongside AI. And I’m curious what you make of those. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I will point out some of these seem more, you know, pro-technology, like giving the students the skills they need to succeed with these technologies. Others actually take a bit more of a defensive crouch, like let’s teach students the critical thinking skills so they can discriminate between the good and the bad. But there is nonetheless a lot of overlap, which is that these requirements purport to prepare students to live in a world alongside AI. And I’m curious what you make of those. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, one thing that we’ve tried over the last twenty years in the United States is a strategy they might call, like, the ‘tech literacy’ strategy, where every time a new technology comes along, you define a set of skills that correlate with that technology.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, one thing that we’ve tried over the last twenty years in the United States is a strategy they might call, like, the ‘tech literacy’ strategy, where every time a new technology comes along, you define a set of skills that correlate with that technology.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You write some policy documents that say schools should be teaching those things, and then you, like, bake it for a while and watch and see what happens. And, like, if you were to pick a sort of education reform strategy that we could be almost certain does not work, it would be that one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You write some policy documents that say schools should be teaching those things, and then you, like, bake it for a while and watch and see what happens. And, like, if you were to pick a sort of education reform strategy that we could be almost certain does not work, it would be that one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It works really well for pundits and policymakers. Like, it’s a great way for policymakers to be like, “Look, we did a thing. We passed a bill which says you have to learn some stuff.” But what you actually have to do to make a difference in schools is you have to translate those policy guidance into curriculum documents.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It works really well for pundits and policymakers. Like, it’s a great way for policymakers to be like, “Look, we did a thing. We passed a bill which says you have to learn some stuff.” But what you actually have to do to make a difference in schools is you have to translate those policy guidance into curriculum documents.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are 3.5 million teachers in the United States. Like your husband, one in every one hundred living Americans has to raise their hand and say, “I will be a teacher this year,” in order for our system to function. To improve the capacity of 3.5 million people is mind-bogglingly complex.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are 3.5 million teachers in the United States. Like your husband, one in every one hundred living Americans has to raise their hand and say, “I will be a teacher this year,” in order for our system to function. To improve the capacity of 3.5 million people is mind-bogglingly complex.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You could probably tell me the number of minutes or hours that your husband has gotten for, you know, AI-related professional development, and I bet the number is not super high. What I’m sure of is the number is not commensurate to some kind of transformational change. And so, I mean, I’m not opposed to that strategy on any kind of ideological or philosophical… Like, sounds kind of great to me. Just historically, it has not worked at all. Go ask young people – “have people, have young people describe their social media practices to you?”, and you’ll be like, “Oh, that sounds pretty bad and not good for your health, actually.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You could probably tell me the number of minutes or hours that your husband has gotten for, you know, AI-related professional development, and I bet the number is not super high. What I’m sure of is the number is not commensurate to some kind of transformational change. And so, I mean, I’m not opposed to that strategy on any kind of ideological or philosophical… Like, sounds kind of great to me. Just historically, it has not worked at all. Go ask young people – “have people, have young people describe their social media practices to you?”, and you’ll be like, “Oh, that sounds pretty bad and not good for your health, actually.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But there has been ten or fifteen years of, like, social media literacy in schools. Like, ask one of your students to, like, save a file to a folder, and watch their head explode. And you’ll be like, “Oh, maybe, like, we’re not that good at teaching digital literacy in schools.” So one is just, like, an efficacy approach – But even if you believe that that, like, general approach would work, you have to sort of ask the question, like, what kinds of things are we gonna stuff into that AI fluency and AI literacy?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But there has been ten or fifteen years of, like, social media literacy in schools. Like, ask one of your students to, like, save a file to a folder, and watch their head explode. And you’ll be like, “Oh, maybe, like, we’re not that good at teaching digital literacy in schools.” So one is just, like, an efficacy approach – But even if you believe that that, like, general approach would work, you have to sort of ask the question, like, what kinds of things are we gonna stuff into that AI fluency and AI literacy?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like, what should that be? And I think we really, to this day, don’t know. So I mentioned before that I went to DeepMind the other day in London, and I cornered every engineer I could find, and I said, “Do you know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot?” I asked in big groups, in small groups, one-on-one. There was not an engineer or program manager there who told me yes. Every single one of them told me, “We do not know how to do that.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Like, what should that be? And I think we really, to this day, don’t know. So I mentioned before that I went to DeepMind the other day in London, and I cornered every engineer I could find, and I said, “Do you know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot?” I asked in big groups, in small groups, one-on-one. There was not an engineer or program manager there who told me yes. Every single one of them told me, “We do not know how to do that.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> DeepMind, Google’s elite AI laboratory. Justin went to a conference there about AI and education. And when he says that software engineers told him that they don’t know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot, what he means is that they may have protocols and practices, but they’re not yet confident that they work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> DeepMind, Google’s elite AI laboratory. Justin went to a conference there about AI and education. And when he says that software engineers told him that they don’t know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot, what he means is that they may have protocols and practices, but they’re not yet confident that they work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is a major concern in the software industry. Many big companies are adopting coding assistants like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex. Senior engineers can thrive in this kind of environment. They can prompt the AI with exactly what they’re looking for, and then they can manually check the outputs and write their own code when something goes wrong.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is a major concern in the software industry. Many big companies are adopting coding assistants like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex. Senior engineers can thrive in this kind of environment. They can prompt the AI with exactly what they’re looking for, and then they can manually check the outputs and write their own code when something goes wrong.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A much more junior engineer can also use these code assistants to generate code that seems like it works, but if it has a bug or a vulnerability, they may not notice or be able to fix it. And worse, they may never get a chance to develop their skills further. So we could end up with a generation of software engineers who don’t understand how the software works, can’t fix it if it goes wrong, and have shaky ideas of what is technologically possible. Not ideal. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A much more junior engineer can also use these code assistants to generate code that seems like it works, but if it has a bug or a vulnerability, they may not notice or be able to fix it. And worse, they may never get a chance to develop their skills further. So we could end up with a generation of software engineers who don’t understand how the software works, can’t fix it if it goes wrong, and have shaky ideas of what is technologically possible. Not ideal. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Companies know this could be a problem, so they’re experimenting with protocols for junior engineers, but this is all so new that nobody knows yet if these protocols will work. And they were frank about this with Justin. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Companies know this could be a problem, so they’re experimenting with protocols for junior engineers, but this is all so new that nobody knows yet if these protocols will work. And they were frank about this with Justin. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>If Google, which has billions and billions of dollars at stake to answer this question, does not know how to teach a junior engineer how to code with a copilot, like, what is a seventh grade middle school’s computer science teacher supposed to do?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>If Google, which has billions and billions of dollars at stake to answer this question, does not know how to teach a junior engineer how to code with a copilot, like, what is a seventh grade middle school’s computer science teacher supposed to do?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like, what would AI literacy in that class look like until Google can figure it out? That is an excellent point. So you mentioned earlier this idea that, in general, previous educational technologies have – if they’ve had a positive impact, it’s been toward the students who are already either high-performing or come from very high-resourced schools.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Like, what would AI literacy in that class look like until Google can figure it out? That is an excellent point. So you mentioned earlier this idea that, in general, previous educational technologies have – if they’ve had a positive impact, it’s been toward the students who are already either high-performing or come from very high-resourced schools.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I wanna ask you a little bit about special education, and in particular, kind of the extreme edges of special education. So this is kind of personal for me. My 11-year-old now, she has a rare genetic disorder, and I would say she does fall in that sort of extreme end of the continuum. Like, she literally will not look at a piece of paper if it hasn’t been, like, personalized with things that, you know, her teachers and aides and therapists know will draw her attention.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I wanna ask you a little bit about special education, and in particular, kind of the extreme edges of special education. So this is kind of personal for me. My 11-year-old now, she has a rare genetic disorder, and I would say she does fall in that sort of extreme end of the continuum. Like, she literally will not look at a piece of paper if it hasn’t been, like, personalized with things that, you know, her teachers and aides and therapists know will draw her attention.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so there’s certainly this kind of low-hanging fruit that I could see being very easy helping, you know, busy professionals in the classroom. But I do see the possibility of something a little bit more transformative in a positive way – for kids whose brains just work so differently that the professionals involved don’t always have a ton of intuition about what will work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so there’s certainly this kind of low-hanging fruit that I could see being very easy helping, you know, busy professionals in the classroom. But I do see the possibility of something a little bit more transformative in a positive way – for kids whose brains just work so differently that the professionals involved don’t always have a ton of intuition about what will work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So we talk a lot about AI having these jagged skills that are hard to understand from the outside, so being amazing at one skill and, like, hilariously bad at another. But there is a population of students for whom this is also true. I think a very concrete example here is severe language disabilities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So we talk a lot about AI having these jagged skills that are hard to understand from the outside, so being amazing at one skill and, like, hilariously bad at another. But there is a population of students for whom this is also true. I think a very concrete example here is severe language disabilities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So right now, the vast majority of educational instruction is done via language. If you have a kid whose language skills are significantly more impaired than their other skills, how do you teach them? How do you assess them? Non-verbal assessments do exist, but guess how the instructions are given? They’re given in language.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So right now, the vast majority of educational instruction is done via language. If you have a kid whose language skills are significantly more impaired than their other skills, how do you teach them? How do you assess them? Non-verbal assessments do exist, but guess how the instructions are given? They’re given in language.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it just seems like this place where a tool that can radically personalize, that’s completely agnostic to how a student chooses to answer a question, that has zero preconceived ideas about what will or won’t be an effective learning tool, could be transformative. And I know this is very hand-wavy, it’s very in the distance, but is there something here?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And it just seems like this place where a tool that can radically personalize, that’s completely agnostic to how a student chooses to answer a question, that has zero preconceived ideas about what will or won’t be an effective learning tool, could be transformative. And I know this is very hand-wavy, it’s very in the distance, but is there something here?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Oh well, for sure. So first, I’m definitely rooting for these people – I mean, I’m always rooting for the people who are making education much, much better. My, like, very boring, sometimes sad job is to, like, hop into these conversations and be like, “That would totally be great. Just, we should remember that people have been working on this for decades, and progress tends to be more measured.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Oh well, for sure. So first, I’m definitely rooting for these people – I mean, I’m always rooting for the people who are making education much, much better. My, like, very boring, sometimes sad job is to, like, hop into these conversations and be like, “That would totally be great. Just, we should remember that people have been working on this for decades, and progress tends to be more measured.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>That’s why they call you the skeptic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>That’s why they call you the skeptic. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>There’s this whole field called universal design for learning, which, you know, has observed for a long time, sometimes better to think of curriculum as disabled than people as disabled. The curriculum is just not presenting information in ways and in mechanisms that people with different kinds of ability can access. And so we should do a better job of reinventing our curriculum and, you know, in fact, as we start bringing generative AI into the application of these kinds of things in special education, we don’t have to start from scratch. We can start from decades of effort of people using computers to do these same kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>There’s this whole field called universal design for learning, which, you know, has observed for a long time, sometimes better to think of curriculum as disabled than people as disabled. The curriculum is just not presenting information in ways and in mechanisms that people with different kinds of ability can access. And so we should do a better job of reinventing our curriculum and, you know, in fact, as we start bringing generative AI into the application of these kinds of things in special education, we don’t have to start from scratch. We can start from decades of effort of people using computers to do these same kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cp>You know, translation is one thing that we mentioned, putting learning resources into different kinds of modalities. So if there are people who don’t read text well, then we can just have the machine speak the text. You know, a strategy that we’ve tried a lot is to build just-in-time learning supports for people into resources, saying like, “Okay, if this learning resource in its current form isn’t working for you, like, push this button and it will talk. Push this button and the reading level will change. Push this button and this other kind of feature of it can be modified to suit your needs.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What we found historically is that the kids that we most want to push those buttons are not the ones who push the button. The like high-performing kids push the ‘Help Me’ button and the kids who we most wish would push the, like, ‘Give Me Some Extra Resources’ or ‘Change This to Support Me’ button would.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, when we talk to teachers across the country, adapting resources to folks with different kinds of abilities is one of the things that they’re most enthusiastic. The you know, generative AI technologies might be able to help them do, and I’m rooting for them, and I hope that there are companies that figure out ways of doing this more sustainably and at scale. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some potential benefits from that. And those benefits are most likely to emerge not in the places where people download the, you know, the software that personalizes things for students with different learning capacities and things like that. It’s gonna be where whole communities are able to, like, rethink the way that they do special education in the context of that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, when we talk to teachers across the country, adapting resources to folks with different kinds of abilities is one of the things that they’re most enthusiastic. The you know, generative AI technologies might be able to help them do, and I’m rooting for them, and I hope that there are companies that figure out ways of doing this more sustainably and at scale. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some potential benefits from that. And those benefits are most likely to emerge not in the places where people download the, you know, the software that personalizes things for students with different learning capacities and things like that. It’s gonna be where whole communities are able to, like, rethink the way that they do special education in the context of that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>This idea of resources, it’s an important one, and not just for special education because every dollar, every hour of an educator’s time, it comes at the expense of money or time spent elsewhere, including on things that we do know work. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>And the worst case scenario, which I think we’ve seen a lot of places, is that we make substantial additional investments, both in technology platforms and then in a bunch of extra humans to manage those technology platforms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have to know what’s possible, and then we’ll need to roll up our sleeves. Test, learn, make sure that whatever gains we see in one classroom with one teacher can eventually benefit a much larger group of students. Because, and I’ll end with this, even our resident skeptic Justin agrees. At the end of the day, alongside all the headaches, new technologies do bring new capabilities. And little by little, these capabilities can tangibly improve the status quo. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Special thanks to today’s guest, Justin Reich. Jesse Dukes is our producer. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney and George Christensen. Marketing support from Ananya Mallapragada. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "AI will revolutionize education! No, it will destroy it! Which is it? If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher Justin Reich walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on interviews with 120 teachers and students across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#Transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI will revolutionize education! No, it will destroy it! Which is it? If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher \u003ca href=\"https://tsl.mit.edu/team/justin-reich/\">Justin Reich\u003c/a> walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\"> interviews with 120 teachers and students\u003c/a> across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Further Listening and Reading:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/the-homework-machine-ep-1-buckle-up-here-it-comes/\">The Homework Machine\u003c/a> (Audio)\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674089049?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback\">Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"Transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life, Automated, the show where we explore how to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. I’ll admit it, I’m the kind of person who hears something about the incredible capabilities of AI and then immediately tries to project all the ways those capabilities might transform the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s actually one of the goals of this podcast, to try to determine how many of these mental leaps are grounded in evidence. And sometimes I talk to someone and I’m like, “Yeah, this is a really big deal.” Today’s conversation, not that. I’ll be talking to Justin Reich, a researcher and director of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, about AI’s likely impact on K-12 education.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is not my first conversation about AI and education. I recently spoke with one of my colleagues here at Kellogg, Sébastien Martin, who has entirely reimagined many aspects of how he teaches his MBA students in ways I find pretty inspiring. But he’s admittedly an edge case, like if you accidentally ended up having Beethoven as your piano instructor and he gave you a warped sense of what piano lessons typically look like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Justin Reich, on the other hand, does have a sense of what lessons typically look like, not those designed by tech-savvy professors at top-ranked business schools, but in the rest of the world where budgets are limited, professional development is scarce, and time and time again, technology has entered the classroom only to fail to live up to its promise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Justin recently interviewed 120 K-12 teachers and students across America about AI for his podcast, “The Homework Machine.” His verdict? AI might modestly help some students learn some things. AI certainly is causing a lot of headaches. But somewhat surprisingly, given we’re talking about a technology that can pretty convincingly mimic human intelligence, he does not view it as transformational in the least.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a project from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. And here is my very grounded conversation with Justin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have been described as a healthy skeptic when it comes to bringing technology into classrooms. Do you agree with that characterization?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah, healthy skeptic. I was recently at DeepMind in London where one of the Google engineers said that I was the token skeptic. I don’t know. I’m not ideologically skeptical. Like, I’ve used technology, computers in my teaching for more than 20 years now, and I still do it. What I aspire to be is evidence-based.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>To me, maybe that’s skeptical, but it’s not skeptical as like, “I don’t know if I trust this technology stuff.” It’s more skeptical in the sense of like, what does a century of evidence tell us, and based on that century, what would we expect to happen next? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, it seems like you’re kind of in a position to interview yourself, so I’m just gonna ask you the question you asked yourself. What does a century of experience with technology tell us about this current moment? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The first things that happen when teachers get access to new technologies is they use them to extend existing practices. So they do whatever they were doing before but with the new technology. So we used to write our notes on chalkboards, and then we wrote our notes on whiteboards, and then we put them on acetate sheets, and then they got projected onto SMART Boards, into LCD projectors. It’s the same notes. We just reproduce them in all these different formats. If you give teachers enough time and support and coaching, they will invent new kinds of practices. Unfortunately, the second pattern that we see is that, where there are benefits to new technologies, they tend to disproportionately benefit the affluent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They benefit people with the financial, social, and technical capital to take advantage of new innovations. So for instance, in 2012, we invented these giant, these massive open online courses, and the main thing that we found is that they were pretty good for helping people earn their second master’s degree.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you were already educated, already affluent person, there are these great new opportunities for you, and it turned out that they really weren’t very good at helping onboard new kinds of students into the higher education system. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The third pattern that we see over and over again is that technologies are only as powerful as the communities that guide their use. So we’re constantly hoping that we can invent the software or these machines. You just sort of download things onto a bunch of people’s computers, and all of a sudden, learning gets better. And that essentially never happens. What can happen, where you can see improvements in learning, is when teachers have time to experiment and to try new things and to collaborate with their colleagues.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Principals come up with new disciplinary standards. Students learn new routines. Families learn new ways of helping people. When whole communities have a chance to make improvements, you know, across the curriculum and lesson planning with technologies, that’s when we can sometimes see some benefits. And, we should typically expect that benefits are modest, because the benefits of anything that we do in educational settings are typically modest.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you want to make education better, what you’re usually doing is, like, putting your shoulder to the wheel for a long time and being like, “Oh, it’s one percent better this year. That’s great. Let’s see if we can make it one percent better again next year.” Which is, of course, not at all what techno-utopians want to have happen or describing what happened, where there’s this giant disjunction with the past, and everything is better afterwards.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it’s kind of fun to think that way. There’s not a lot of historical evidence for it, and, I mean, I think the reason why I critique that approach the most is that it tends to be where you see people wasting a lot of time and money. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So let’s do a couple of examples here. So can you give us a couple of examples of times when techno-utopians came in and said, “This is it. This is going to change everything,” and then what actually happened? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, you got to start with the OG, Thomas Edison. Wow, so my man, a century ago, Thomas Edison, went in front of Congress, I think it was in 1913, and said, “In 10 years, textbooks will be gone, that they’ll be completely replaced by film strips, and this is gonna be a good thing as computers have been introduced” – I mean, radio went through this phase. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s a Larry Cuban has a great book called Teachers and Machines with a photograph in it, of a big, like, an armour-sized radio set. And it says, “With radio, the underprivileged school becomes a privileged one.” And so the idea that, like, we’re gonna have the best experts in the world broadcast radio lectures, radio lessons into homes all across the country, and it’s gonna be totally transformative of how students learn. Massive open online courses are probably the one that most recently went through higher education.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, I don’t know, Sebastian Thrun, who was a Google employee, a founder of Udacity, said that, “In 10 years, there will be fifty universities left, and Udacity might be one of them.” And as it turns out, today, sitting here in 2026, there are more than fifty universities that are left. People were really enthusiastic about the web, online courses.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was a book called Disrupting Class, which Clay Christensen wrote. He’s the developer of the theory of disruptive innovation. In 2009, he said that in 10 years, by 2019, half of all secondary school courses would be mediated online, that they would cost a third as much to deliver, and they would have better outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And my hunch is, if any of your listeners wander to their local public high school, they will not find that half of the classes are delivered online, that they will not find that the costs of running educational institutions have gone down by sixty-six percent, and they will not find, that the educational outcomes of the online learning experiences are substantially better than the ones that are being mediated by teachers. So there’s a pile of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Now, this does not mean that these previous technologies haven’t changed anything about the classroom experience, or that they didn’t feel, in small ways, kind of magical. Here’s a story Justin likes to tell, one from before he became a researcher, back when he was a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So when I went to go get my first teaching job, the department head was interviewing me the summer before and he said, “Can you teach world history?”And I said, “No, but I promise that if you hire me by September, I’ll figure out how to teach world history.” And he said, “Well, maybe.” And he said, “All right, one more thing, you’re gonna be teaching in this kind of trial classroom where there’s a cart of laptops in the corner. There are these blue and orange clamshell MacBooks”, this sort of iconic form factor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he said, you know, “And we’ve used ninth grade world history as sort of a testing bed to,” this was in 2003, “to see how these new computers could affect teaching and learning.” I said, “You can put a cart of bananas in the back corner of the classroom and I’ll teach with them. I just really need this job.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he went ahead and hired me, and it was really fun teaching in that classroom. It was a moment where the world’s government and archives and museums were rapidly digitizing primary sources. And so as a history teacher, with those computers, I could really do some things that were quite different from my own high school education where, you know, maybe I had a book of primary source documents with 20 documents in it or something like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now I can, you know, you just sort of imagine like, oh, what was, you know, I wanna teach my students about the Harlem Renaissance. Oh, the Smithsonian has 20,000 song sheets from the Harlem Renaissance. They can each study their own document, which maybe nobody has looked at, in the last hundred years or something like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Now, Justin says this was great. His students got a taste of what real historians do, find their own sources and documents and interpret them. But it also came with some hidden costs, in many ways, much greater than those of the computers themselves. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I was working in a private school, and I also recognized that the kinds of resources that were required to keep those computers running, to keep them charged, to keep our networks running, to find the productive things that students were doing and to highlight them, to find the malicious things that students were doing and stop them, was an enormous amount of resources.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the sort of incredible possibility of what students and me as a teacher could do with new computers was always balanced against the challenges and realities of turning those new affordances into everyday routines of learning that really helped students. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So fun, genuinely interesting, but not necessarily a game changer, and very resource intensive. I could see where this was going, and I wanted to know, is ChatGPT really just computers in classrooms all over again? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah. Well, what is different, if anything, about generative AI? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Well, I think we will by and large see those same kinds of patterns, I mean, people get really enthusiastic about the new technology that are in front of them to the point of dismissing the magic of previous technologies. There’s sort of an argument that emerges, which is kind of like… I’m calling it the web was met. Like you hear people say, like, “Well, you know, this AI thing is just totally different. I mean, we-\u003cs> \u003c/s>like, what could the web have possibly done?” I was like, “My guy, we took a handheld supercomputer, and we put it in the pocket of every child 13 years older in the networked world. We connected them to basically the world’s corpus of information, to every person they know, to every expert you can possibly imagine, and the effects on education range from not that much to maybe actually not that good.” You know, to the point where schools across the country are banning those mobile devices from people’s classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin says that like previous technologies, there will be some things that AI is really good at. They just won’t be, in his words, “transformative.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> They seem to be pretty good at translation. Like, maybe that will become less expensive, and that will be sort of helpful, but we actually… It’s gonna find that it’s not transformative to schools because, like, just translating materials is not, like, the only thing you need to unlock educating, you know, students that come from all over the world and speak all kinds of different languages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m kind of enthusiastic about writing feedback, maybe. You know, one of the things we know is that, like, you need a lot of feedback to improve at things, and the machines seem to be able to generate reasonable writing feedback, but then you get other kinds of reports from classrooms that are like, “Yeah, my students really just want feedback from me, the human being teacher in the room,” because it turns out that most of what motivates us to learn is our social relationships with one another, and it doesn’t seem like social relationships with chatbots is a very promising direction for humanity to go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, there is at least one kind of disruption that absolutely is happening in schools right now. So this very deep intel comes from my husband. He is a Chicago public school teacher. He teaches at high school.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Excellent!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And so I asked him, I was like, “All right, I’m gonna talk to this ed tech expert.” Like, “Give me the lowdown. Like, what is happening in your high school?” And so he had a number of things to say, and so I’m gonna share these with you. I think we’ll do it, like, one at a time, and you can tell me if you are in any way surprised by this. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, to prevent students from using these chatbots to just do entire homework assignments, there’s been a big shift toward in-class assignments done on paper, which does seem to help with that cheating problem, but it introduces another challenge, which is that you’re then not spending that class time actually doing instruction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Happening all over the place, happening in universities, happening in lots of different contexts. If, like definitely, one potential thing to be sad about is that, like, if you believed it could be possible that five years ago you could send students home to write stuff and be reasonably likely that they would write stuff, and then you could use class for the time of being together and engaging with one another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now it sounds like your husband, like many other teachers, believes, “If I want to read something that my students have actually written, I pretty much have to put them in a room and watch them write it themselves.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, I think it’s quite possible that there are millions of fewer minutes of homework being assigned than in previous years. And if you believe that homework gives students practice that’s valuable for their learning, then that could be a massive drawdown in the amount of learning time that students are doing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So he and his colleagues have not entirely given up on the idea of homework, but what they’ve done is try to use technology to fight technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he and his colleagues pay out of pocket, mind you, for a Google Doc extension that shows them a detailed history of the revisions made to a document. So the idea is you can actually see a video of an essay being constructed in real time, kind of sped up. And the downside is that it is still possible for students to cheat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>They just, they ask ChatGPT to write the essay, and then they’re literally sitting there, like, typing the essay from ChatGPT into Google Docs at, like, roughly a pace that they think it would look like you know, a 17-year-old comes up with thoughts in a unique manner and things like that. It’s kind of an interesting learning experience for the students, but obviously they’re not learning the thing that they’re supposed to be doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, like, the best possible use of your husband’s expertise is not surveilling students’ writing. I think we could find that as we ramp up the level of surveillance in schools, that that’s really not good for a democratic society, that you know, that a certain amount of privacy, a certain amount of freedom from surveillance is actually necessary for the Republic to continue as a Republic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the context that he’s in, what he’s doing is sensible, but if you aggregate that context across a lot of classrooms, you’re like, “Oh, that could be really bad, actually.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah. And I’ll share one more with you. So the last thing he mentioned is building, he calls it “layers of resistance.” So for an essay, this might mean breaking down an assignment into a bunch of different pieces. Then students do each piece separately, and then once they’ve already done that work, they then combine it into a longer piece. So, you are making it easier to do the eventual assignment yourself since you’ve had to do earlier parts yourself before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But you’re also making it harder to cheat because that would be, you know, just a lot more difficult to cheat at each of those steps and then combine them into cheating. And again, he says it’s fairly effective, and that’s kinda like his favorite strategy right now. And I asked him, I said, “Well, is this having the effect of requiring your students to kind of use training wheels to think longer than they would otherwise?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> So training wheels to think is oftentimes better than we imagine it is. There’s a group of educational researchers that are interested in this set of ideas called cognitive load theory, and an idea that we often have is that people become experts by behaving like experts. And they sort of argue, “No, no, no when people develop expertise, it looks quite different than being an expert.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I mean, you do, I think, Jess, have a good intuition there, which is like, “man, at some point, the kids, like, before they leave high school, probably just need to be able to write the essay.” Like, that it seems like that would be a pretty good thing, that we would want young people to be able to independently generate an argument in prose.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At least for the last, like, 30 years, we’ve thought that’s a pretty good idea to do, you know, with computers in particular. And boy, is generative AI making it hard for teachers to assign that task that we think is pretty good. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>But after going into these specifics, like, wouldn’t you agree that this is pretty transformative in terms of what students are actually doing during the school day?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I mean, definitely not transformative in the sense of, “Boy, this is great.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Justin really wouldn’t take the bait here. He was adamant. No, we don’t have any great evidence that how teachers and students actually spend their days, think lectures, group work, has really changed that much over the past couple of years, or for that matter, the past few decades, even if take-home essays are basically off the table now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I kept at him. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It does seem like one really big difference right now is that there’s a lot of discussions about how AI is or isn’t going to change the kind of future and work that we’re preparing students for. I’m curious if you’re seeing, you know, is that impacting students’ motivation to learn, which would obviously have a very big impact in the classrooms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess it also could start to change the question of what school should be for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>Yes. New technologies are a great catalyst to provoke conversations about what schools are for. In the last few decades, we’ve been particularly interested in the question, like, how do you prepare individuals for work in the labor market?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Although if you go through the history of schooling, you know, in the United States, we have public schools as a bulwark of our democracy. When Thomas Jefferson wrote about public schooling in the notes of the State of Virginia, and proposed the system of public schooling, it would be so that our nascent democracy would continue to exist and have citizens who are prepared to take on their roles as citizens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, you know, citizenship is gonna change with generative AI, too, and so we should be thinking about some of those kinds of changes. My hunch is if you went to all of the K-12 schools in the United States, you would not see huge changes in student motivation because like, students are not that great at thinking about their long-term futures.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, students primarily, like, they do not care that much about the subjects that we teach, for the most part. They care a ton about their teacher and their peers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Well, whether the students feel it or not, I guess my question would be to you, do you think that schools should be rethinking what education is for in this moment?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> I don’t know – I think we should start by saying we don’t know. Not only do we not know, but historically, when we’ve made some of these guesses in the past, we’ve been wrong. So you could look at things like, you know, the sort of computer science industry telling people that it’s enormously important to learn to code in order to get good jobs, and now there’s a possibility that computer programming won’t actually be a very viable field in the near future.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, and these things go back histor- You know, in the 19th century, there were a group of educators who passionately believed that you really had to teach sentence diagramming – that if you didn’t teach sentence diagramming, like, Western civilization would fall. And we’ve mostly stopped teaching sentence diagramming, and maybe Western civilization will fall apart, but it’s probably not gonna be for the lack of sentence diagramming.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Cursive. The great cursive debate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>The great cursive debate continues. Here, here, here are two stories you could tell about AI. One story you could tell about AI is that there is a lot to learn to figure out how to use AI, and that students should begin the process of learning that as soon as possible, that there should be a set of scaffold experiences, that we should change our curriculum, so that as people get older and older, there are more and more tasks that they do in partnership with AI, ’cause partnering with AI is hard to learn how to do, and if they do it with the supervision of teachers, they’ll be better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A second story that you could tell is that getting generative AI to spit stuff out is actually super easy, that there really is not that much to learn, and that what really differentiates people who are proficient and less proficient with using generative AI is whether or not they can evaluate output. Since the output is highly uneven, what you really need are people who can say, “Oh, this is a good idea, this is a good practice, and this one is not.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It could be that there’s actually very little general expertise that you can develop to distinguish good output from bad output. What you probably primarily need is domain knowledge. Like, if you ask ChatGPT a question about plumbing, there’s nothing about AI which is gonna tell you whether or not it gave you a good plumbing answer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What you need to know about is plumbing. If that was the case, if domain expertise was sort of the key differentiator in people skills in using AI, then that would be pretty good news for schools and universities, ’cause the main thing they’ve done for however many hundreds of years is try to help people develop domain expertise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But I don’t- as a civilization, science does not know the answer to those two stories. Science cannot tell you today which of those two stories is correct. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s interesting. So I’m guessing you’re not a big fan of some of these moves more recently by school districts, university systems, states, even potentially the federal government, to implement various AI competency or AI literacy requirements.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I will point out some of these seem more, you know, pro-technology, like giving the students the skills they need to succeed with these technologies. Others actually take a bit more of a defensive crouch, like let’s teach students the critical thinking skills so they can discriminate between the good and the bad. But there is nonetheless a lot of overlap, which is that these requirements purport to prepare students to live in a world alongside AI. And I’m curious what you make of those. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Well, one thing that we’ve tried over the last twenty years in the United States is a strategy they might call, like, the ‘tech literacy’ strategy, where every time a new technology comes along, you define a set of skills that correlate with that technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You write some policy documents that say schools should be teaching those things, and then you, like, bake it for a while and watch and see what happens. And, like, if you were to pick a sort of education reform strategy that we could be almost certain does not work, it would be that one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It works really well for pundits and policymakers. Like, it’s a great way for policymakers to be like, “Look, we did a thing. We passed a bill which says you have to learn some stuff.” But what you actually have to do to make a difference in schools is you have to translate those policy guidance into curriculum documents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are 3.5 million teachers in the United States. Like your husband, one in every one hundred living Americans has to raise their hand and say, “I will be a teacher this year,” in order for our system to function. To improve the capacity of 3.5 million people is mind-bogglingly complex.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You could probably tell me the number of minutes or hours that your husband has gotten for, you know, AI-related professional development, and I bet the number is not super high. What I’m sure of is the number is not commensurate to some kind of transformational change. And so, I mean, I’m not opposed to that strategy on any kind of ideological or philosophical… Like, sounds kind of great to me. Just historically, it has not worked at all. Go ask young people – “have people, have young people describe their social media practices to you?”, and you’ll be like, “Oh, that sounds pretty bad and not good for your health, actually.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But there has been ten or fifteen years of, like, social media literacy in schools. Like, ask one of your students to, like, save a file to a folder, and watch their head explode. And you’ll be like, “Oh, maybe, like, we’re not that good at teaching digital literacy in schools.” So one is just, like, an efficacy approach – But even if you believe that that, like, general approach would work, you have to sort of ask the question, like, what kinds of things are we gonna stuff into that AI fluency and AI literacy?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, what should that be? And I think we really, to this day, don’t know. So I mentioned before that I went to DeepMind the other day in London, and I cornered every engineer I could find, and I said, “Do you know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot?” I asked in big groups, in small groups, one-on-one. There was not an engineer or program manager there who told me yes. Every single one of them told me, “We do not know how to do that.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> DeepMind, Google’s elite AI laboratory. Justin went to a conference there about AI and education. And when he says that software engineers told him that they don’t know how to train a junior engineer to code with a copilot, what he means is that they may have protocols and practices, but they’re not yet confident that they work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is a major concern in the software industry. Many big companies are adopting coding assistants like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex. Senior engineers can thrive in this kind of environment. They can prompt the AI with exactly what they’re looking for, and then they can manually check the outputs and write their own code when something goes wrong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A much more junior engineer can also use these code assistants to generate code that seems like it works, but if it has a bug or a vulnerability, they may not notice or be able to fix it. And worse, they may never get a chance to develop their skills further. So we could end up with a generation of software engineers who don’t understand how the software works, can’t fix it if it goes wrong, and have shaky ideas of what is technologically possible. Not ideal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Companies know this could be a problem, so they’re experimenting with protocols for junior engineers, but this is all so new that nobody knows yet if these protocols will work. And they were frank about this with Justin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>If Google, which has billions and billions of dollars at stake to answer this question, does not know how to teach a junior engineer how to code with a copilot, like, what is a seventh grade middle school’s computer science teacher supposed to do?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, what would AI literacy in that class look like until Google can figure it out? That is an excellent point. So you mentioned earlier this idea that, in general, previous educational technologies have – if they’ve had a positive impact, it’s been toward the students who are already either high-performing or come from very high-resourced schools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I wanna ask you a little bit about special education, and in particular, kind of the extreme edges of special education. So this is kind of personal for me. My 11-year-old now, she has a rare genetic disorder, and I would say she does fall in that sort of extreme end of the continuum. Like, she literally will not look at a piece of paper if it hasn’t been, like, personalized with things that, you know, her teachers and aides and therapists know will draw her attention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so there’s certainly this kind of low-hanging fruit that I could see being very easy helping, you know, busy professionals in the classroom. But I do see the possibility of something a little bit more transformative in a positive way – for kids whose brains just work so differently that the professionals involved don’t always have a ton of intuition about what will work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we talk a lot about AI having these jagged skills that are hard to understand from the outside, so being amazing at one skill and, like, hilariously bad at another. But there is a population of students for whom this is also true. I think a very concrete example here is severe language disabilities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right now, the vast majority of educational instruction is done via language. If you have a kid whose language skills are significantly more impaired than their other skills, how do you teach them? How do you assess them? Non-verbal assessments do exist, but guess how the instructions are given? They’re given in language.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it just seems like this place where a tool that can radically personalize, that’s completely agnostic to how a student chooses to answer a question, that has zero preconceived ideas about what will or won’t be an effective learning tool, could be transformative. And I know this is very hand-wavy, it’s very in the distance, but is there something here?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> Oh well, for sure. So first, I’m definitely rooting for these people – I mean, I’m always rooting for the people who are making education much, much better. My, like, very boring, sometimes sad job is to, like, hop into these conversations and be like, “That would totally be great. Just, we should remember that people have been working on this for decades, and progress tends to be more measured.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>That’s why they call you the skeptic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>There’s this whole field called universal design for learning, which, you know, has observed for a long time, sometimes better to think of curriculum as disabled than people as disabled. The curriculum is just not presenting information in ways and in mechanisms that people with different kinds of ability can access. And so we should do a better job of reinventing our curriculum and, you know, in fact, as we start bringing generative AI into the application of these kinds of things in special education, we don’t have to start from scratch. We can start from decades of effort of people using computers to do these same kinds of things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, translation is one thing that we mentioned, putting learning resources into different kinds of modalities. So if there are people who don’t read text well, then we can just have the machine speak the text. You know, a strategy that we’ve tried a lot is to build just-in-time learning supports for people into resources, saying like, “Okay, if this learning resource in its current form isn’t working for you, like, push this button and it will talk. Push this button and the reading level will change. Push this button and this other kind of feature of it can be modified to suit your needs.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What we found historically is that the kids that we most want to push those buttons are not the ones who push the button. The like high-performing kids push the ‘Help Me’ button and the kids who we most wish would push the, like, ‘Give Me Some Extra Resources’ or ‘Change This to Support Me’ button would.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, when we talk to teachers across the country, adapting resources to folks with different kinds of abilities is one of the things that they’re most enthusiastic. The you know, generative AI technologies might be able to help them do, and I’m rooting for them, and I hope that there are companies that figure out ways of doing this more sustainably and at scale. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some potential benefits from that. And those benefits are most likely to emerge not in the places where people download the, you know, the software that personalizes things for students with different learning capacities and things like that. It’s gonna be where whole communities are able to, like, rethink the way that they do special education in the context of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, and it’s probably gonna be that students who live in more affluent places are gonna have the kinds of systemic resources that allow for all that training and adoption to occur.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>This idea of resources, it’s an important one, and not just for special education because every dollar, every hour of an educator’s time, it comes at the expense of money or time spent elsewhere, including on things that we do know work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>And the worst case scenario, which I think we’ve seen a lot of places, is that we make substantial additional investments, both in technology platforms and then in a bunch of extra humans to manage those technology platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the cost of schooling goes up, but because at best, the gains of those technology platforms is pretty moderate, you’re like adding a whole bunch of additional expense. Like, you know, you’re basically like in the Chicago Public Schools, like you bought all these Google Docs, and you bought all of these computers so that all the students can use them, and you bought all these IT professionals because the computers break all the time, and your husband like, is like, “Well, actually, the best thing to do is to have them write essays on pencils and paper.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, that’s an awful lot of money that we’re spending on all of this infrastructure to sit in a closet while your students are writing in composition notebooks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Will AI transform K-12 education? Justin really doesn’t think so. And frankly, I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved by that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, there is something reassuring about a world where students continue to learn the same kinds of things that I learned when I was in school. It’s certainly preferable to one where the whole educational system grinds to a panicked halt because they’ve decided students don’t need to learn anything anymore.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But on the other hand, it seems my dreams of some automated tool that can magically help my daughter learn in a way no human has yet managed to is probably not right around the corner either. And I still think that experiments will be important, including the kind of ambitious, dare I say transformative experiments that folks like my colleague Sébastien Martin are pursuing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have to know what’s possible, and then we’ll need to roll up our sleeves. Test, learn, make sure that whatever gains we see in one classroom with one teacher can eventually benefit a much larger group of students. Because, and I’ll end with this, even our resident skeptic Justin agrees. At the end of the day, alongside all the headaches, new technologies do bring new capabilities. And little by little, these capabilities can tangibly improve the status quo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich: \u003c/strong>I mean, the things that do work, it’s probably going to be more like 10 or 20 years of development rather than sort of stumbling across something which works super well in a year or two. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So it could be transformative for the better, but it’s just going to take a ton of work and dedication and probably resources to get there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Justin Reich:\u003c/strong> My colleague Ken Kaedinger says that step change is what 25 years of incremental change looks like from a distance.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Special thanks to today’s guest, Justin Reich. Jesse Dukes is our producer. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney and George Christensen. Marketing support from Ananya Mallapragada. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094595/meta-faces-up-to-1-4-trillion-reckoning-as-youth-addiction-trial-opens-in-oakland\">landmark trial against Meta\u003c/a> opened in Oakland on Tuesday, with California leading a coalition of states accusing the largest social media company in the world of knowingly designing its products in ways that could harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“What you’re going to hear in this trial is how Meta hooked kids on its platforms. How it designed those platforms so that kids kept coming back,” Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for California, told the court during her opening statement on Tuesday morning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Meta had its own research showing how kids had bad, even traumatic, experiences on its apps,” O’Neill said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If the states succeed, Meta could be held liable for up to $1.4 trillion in damages — roughly what the company is worth on Wall Street — and required to make changes to how it runs Instagram and Facebook platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095798\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In recent years, Meta and other social media companies have been slammed with thousands of lawsuits brought by families and school districts, claiming social media addiction has harmed children’s mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over several decades, the companies have been able to defeat many lawsuits, arguing federal law protects platforms from being held liable for the content users publish on their sites. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But states, school districts and individuals have begun employing a different strategy that led to Meta losses in district courts in Los Angeles and New Mexico in recent years: arguing that social media platforms like Meta have deliberately engineered products to be addictive, even or especially for children, and misled the public about their behavior and the risks in order to make money and increase its customer base. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tens of millions of teens and children under 13 have Instagram and Facebook accounts, earning Meta ad revenue and allowing it to harvest emails, phone numbers, images of kids’ faces and other personal information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Time and time again, profits won,” O’Neill said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The federal suit — brought by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey and joined by 29 others, whose cases will go to trial at a later time — argues that Meta built features that it knew would hook young people and did little to remove children under 13 from its platforms, while telling parents and regulators otherwise. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We are not here to hold Meta responsible for the fact that there are bad people out there who post bad things that may harm kids,” O’Neill said. “We are holding Meta responsible for its own conduct. What Meta said and didn’t say, what Meta did and didn’t do. The choices that Meta made.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Internal company documents and whistleblowers, including Arturo Béjar, the former leader of Integrity and Care Facebook, have revealed that Instagram aimed to increase the minutes that teen users spent on their platform each year, and that the company hid its own research showing the negative impacts its apps had on teens. The company also knew, they allege, that millions of children under the age of 13, barred from Facebook and Instagram in the company’s terms and conditions, were users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar testified that the company “has taken a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach” to children under 13 using its platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Coco was 12 when she opened Instagram for the first time in 2017, four years before the world learned what Meta already knew: Instagram was harming teenage girls,” mom Julianna Arnold said outside the Oakland courtroom. There, advocates gathered to pay tribute to nearly 400 deceased young people who were allegedly lured into sexual exploitation through Facebook, or served content that made them feel worse about themselves and their bodies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“By her teens, [Coco] could not look away. Her scrolling became depression, then anxiety she couldn’t escape,” Arnold said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said her daughter was groomed by a man on Instagram, who sold her what she thought was Percocet, but turned out to be a fatal dose of fentanyl, when she was 17. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Coco’s story was not an accident. We know it was the predictable outcome of a platform Meta knew harmed children,” Arnold said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095855\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Arturo Béjar, a security consultant who formerly worked for Meta, testified on Aug. 18, 2026, in a federal courthouse in Oakland. Béjar testified before the Senate in 2023 that the company knew about harms its platforms caused to children and teens, but failed to act. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta has repeatedly denied that its platforms are responsible for this harm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The company’s lead attorney, Paul Schmidt, told the court during his opening statement that Meta doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, and some people “post negative things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“That’s something Meta takes seriously, and tries to act on,” he said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He said the whistleblower accounts and data shared by the states lacked context and were needles picked out of the haystack of employee and user statements over many years. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to one internal report, one in five teens said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves, a statistic O’Neill quoted in her opening statement before the advisory jury in Oakland. Schmidt said that the same report noted 40% of those surveyed said they felt better, and 41% felt no different. In other internal documents, employees discussed making a product that “intentionally promotes wellbeing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Schmidt also said there are “real challenges in verifying age,” but that Meta has always required users to be at least 13, and has more recently developed detection tools to identify accounts belonging to children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta said in a statement that it was “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” but parents and advocates at the courthouse on Tuesday said they believe the company will be held accountable in the coming weeks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We’re going to make history here,” said Erin Popolo, whose daughter Emily died by suicide after being cyberbullied and harassed. “This is going to be a groundbreaking trial. They’re going to be found liable for what they are doing to people.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The trial is expected to go on for weeks and feature testimony from high-level Meta executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, who wasn’t present in the courtroom on Tuesday, as well as state health and education officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The jury will provide an advisory verdict, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — who has a track record of presiding over blockbuster tech industry cases, including this spring’s trial between \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12081290/how-to-unscramble-an-omelet-in-silicon-valley-the-musk-v-altman-trial-that-will-try\">Sam Altman and Elon Musk\u003c/a> — will decide the civil penalties and any changes Meta will be required to make, if it is found liable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta, one of the largest, most powerful companies in the world, carried out a campaign to deceive, to mislead its users, legislators, teachers and parents,” O’Neill said. “At the end of this trial, we’re going to ask you to hold Meta accountable.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We are not here to hold Meta responsible for the fact that there are bad people out there who post bad things that may harm kids,” O’Neill said. “We are holding Meta responsible for its own conduct. What Meta said and didn’t say, what Meta did and didn’t do. The choices that Meta made.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Coco was 12 when she opened Instagram for the first time in 2017, four years before the world learned what Meta already knew: Instagram was harming teenage girls,” mom Julianna Arnold said outside the Oakland courtroom. There, advocates gathered to pay tribute to nearly 400 deceased young people who were allegedly lured into sexual exploitation through Facebook, or served content that made them feel worse about themselves and their bodies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta said in a statement that it was “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” but parents and advocates at the courthouse on Tuesday said they believe the company will be held accountable in the coming weeks. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We’re going to make history here,” said Erin Popolo, whose daughter Emily died by suicide after being cyberbullied and harassed. “This is going to be a groundbreaking trial. They’re going to be found liable for what they are doing to people.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The jury will provide an advisory verdict, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — who has a track record of presiding over blockbuster tech industry cases, including this spring’s trial between \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12081290/how-to-unscramble-an-omelet-in-silicon-valley-the-musk-v-altman-trial-that-will-try\">Sam Altman and Elon Musk\u003c/a> — will decide the civil penalties and any changes Meta will be required to make, if it is found liable.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Meta, one of the largest, most powerful companies in the world, carried out a campaign to deceive, to mislead its users, legislators, teachers and parents,” O’Neill said. “At the end of this trial, we’re going to ask you to hold Meta accountable.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "California and other states allege that the company hid its social media addiction research to protect its bottom line, which Meta disputes.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094595/meta-faces-up-to-1-4-trillion-reckoning-as-youth-addiction-trial-opens-in-oakland\">landmark trial against Meta\u003c/a> opened in Oakland on Tuesday, with California leading a coalition of states accusing the largest social media company in the world of knowingly designing its products in ways that could harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“What you’re going to hear in this trial is how Meta hooked kids on its platforms. How it designed those platforms so that kids kept coming back,” Megan O’Neill, a deputy attorney general for California, told the court during her opening statement on Tuesday morning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Meta had its own research showing how kids had bad, even traumatic, experiences on its apps,” O’Neill said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If the states succeed, Meta could be held liable for up to $1.4 trillion in damages — roughly what the company is worth on Wall Street — and required to make changes to how it runs Instagram and Facebook platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095798\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In recent years, Meta and other social media companies have been slammed with thousands of lawsuits brought by families and school districts, claiming social media addiction has harmed children’s mental health.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over several decades, the companies have been able to defeat many lawsuits, arguing federal law protects platforms from being held liable for the content users publish on their sites. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But states, school districts and individuals have begun employing a different strategy that led to Meta losses in district courts in Los Angeles and New Mexico in recent years: arguing that social media platforms like Meta have deliberately engineered products to be addictive, even or especially for children, and misled the public about their behavior and the risks in order to make money and increase its customer base. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tens of millions of teens and children under 13 have Instagram and Facebook accounts, earning Meta ad revenue and allowing it to harvest emails, phone numbers, images of kids’ faces and other personal information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Time and time again, profits won,” O’Neill said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The federal suit — brought by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey and joined by 29 others, whose cases will go to trial at a later time — argues that Meta built features that it knew would hook young people and did little to remove children under 13 from its platforms, while telling parents and regulators otherwise. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We are not here to hold Meta responsible for the fact that there are bad people out there who post bad things that may harm kids,” O’Neill said. “We are holding Meta responsible for its own conduct. What Meta said and didn’t say, what Meta did and didn’t do. The choices that Meta made.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Internal company documents and whistleblowers, including Arturo Béjar, the former leader of Integrity and Care Facebook, have revealed that Instagram aimed to increase the minutes that teen users spent on their platform each year, and that the company hid its own research showing the negative impacts its apps had on teens. The company also knew, they allege, that millions of children under the age of 13, barred from Facebook and Instagram in the company’s terms and conditions, were users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Béjar testified that the company “has taken a ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ approach” to children under 13 using its platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Coco was 12 when she opened Instagram for the first time in 2017, four years before the world learned what Meta already knew: Instagram was harming teenage girls,” mom Julianna Arnold said outside the Oakland courtroom. There, advocates gathered to pay tribute to nearly 400 deceased young people who were allegedly lured into sexual exploitation through Facebook, or served content that made them feel worse about themselves and their bodies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“By her teens, [Coco] could not look away. Her scrolling became depression, then anxiety she couldn’t escape,” Arnold said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said her daughter was groomed by a man on Instagram, who sold her what she thought was Percocet, but turned out to be a fatal dose of fentanyl, when she was 17. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Coco’s story was not an accident. We know it was the predictable outcome of a platform Meta knew harmed children,” Arnold said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095855\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch3_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Arturo Béjar, a security consultant who formerly worked for Meta, testified on Aug. 18, 2026, in a federal courthouse in Oakland. Béjar testified before the Senate in 2023 that the company knew about harms its platforms caused to children and teens, but failed to act. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta has repeatedly denied that its platforms are responsible for this harm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The company’s lead attorney, Paul Schmidt, told the court during his opening statement that Meta doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media, and some people “post negative things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“That’s something Meta takes seriously, and tries to act on,” he said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He said the whistleblower accounts and data shared by the states lacked context and were needles picked out of the haystack of employee and user statements over many years. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to one internal report, one in five teens said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves, a statistic O’Neill quoted in her opening statement before the advisory jury in Oakland. Schmidt said that the same report noted 40% of those surveyed said they felt better, and 41% felt no different. In other internal documents, employees discussed making a product that “intentionally promotes wellbeing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Schmidt also said there are “real challenges in verifying age,” but that Meta has always required users to be at least 13, and has more recently developed detection tools to identify accounts belonging to children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta said in a statement that it was “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people,” but parents and advocates at the courthouse on Tuesday said they believe the company will be held accountable in the coming weeks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We’re going to make history here,” said Erin Popolo, whose daughter Emily died by suicide after being cyberbullied and harassed. “This is going to be a groundbreaking trial. They’re going to be found liable for what they are doing to people.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The trial is expected to go on for weeks and feature testimony from high-level Meta executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, who wasn’t present in the courtroom on Tuesday, as well as state health and education officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The jury will provide an advisory verdict, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — who has a track record of presiding over blockbuster tech industry cases, including this spring’s trial between \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12081290/how-to-unscramble-an-omelet-in-silicon-valley-the-musk-v-altman-trial-that-will-try\">Sam Altman and Elon Musk\u003c/a> — will decide the civil penalties and any changes Meta will be required to make, if it is found liable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Seven in ten teenagers are \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">using artificial intelligence\u003c/a> for their schoolwork, according to new data released by San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As schools and parents grapple with how to better control students’ technology and AI access, the survey of more than 1,000 teens across the U.S. found that the vast majority are already relying on the tools, while few are learning how to use them safely. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI has become routine in how teens do homework,” said Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media. “I actually think the more interesting finding is kind of how they are using AI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of phone screen displaying Anthropic Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) powered generative artificial intelligence chatbot in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our biggest concern … is that even if you think you are using AI in a way that’s beneficial to your learning, you might actually be subtly undermining your learning,” he said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The survey found that 63% of teens using AI for schoolwork are getting an answer from the tool in some form. What they do with these responses varies: a quarter said they use the AI-generated text as is, while about 31% rewrite it in their voice and just 35% say they improve it with their own knowledge. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robb said the concern with all of those uses is whether they are disrupting the learning process. The Common Sense Media report found that among the AI users surveyed, 38% say having the tools available leads them to develop fewer of their own ideas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Two-thirds of teens said that AI helped them understand their schoolwork, but almost four in 10 reported feeling like they were missing out on learning when they used AI to complete assignments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Schools, Robb said, should be “trying to design assignments so that AI is not removing the important thinking parts, things like drafting or revising, coming up with arguments.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Teens reported that they believe the skills that will matter most for their future are social skills, fact-checking, critical thinking and understanding complex information. Robb said AI companies, school districts and employers should be considering if the tools available to their students are counterintuitive to those goals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The question is, if we’re introducing AI in all these various forms, are those things actually supporting human connection or critical thinking? Or are they replacing or disrupting them?” he asked. “Because if it’s the latter, then … we are undercutting the very things we set to value.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Robb said using AI to check work or get feedback can be useful, he worries about students who said they use it to brainstorm for assignments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They are starting with an answer before a student is trying the problem,” Robb said. “There are a couple of skills I think are at stake. Starting hard things, generating your own ideas flexibly — these are executive function skills that are still developing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1335\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11992395\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1920x1282.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students walk down a hallway at Fremont High School in Oakland on Oct. 10, 2023. (Laure Andrillon for CalMatters)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is happening at a period in adolescence where you really want to hone and strengthen these skills, and I’m concerned that we are undermining them,” he continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sixty-eight percent of students who use AI said they use one of those multi-purpose tools, like ChatGPT, for their schoolwork, while four in 10 reported that they use a reading or writing assistant, like Grammarly. Smaller percentages use AI-backed research tools, image and video generators or tutors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s school district in 2025 introduced an AI-powered tutoring program called Amira, which it said provides students with individualized reading support, without the need for one-on-one human tutors. Amira’s \u003ca href=\"https://amiralearning.com/research\">website\u003c/a> said studies show that the software “outperforms high dosage human tutoring at scale,” though critics have \u003ca href=\"https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/no-amiras-ai-tutor-is-not-ready-to\">disputed\u003c/a> this claim. According to district documents, SFUSD uses the program for elementary students in class and at home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think [something] that schools should be looking at is making sure that AI is not replacing learning from people,” Robb said. “People throw around the word ‘personalized’ a lot … but that should really just mean that kids need to be better supported, not leaving kids along with an AI system instead of a teacher or a classmate.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report comes amid a parent-led movement across some major school districts to restrict school technology use, as the majority have \u003ca href=\"https://www.cosn.org/edtech-topics/state-of-edtech-leadership/\">1:1\u003c/a> device programs that give students access to a laptop or tablet both in their classrooms and at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Dwyer/Associated Press)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many of these devices make it easy for students to access artificial intelligence technology — from the automatically generated AI summary that tops Google search result pages to access to tools like ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini — leading the national parent group \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolsbeyondscreens.com/reform-proposals\">Schools Beyond Screens\u003c/a> to call for a moratorium on AI in schools. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Common Sense Media survey found that while many students have access to this tech, they aren’t all discussing how to use it safely or to support their learning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s important that schools make their rules really clear,” Robb said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media has also created a new curriculum that focuses on safety concerns like deepfakes and social engineering, a technique cybercriminals use to get people to reveal sensitive data or grant access to restricted systems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s Jose Velazquez contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sixty-eight percent of students who use AI said they use one of those multi-purpose tools, like ChatGPT, for their schoolwork, while four in 10 reported that they use a reading or writing assistant, like Grammarly. Smaller percentages use AI-backed research tools, image and video generators or tutors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s school district in 2025 introduced an AI-powered tutoring program called Amira, which it said provides students with individualized reading support, without the need for one-on-one human tutors. Amira’s \u003ca href=\"https://amiralearning.com/research\">website\u003c/a> said studies show that the software “outperforms high dosage human tutoring at scale,” though critics have \u003ca href=\"https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/no-amiras-ai-tutor-is-not-ready-to\">disputed\u003c/a> this claim. According to district documents, SFUSD uses the program for elementary students in class and at home.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I think [something] that schools should be looking at is making sure that AI is not replacing learning from people,” Robb said. “People throw around the word ‘personalized’ a lot … but that should really just mean that kids need to be better supported, not leaving kids along with an AI system instead of a teacher or a classmate.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The report comes amid a parent-led movement across some major school districts to restrict school technology use, as the majority have \u003ca href=\"https://www.cosn.org/edtech-topics/state-of-edtech-leadership/\">1:1\u003c/a> device programs that give students access to a laptop or tablet both in their classrooms and at home. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many of these devices make it easy for students to access artificial intelligence technology — from the automatically generated AI summary that tops Google search result pages to access to tools like ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini — leading the national parent group \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolsbeyondscreens.com/reform-proposals\">Schools Beyond Screens\u003c/a> to call for a moratorium on AI in schools. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Common Sense Media survey found that while many students have access to this tech, they aren’t all discussing how to use it safely or to support their learning. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media has also created a new curriculum that focuses on safety concerns like deepfakes and social engineering, a technique cybercriminals use to get people to reveal sensitive data or grant access to restricted systems.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s Jose Velazquez contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "A new study from Bay Area-based Common Sense Media suggests AI tools could be disrupting students’ development of key skills, like critical thinking and executive function.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Seven in ten teenagers are \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/category/technology\">using artificial intelligence\u003c/a> for their schoolwork, according to new data released by San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As schools and parents grapple with how to better control students’ technology and AI access, the survey of more than 1,000 teens across the U.S. found that the vast majority are already relying on the tools, while few are learning how to use them safely. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI has become routine in how teens do homework,” said Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media. “I actually think the more interesting finding is kind of how they are using AI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of phone screen displaying Anthropic Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) powered generative artificial intelligence chatbot in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our biggest concern … is that even if you think you are using AI in a way that’s beneficial to your learning, you might actually be subtly undermining your learning,” he said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The survey found that 63% of teens using AI for schoolwork are getting an answer from the tool in some form. What they do with these responses varies: a quarter said they use the AI-generated text as is, while about 31% rewrite it in their voice and just 35% say they improve it with their own knowledge. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Robb said the concern with all of those uses is whether they are disrupting the learning process. The Common Sense Media report found that among the AI users surveyed, 38% say having the tools available leads them to develop fewer of their own ideas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Two-thirds of teens said that AI helped them understand their schoolwork, but almost four in 10 reported feeling like they were missing out on learning when they used AI to complete assignments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Schools, Robb said, should be “trying to design assignments so that AI is not removing the important thinking parts, things like drafting or revising, coming up with arguments.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Teens reported that they believe the skills that will matter most for their future are social skills, fact-checking, critical thinking and understanding complex information. Robb said AI companies, school districts and employers should be considering if the tools available to their students are counterintuitive to those goals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The question is, if we’re introducing AI in all these various forms, are those things actually supporting human connection or critical thinking? Or are they replacing or disrupting them?” he asked. “Because if it’s the latter, then … we are undercutting the very things we set to value.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Robb said using AI to check work or get feedback can be useful, he worries about students who said they use it to brainstorm for assignments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They are starting with an answer before a student is trying the problem,” Robb said. “There are a couple of skills I think are at stake. Starting hard things, generating your own ideas flexibly — these are executive function skills that are still developing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1335\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11992395\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/06/101023-AI-College-Toby-Reed-LA-CM-21-copy-1920x1282.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students walk down a hallway at Fremont High School in Oakland on Oct. 10, 2023. (Laure Andrillon for CalMatters)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is happening at a period in adolescence where you really want to hone and strengthen these skills, and I’m concerned that we are undermining them,” he continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sixty-eight percent of students who use AI said they use one of those multi-purpose tools, like ChatGPT, for their schoolwork, while four in 10 reported that they use a reading or writing assistant, like Grammarly. Smaller percentages use AI-backed research tools, image and video generators or tutors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s school district in 2025 introduced an AI-powered tutoring program called Amira, which it said provides students with individualized reading support, without the need for one-on-one human tutors. Amira’s \u003ca href=\"https://amiralearning.com/research\">website\u003c/a> said studies show that the software “outperforms high dosage human tutoring at scale,” though critics have \u003ca href=\"https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/no-amiras-ai-tutor-is-not-ready-to\">disputed\u003c/a> this claim. According to district documents, SFUSD uses the program for elementary students in class and at home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think [something] that schools should be looking at is making sure that AI is not replacing learning from people,” Robb said. “People throw around the word ‘personalized’ a lot … but that should really just mean that kids need to be better supported, not leaving kids along with an AI system instead of a teacher or a classmate.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report comes amid a parent-led movement across some major school districts to restrict school technology use, as the majority have \u003ca href=\"https://www.cosn.org/edtech-topics/state-of-edtech-leadership/\">1:1\u003c/a> device programs that give students access to a laptop or tablet both in their classrooms and at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Dwyer/Associated Press)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many of these devices make it easy for students to access artificial intelligence technology — from the automatically generated AI summary that tops Google search result pages to access to tools like ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini — leading the national parent group \u003ca href=\"https://www.schoolsbeyondscreens.com/reform-proposals\">Schools Beyond Screens\u003c/a> to call for a moratorium on AI in schools. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Common Sense Media survey found that while many students have access to this tech, they aren’t all discussing how to use it safely or to support their learning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s important that schools make their rules really clear,” Robb said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media has also created a new curriculum that focuses on safety concerns like deepfakes and social engineering, a technique cybercriminals use to get people to reveal sensitive data or grant access to restricted systems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s Jose Velazquez contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "new-california-law-requires-ai-companies-to-publish-detection-tools-are-they-complying",
"title": "New California Law Requires AI Companies to Publish Detection Tools. Are They Complying?",
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"headTitle": "New California Law Requires AI Companies to Publish Detection Tools. Are They Complying? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>After California enacted a state artificial intelligence transparency \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12093427/california-leads-us-with-new-ai-transparency-law\">law\u003c/a> earlier this month, an independent review of 13 major companies that generate AI images and audio found that only 7 — with an eighth identified by KQED — published the legally required tools to help users decipher whether a piece of content was made or edited with their technology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As AI-generated images flood the web, identifying and labeling this content has become a key concern for educators teaching \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/schools-play-game-of-media-literacy-catch-up-as-ai-use-rises/2026/04\">media literacy\u003c/a>, for politicians worrying about \u003ca href=\"https://kevinmullin.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Meta-Election-Integrity-Letter-8.17.26.pdf\">disinformation\u003c/a> and for students being sexually harassed with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091964/nearly-half-of-teens-report-seeing-ai-sexual-content-bay-area-leaders-want-to-shut-it-down\">deepfakes, among others\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On Aug. 2, a law requiring AI companies with over 1 million users to mark their photo, audio and video content with metadata and to make detection tools publicly available went into effect in California — a similar law went into effect in the \u003ca href=\"https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content\">European Union\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report, published last week by media outlet \u003ca href=\"https://indicator.media/p/ai-generators-are-now-required-to-offer-detection-tools-we-tested-them-and-they-need-work?gift_content=a0a8e696-77f2-4a40-83b3-9ffcc7bcbf1a\">Indicator and WITNESS\u003c/a>, a human rights organization focused on videos, evaluated these AI detection tools from 13 companies. About 10.6 billion users visited the companies monthly, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12040806\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The California State Capitol in Sacramento on May 6, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The authors found that HeyGen, Midjourney, Mistral, Synthesia and xAI did not have tools available.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the original report indicated that Suno, an AI music company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did not have a tool, it shared its tool with KQED and said that they released it at the beginning of the month in compliance with the law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Synthesia — an AI video platform based in the United Kingdom — told KQED that they have included the required metadata in their content and that they are “still seeking clarification on a few technical points” when it comes to implementing other parts of the law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our wider view is that transparency rules work best when they track a tool’s or platform’s reach and risk,” Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of corporate affairs and policy, wrote in an email. Voica said that as a business-to-business platform, their risk profile differs greatly from the standard consumer application. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>HeyGen, Midjourney, Mistral and xAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When asked whether or not they had started fining companies under the new law, the State Attorney General’s office said that they can’t comment on potential or ongoing investigations. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While California’s transparency law aims to make AI content more identifiable, the report found that just because a tool exists does not mean it can reliably tell you whether or not a piece of content was AI-generated. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The authors of the report found that most tools could identify their own unedited content, but only Google and OpenAI could identify their own output even after it was edited. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They also found that only Adobe and Microsoft could identify another tool’s unedited content more than half of the time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report noted that these results are somewhat unsurprising given that the law does not require detectors to flag AI content from rival companies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Three of the tools, the report said, limit the number of tests a user can run. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“OpenAI’s verify tool is particularly aggressive, blocking us after as few as 7 tests in one session; Google and Meta capped out at 10 to 15 tests a day per user,” the report states. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1082\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/08/ap_17105670084083_wide-cf2820bf8be090adcc67e88c393b6467c2cf72fe-e1534877546782.jpg\" alt=\"Microsoft's French headquarters, seen outside Paris last year.\" class=\"wp-image-11687988\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Microsoft’s French headquarters outside Paris. (Raphael Satter/AP)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Microsoft said that their AI tool is designed to identify content generated or edited by Microsoft AI systems and that “editing or other downstream modifications can affect the availability or readability of those signals.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI said in a statement that while including these tools is an important foundation, “Metadata is not foolproof. It can be stripped, lost through uploads and downloads, or broken by transformations like file format changes, resizing, or screenshots.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While the California law focuses on photo, video and audio, the EU law also requires detection for AI-generated text. Anthropic, which doesn’t generate photorealistic images or videos, announced that it will be watermarking text in all its new models according to a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark\">post\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In July, State Sen. Josh Becker told KQED that starting in January, large online platforms, including social media companies and search engines, will be required to detect AI content and enable users to inspect it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta started \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/355108217670024/\">tagging ads\u003c/a> that have been “created or significantly edited by generative AI” with labels earlier this summer. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, some Instagram \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/Db-hSCHDkN-/\">marketers\u003c/a> noticed that Meta’s filters appear to be flagging content made with Canva’s background remover with the “AI info” label. Though some creators \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db_SIc8KmQo/\">expressed \u003c/a>concern over what this change could mean for online businesses, \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcBtR6aTzzH/\">others\u003c/a> said they would rather see “made with AI labels ‘go too far’” — than not far enough.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On Aug. 2, a law requiring AI companies with over 1 million users to mark their photo, audio and video content with metadata and to make detection tools publicly available went into effect in California — a similar law went into effect in the \u003ca href=\"https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content\">European Union\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>On Aug. 2, a law requiring AI companies with over 1 million users to mark their photo, audio and video content with metadata and to make detection tools publicly available went into effect in California — a similar law went into effect in the \u003ca href=\"https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content\">European Union\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The report, published last week by media outlet \u003ca href=\"https://indicator.media/p/ai-generators-are-now-required-to-offer-detection-tools-we-tested-them-and-they-need-work?gift_content=a0a8e696-77f2-4a40-83b3-9ffcc7bcbf1a\">Indicator and WITNESS\u003c/a>, a human rights organization focused on videos, evaluated these AI detection tools from 13 companies. About 10.6 billion users visited the companies monthly, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The report, published last week by media outlet \u003ca href=\"https://indicator.media/p/ai-generators-are-now-required-to-offer-detection-tools-we-tested-them-and-they-need-work?gift_content=a0a8e696-77f2-4a40-83b3-9ffcc7bcbf1a\">Indicator and WITNESS\u003c/a>, a human rights organization focused on videos, evaluated these AI detection tools from 13 companies. About 10.6 billion users visited the companies monthly, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While the original report indicated that Suno, an AI music company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did not have a tool, it shared its tool with KQED and said that they released it at the beginning of the month in compliance with the law. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Our wider view is that transparency rules work best when they track a tool’s or platform’s reach and risk,” Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of corporate affairs and policy, wrote in an email. Voica said that as a business-to-business platform, their risk profile differs greatly from the standard consumer application. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When asked whether or not they had started fining companies under the new law, the State Attorney General’s office said that they can’t comment on potential or ongoing investigations. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While California’s transparency law aims to make AI content more identifiable, the report found that just because a tool exists does not mean it can reliably tell you whether or not a piece of content was AI-generated. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The authors of the report found that most tools could identify their own unedited content, but only Google and OpenAI could identify their own output even after it was edited. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They also found that only Adobe and Microsoft could identify another tool’s unedited content more than half of the time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The report noted that these results are somewhat unsurprising given that the law does not require detectors to flag AI content from rival companies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Three of the tools, the report said, limit the number of tests a user can run. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“OpenAI’s verify tool is particularly aggressive, blocking us after as few as 7 tests in one session; Google and Meta capped out at 10 to 15 tests a day per user,” the report states. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/08/ap_17105670084083_wide-cf2820bf8be090adcc67e88c393b6467c2cf72fe-e1534877546782.jpg\" alt=\"Microsoft's French headquarters, seen outside Paris last year.\" class=\"wp-image-11687988\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Microsoft’s French headquarters outside Paris.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/08/ap_17105670084083_wide-cf2820bf8be090adcc67e88c393b6467c2cf72fe-e1534877546782.jpg\" alt=\"Microsoft's French headquarters, seen outside Paris last year.\" class=\"wp-image-11687988\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Microsoft’s French headquarters outside Paris.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Microsoft said that their AI tool is designed to identify content generated or edited by Microsoft AI systems and that “editing or other downstream modifications can affect the availability or readability of those signals.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI said in a statement that while including these tools is an important foundation, “Metadata is not foolproof. It can be stripped, lost through uploads and downloads, or broken by transformations like file format changes, resizing, or screenshots.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While the California law focuses on photo, video and audio, the EU law also requires detection for AI-generated text. Anthropic, which doesn’t generate photorealistic images or videos, announced that it will be watermarking text in all its new models according to a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark\">post\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In July, State Sen. Josh Becker told KQED that starting in January, large online platforms, including social media companies and search engines, will be required to detect AI content and enable users to inspect it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Weeks after the state’s AI Transparency Law took effect, researchers looked into which companies generating images and audio met the mark.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After California enacted a state artificial intelligence transparency \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12093427/california-leads-us-with-new-ai-transparency-law\">law\u003c/a> earlier this month, an independent review of 13 major companies that generate AI images and audio found that only 7 — with an eighth identified by KQED — published the legally required tools to help users decipher whether a piece of content was made or edited with their technology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As AI-generated images flood the web, identifying and labeling this content has become a key concern for educators teaching \u003ca href=\"https://www.edweek.org/technology/schools-play-game-of-media-literacy-catch-up-as-ai-use-rises/2026/04\">media literacy\u003c/a>, for politicians worrying about \u003ca href=\"https://kevinmullin.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Meta-Election-Integrity-Letter-8.17.26.pdf\">disinformation\u003c/a> and for students being sexually harassed with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091964/nearly-half-of-teens-report-seeing-ai-sexual-content-bay-area-leaders-want-to-shut-it-down\">deepfakes, among others\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On Aug. 2, a law requiring AI companies with over 1 million users to mark their photo, audio and video content with metadata and to make detection tools publicly available went into effect in California — a similar law went into effect in the \u003ca href=\"https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-ai-generated-content\">European Union\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report, published last week by media outlet \u003ca href=\"https://indicator.media/p/ai-generators-are-now-required-to-offer-detection-tools-we-tested-them-and-they-need-work?gift_content=a0a8e696-77f2-4a40-83b3-9ffcc7bcbf1a\">Indicator and WITNESS\u003c/a>, a human rights organization focused on videos, evaluated these AI detection tools from 13 companies. About 10.6 billion users visited the companies monthly, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12040806\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/05/250506-SACRAMENTOFILE-04-BL-KQED-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The California State Capitol in Sacramento on May 6, 2025. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The authors found that HeyGen, Midjourney, Mistral, Synthesia and xAI did not have tools available.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the original report indicated that Suno, an AI music company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did not have a tool, it shared its tool with KQED and said that they released it at the beginning of the month in compliance with the law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Synthesia — an AI video platform based in the United Kingdom — told KQED that they have included the required metadata in their content and that they are “still seeking clarification on a few technical points” when it comes to implementing other parts of the law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our wider view is that transparency rules work best when they track a tool’s or platform’s reach and risk,” Alexandru Voica, Synthesia’s head of corporate affairs and policy, wrote in an email. Voica said that as a business-to-business platform, their risk profile differs greatly from the standard consumer application. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>HeyGen, Midjourney, Mistral and xAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When asked whether or not they had started fining companies under the new law, the State Attorney General’s office said that they can’t comment on potential or ongoing investigations. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While California’s transparency law aims to make AI content more identifiable, the report found that just because a tool exists does not mean it can reliably tell you whether or not a piece of content was AI-generated. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The authors of the report found that most tools could identify their own unedited content, but only Google and OpenAI could identify their own output even after it was edited. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They also found that only Adobe and Microsoft could identify another tool’s unedited content more than half of the time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The report noted that these results are somewhat unsurprising given that the law does not require detectors to flag AI content from rival companies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Three of the tools, the report said, limit the number of tests a user can run. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“OpenAI’s verify tool is particularly aggressive, blocking us after as few as 7 tests in one session; Google and Meta capped out at 10 to 15 tests a day per user,” the report states. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1082\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/08/ap_17105670084083_wide-cf2820bf8be090adcc67e88c393b6467c2cf72fe-e1534877546782.jpg\" alt=\"Microsoft's French headquarters, seen outside Paris last year.\" class=\"wp-image-11687988\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Microsoft’s French headquarters outside Paris. (Raphael Satter/AP)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Microsoft said that their AI tool is designed to identify content generated or edited by Microsoft AI systems and that “editing or other downstream modifications can affect the availability or readability of those signals.”\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI said in a statement that while including these tools is an important foundation, “Metadata is not foolproof. It can be stripped, lost through uploads and downloads, or broken by transformations like file format changes, resizing, or screenshots.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While the California law focuses on photo, video and audio, the EU law also requires detection for AI-generated text. Anthropic, which doesn’t generate photorealistic images or videos, announced that it will be watermarking text in all its new models according to a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark\">post\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In July, State Sen. Josh Becker told KQED that starting in January, large online platforms, including social media companies and search engines, will be required to detect AI content and enable users to inspect it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta started \u003ca href=\"https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/355108217670024/\">tagging ads\u003c/a> that have been “created or significantly edited by generative AI” with labels earlier this summer. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last week, some Instagram \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/p/Db-hSCHDkN-/\">marketers\u003c/a> noticed that Meta’s filters appear to be flagging content made with Canva’s background remover with the “AI info” label. Though some creators \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db_SIc8KmQo/\">expressed \u003c/a>concern over what this change could mean for online businesses, \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcBtR6aTzzH/\">others\u003c/a> said they would rather see “made with AI labels ‘go too far’” — than not far enough.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "AI Will Create Enormous Wealth — But Who Benefits? with Erik Brynjolfsson",
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"content": "\u003cp>AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, but how quickly will that \u003cstrong>actually\u003c/strong> transform the economy? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson about what the data can tell us so far, why previous technological revolutions took decades to reshape everyday life, and whether this time will be different. They discuss early signs that AI may already be affecting young workers, what happens to the career ladder when machines take over junior tasks, and where the biggest challenges — and opportunities — lie.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Guest: Erik Brynjolfsson, economist and Director of the \u003ca href=\"https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/\">Stanford Digital Economy Lab\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps://youtu.be/5HI0RBP-jDk\n\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Episode transcript\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:00:00 – 00:00:06:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>00:00:06:14 – 00:00:12:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces,the AI itself tends to work better at large scale. That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. You make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:31:16 – 00:00:39:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: I’m Alexis Madrigal,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin\u003c/strong>: I’m Robin Sloan, and this is Dream Machines. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>It’s a podcast about how AI works, also about how it feels.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:39:14 – 00:00:49:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And of course, we make it right here in San Francisco, where it’s all happening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>And nobody really disagrees at this point that AI is going to transform the economy in some way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:49:16 – 00:00:54:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But one of the questions that is still really open and hotly debated is how fast that is going to happen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:55:01 – 00:01:12:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And also the question of how would we know that it’s being transformed? You certainly read a lot of headlines and see a lot of stock prices go up. But like what’s actually happening out there in offices?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Do we have the economic data that we need to make sense? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah, exactly. It’s sort of the question of like, what would be the canary in the coal mine?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:12:12 – 00:01:25:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And as we were looking around for answers to these questions, turns out there’s a paper called \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin & Alexis: \u003c/strong>Canary in the Coal Mine \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Out of the Stanford Digital Economy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah. That’s right. And it’s the work of a scholar there named Erik Brynjolfsson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:25:08 – 00:01:46:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was at MIT for 30 years before coming to Stanford, very early in his understanding of the potentially transformative effects of AI, and has become one of the folks who is really trying to shine a light into the kind of mysterious recesses of the economy so that the rest of us can know, like what is happening and how fast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:46:23 – 00:01:47:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yeah,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:47:11 – 00:02:08:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because it really matters the time scale. Right? If we have this incredible transformation in three months or in three years or in three decades, it will mean tremendously different society. And we need someone who can tell us, like, where are we on this, on this chart? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>So here is our very own canary in the coal mine Erik\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:08:22 – 00:02:10:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Brynjolfsson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:10:11 – 00:02:25:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>There’s a lot of, as you know, definitions of AI, you know, superintelligence, AGI, you know, just like advanced AI, I’m quite taken by the definition that you used in sort of a formative ad.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:25:22 – 00:02:47:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah. Transformative AI. You laid this out in a research agenda, you know, for kind of the, the community last year. And there’s a bit more to it. But the core of it is, as you said, we’ll know it’s transformative AI because it’ll have this significant economic effect. It’ll accelerate economic growth from sort of the the baseline that we’ve become accustomed to for a long time now, maybe around 2%.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:47:17 – 00:03:09:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’ll it’ll multiply that by by 3 or 5 times almost without talking about AI specifically, it’d be really interesting to have you dramatize like what that means for for an economy. You know, if that did happen, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>transformative AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Transformative AI that and that growth rate like, like how would that change our our day, our week, our year, our jobs?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:09:11 – 00:03:35:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, these way for me to think of it as by analogy. And so we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen going forward. But we can look back at, say, the industrial revolution. And in the Second Machine Age, Andy McAfee and I wrote about how we went through this big transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, and we call it the second Machine age, because now we’re having in the early stages of a second big transition like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:35:20 – 00:03:56:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The first one was about machines doing what our muscles could do, an animal muscles, and that took growth from being sort of growing very, very slow tenths of a percent per year to growing about 2% per year, which may not sound like much, but you compound it. And now we’re like 30 or 50 times richer than our ancestors were a couple hundred years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:56:03 – 00:04:13:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that doing now, now, we were able to use machines to augment our minds, our brains. And I think that’s going to be at least as big as what the Industrial Revolution did. And it will transform society at least as much, not just in growth rate, but also like, you know, just what we do in our daily lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:13:13 – 00:04:33:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Think of the way farmers versus people in factories or modern society, how different that is. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Using that analogy, I feel like I should probably know this, but during the Industrial revolution, did people’s lives change in a decade in terms of the kind of work they did, how they worked in the world, the kind of goods and services they, they had access to?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:33:01 – 00:04:53:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Did it? Was it more of a generational change, like what was the pace of that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> It was actually pretty slow. In fact, there’s something called Engels pause. This period of like several decades, 40, 50 years where there wasn’t much of an improvement in living standards. If you read Charles Dickens, you know, actually life could be pretty miserable, even worse than it was for the people living in agricultural society.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:53:06 – 00:05:11:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>As life expectancy declined, people got shorter. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. All that smoke and soot and and kids working in factories and stuff, you know, it was pretty miserable for the majority of the population. But under the surface, things were changing. And you were beginning to have this productivity gain. But it took a while and eventually it started taking off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:11:11 – 00:05:19:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This time around, it’s also going to take longer than I think some of our friends here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley think, but but certainly a lot faster than the last time around\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:19:19 – 00:05:24:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Let’s go back into the historical example. I think it’s actually really useful for people to think about this, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:24:05 – 00:05:44:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have this general purpose technology of \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>general purpose technology, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>which is a term of art, I love it, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and also I do we were talking about this earlier. I it had not occurred to me that it’s the twin GPT. It seems a little uncanny\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong>. Yeah. So my, my my friend and student, former student Daniel Rock, he wrote a great paper with some folks at OpenAI called GPT RPGs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:44:12 – 00:06:03:18\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, generative pre-trained transformers and general purpose technologies. It used to be when I said GPT to economists, we all knew we were talking about general purpose technologies, but the AI people have pretty much stolen that acronym \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and branded it. Yeah. And for the into it into a global brand\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> So be it. Yeah. But but but general purpose technology is pretty much what drives all economic growth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:03:18 – 00:06:23:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s all these inventions, but there’s just a handful that really raise our living standards. The steam engine was the first really powerful general purpose technology electricity, computers and now AI, which is kind of like the mother of all general purpose technology, I think. So, you know, Demis Hassabis has this. I was over at Google DeepMind a few weeks ago in London.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:23:16 – 00:06:41:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They had this mission statement. They want to let me see if I can get it right. They want to solve intelligence and then use that to solve all the other problems in the world. So, you know, modest little mission statement. But but, you know, there’s a lot of truth to the fact that if you really could solve intelligence, there’s so many other things you could solve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:41:11 – 00:06:56:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yeah, that is, of course, if you trusted that that’s what people who had solved intelligence would actually do with this intelligence. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, that’s a very good question. There’s a bunch of things that you can use it for. And also, to be fair, as I’ve come to think harder about the problem, intelligence is not the be all and end all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:56:01 – 00:07:06:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of very smart people think and wish it was, but when you get into the real world, you know, just look around us. There’s there’s lots of PhDs in the economy and they don’t like, rule the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:06:12 – 00:07:14:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, you go into a I was at the Starbucks across the street just before coming here, and you walk in there and l\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Seven PhDs just right in there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:14:05 – 00:07:14:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah. Imagine\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:14:17 – 00:07:27:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>imagine you pull up with a bus and you say, okay, good news. You know, we’ve got Einstein, we’ve got a bus of 200 Einsteins. They’re going to come help you. I think the manager over there be like, oh, well, like, do they know how to push a broom? I mean, what are they going to do? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>I love that\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:27:23 – 00:07:33:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>because that that kind of argument and just even that that playful vision gets into the real crunchy details of like, what happens in an economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:33:19 – 00:07:54:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not just, you know, sugar and eggs, whip them together and voila, you get growth and productivity. It’s really crunchy. And the thing I like best about your work is that kind of ongoing attempt to to dig in and sort of look for signals. You had the paper called Canary in a coal mine, which feels like exactly what we need most right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:54:09 – 00:08:11:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We need those kind of early signals. You know, they might be warning signals in some cases. They might be like hopeful beacons. We’re going to steer towards \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: the Canaries. metaphor for is a little dark at times. Yeah. We didn’t really mean it that way. We meant it in the more general metaphors, like an early warning signal. Yeah. And it’s very uneven.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:08:11:20 – 00:08:27:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s part of it. You know, going back to the intelligence point, you know, I just want to finish that earlier point about about these general purpose technologies. They tend to take a long time to play out, because even when you speed up one part, there are other parts that are bottlenecks or weak links to take longer to emerge.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:08:27:17 – 00:09:00:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that that gets to your question about the Canaries paper, where we did find that there are certain jobs that are already beginning to be affected and others that are actually going the other way, that are becoming more valuable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>That’s interesting. I mean, so one of the findings, at least as I read it, you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that if there is an impact, it seems to be maybe, as you’d expect on entry level workers, the people who whose contributions can perhaps most seamlessly be replaced by Claude or ChatGPT or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:00:23 – 00:09:14:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I didn’t necessarily expect that in Vance. I should credit my coauthors, Baratunde and Russian, who did most of the heavy lifting on this, and the folks at ADP who provided all the data. And we went into it, you know, with with a blank slate. We just were open to whatever. Actually,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:14:10 – 00:09:16:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>the first cut at it, we looked at the top line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:16:15 – 00:09:32:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s not much happening, actually. You know, the overall labor market, it wasn’t that much happening. And we’re kicking around like, okay, maybe write a paper that all these headlines, these newspaper articles are all kind of overblown. And then, you know, Borat and Rudy looked in a little more deeply and they said, wait a minute. There’s like, there’s one group that’s really being affected.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:32:14 – 00:09:36:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Early career workers, especially in the most exposed occupations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:36:21 – 00:09:50:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So one of the things you can do with you can take all the jobs in the economy. 950, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And each of them, you can break down to a bundle of individual tasks. And once you do, at that fine grained level, you can really make headway.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:50:19 – 00:10:14:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s hard to say whether that AI will replace a radiologist, some people say, but it’s much easier to look at a specific thing. Can it read a medical image? And that’s one of the 26 things that a radiologist does when you break it down to those tasks. And by the way, the paper that did that the best was this GPT are GPTs paper we were just talking about, when you break it down that way, you can rank all the occupations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:14:15 – 00:10:14:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:14:23 – 00:10:24:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>then when you also look at the age, you find that the combination of the most exposed occupations with the youngest workers had about a 16% decline in employment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:24:05 – 00:10:33:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin\u003c/strong>: So there’s a couple threads to pull on there and I want to do them both. One is the young workers, kind of the entry level workers and just the whole idea of like careers and and experience and everything else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:33:03 – 00:10:44:17\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the other one is the data. My perception is that right now we as a country, a society, maybe a planet probably don’t have as much data as we would like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:44:19 – 00:10:45:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Oh, no.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:45:09 – 00:10:46:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>it’s a tragedy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:46:04 – 00:11:01:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I spent a lot of time with our friends in Washington who are, like, working in the statistical agencies, and they’re having their budgets cut. It’s getting, you know, there’s more and more need for better data and less and less resources going into it. I think it’s incredibly foolish. One of the things we’re doing at Stanford is trying to help with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:01:06 – 00:11:17:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We created something just last month called the Stanford AI Economic Indicators. That is like a dashboard that brings together all this data from a lot of private sources, as well as public sources, so people can look at it in one place instead of all these sort of dueling anecdotes, you know, everyone can see the data\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:17:11 – 00:11:31:07\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>The timing around this technological change of these major changes feels to me like it should be a deflationary narrative about how quickly AI is going to be deployed. But I’m kind of hearing from you, like sort of the opposite of that,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:31:07 – 00:11:45:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>that that you feel like there are that, that we are going to deploy this much faster than in these previous instances, even though historically we haven’t been able to do that, that it’s just there’s all this inertia across so many different sectors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:45:21 – 00:11:54:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it also sounds to me a little bit from the data board that like that is what’s happening. It is taking longer, you know, and I know both of us well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:54:10 – 00:11:56:01\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erik: Well, I think both of those things are true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:56:02 – 00:12:11:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I would say, you know, I wrote about the need for these complementary investments. I wrote a paper called about the productivity paradox, about the first wave and then about this wave, and most importantly, a paper called The Productivity J curve with Chad Stephenson and Daniel Rock.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:11:02 – 00:12:13:07\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they all make this point that, you know,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:13:07 – 00:12:31:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>just because you have amazing technology, it doesn’t translate into productivity, business changes, transformation of the economy. That said that said, I think it’s happening a lot faster this time than with the Industrial revolution or with electricity, which also took like 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:31:10 – 00:12:34:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s just a lot of structural reasons why it’s going faster.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:34:08 – 00:12:53:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For one thing, you know, the internet has been built out, so we can just go from 0 to 100 million users of ChatGPT and like, you know, what was it, 60 days and now it’s a billion. Yeah, but like just going super fast and and a lot of the cognitive work, you can, you know, like software, you can do it a lot faster now than you could.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:53:07 – 00:13:10:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s still there’s still a lot of bottlenecks which you know, so I find myself sort of between these worlds when I talk to most economists and, you know, in New York or Washington or in businesses, you know, they see all the the structural barriers. When I talk to the guys at the Frontier Labs, they’re like, oh, we’re going to have RSI, recursive self-improvement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:10:21 – 00:13:26:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s all going to happen super fast. And I point out a bottleneck and they’re like, oh, AI will solve that. Yeah, yeah. And I’m kind of I’m kind of between them I put myself, you know, they’re like probably two orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of rate of speed. And I’m at the geometric mean like one order of magnitude.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:26:11 – 00:13:45:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I do think it’s faster than most people in the rest of the world are ready for. And that’s why we create that statement about we must act now. I do also, at the same time think that that most of the technologists, they haven’t really spent as much time in big companies as I have and realized like how hard it is to get them to change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:45:04 – 00:14:11:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Can I ask this though, knowing that you have a company that is essentially trying to accelerate the change? Is there an argument to be made that letting this take some time is actually a good thing for society? Because this kind of disjunction in a labor market, or in just the value of intelligence or any of the ways that we might describe this transformation, is actually kind of a good thing to let it settle in more slowly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:11:16 – 00:14:36:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I agree with your core point, and but what I would say is that we need to speed up our understanding. We need to speed up our adaptation to it. We need to speed up our reskilling and, you know, be prepared or preparation. At the same time, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that those core capabilities, you know, there was just another statement that come out, these statements are all coming out about what they call it pacing, pacing, pacing the frontier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:36:13 – 00:14:39:17\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Right. Exactly. Which is, you know, that’s on the capability side. So,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:39:17 – 00:14:54:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>so the way I think about it is that there are these two lines. One of them is skyrocketing, which is the capabilities. The other one is our ability to adapt to it, which is barely moving. And that gap is where most of the big problems and challenges and opportunities lie over the next 5 or 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:54:11 – 00:15:05:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s where all the action is. Until all my economist friends, you should be focusing on that gap. My part of it is to close the gap from the bottom and like, speed up our understanding. Other people can think about the technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:05:16 – 00:15:12:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> You know, we’re talking about sort of the acceleration of an economy, but there’s also this simultaneous thing that that maybe is different.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:12:01 – 00:15:31:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like maybe there’s a historical analogy for this, maybe there’s not. I think of it almost as like the weirding of the economy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> Yes\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>And this connects to a couple of things that we’ve talked about. You know, the idea that suddenly there’s no such thing as an entry level worker. Instead, you can only be, you know, a senior software engineer with an army of AI bots, and you’re really good at them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:31:00 – 00:15:52:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it raises the question of like, where do senior engineers or senior people of any kind come from anymore? Also, you know, again, to to make that industrial Revolution analogy, it’s interesting to consider that when you replace your, you know, horses going around a post with a steam engine, even though that’s new and kind of radical, you fundamentally do understand how that works.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:52:23 – 00:16:12:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas when you replace your software engineering team with bots, you probably don’t understand how it works anymore. Do these differences I mean, do these matter? Should we really be looking closely at these, this this weirdness?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> I mean, those are those two parts of your question are so different in my mind. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, they’re both weird.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:12:20 – 00:16:28:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We can talk. Yeah, I’ll put them on that. So let me let me do one at a time because I think they’re both interesting to talk about. So on the on the junior versus senior this is this is a real problem. Like we describe earlier the data that there’s less demand for these young workers. But where do the middle managers come from.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:28:08 – 00:16:44:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Where are the senior workers come from. And you need them. And you need people with that kind of judgment. And we used to have this grand bargain where people come in sometimes do some kind of boring Scott work. But in the process, sort of by osmosis, they would learn how the business ran, learn how to be a lawyer or a doctor or investment bank or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:44:11 – 00:17:01:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now they don’t have that opportunity. And I think part of the answer has to be we have to like, consciously and explicitly train them. I was talking to some folks at Infosys and, you know, they their junior people are very much in the bullseye of not being needed as much, but they tell me that they’re still hiring a bunch of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:01:23 – 00:17:23:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now instead of having them do some of that boring work that AI could now do, they are explicitly training them with an AI system. Actually, AI can be a really good tutor and it can help them learn faster. So that’s that’s part of the. That’s one approach to the answer. I think it’s going to be kind of a new social contract that we have to think about, because we don’t just abandon this whole generation of people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:23:12 – 00:17:44:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, I’ll tell you a little bit of a, of a of a sad story. Well, hopefully it has a good ending. A student came to me in my office a couple of months ago graduating from Stanford. Pretty good school. And she said, I don’t have a job. My friends don’t have jobs. Is my generation doomed? And I was like, whoa, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:44:04 – 00:17:59:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, you’re a Stanford student. You should be optimistic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis:\u003c/strong> I know I’m a mindful optimist what do you mean?.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> You should be. You’re graduating. And what I tried to say was, look, you know, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. There’s a bunch of jobs disappearing, like you just said, but the other on the other side, you know, you can use these tools to do things you never could have before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:59:14 – 00:18:16:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’ve got superpowers where you can do vibe coding and create all sorts of software. That would have been impossible five years ago or even one year ago, and you needed to lean into those new possibilities. There’s more startups being started than ever before, because a lot of people are seeing this opportunity to create things they couldn’t have done before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:16:08 – 00:18:33:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, you know, that’s what I tried to teach my class. I have a master class that also does this, but I really want people to, you know, you know, I understand the downside, but I think there’s almost too much emphasis on that. And there should be more of a leaning in to AI allowing you to do new things you never could have done before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:33:22 – 00:18:55:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re harder to see because a lot of them didn’t exist before, but that’s where the opportunity is. And that’s the part I want to speed up, is that is the transition to those new opportunities. I don’t want to just ossify everything and try to freeze everything in place. I don’t think that’s the strategy. We need to be nimble and have that more flexible opportunity to create new jobs, new opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:55:15 – 00:19:16:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>another recent historical analogy to this is, you know, self-driving cars, where we essentially see them being, generally speaking, safer drivers than human drivers. But when they do make a mistake, it tends to be sort of a novel mistake or the kind of the way the system breaks down is we could not have anticipated, you know, power outage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:16:18 – 00:19:39:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah, it’s like an alien intelligence. Yeah. It is it exactly. Respect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> They respect the cones too much. You know yourself driving cars. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. They worship the code, but they don’t worship some other things. And, you know, as an economist, actually, you know, this is can be a little dangerous and off putting. It’s also an opportunity like for in economics, gains from trade happen when there’s two entities that are very different from each other.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:39:05 – 00:19:55:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If they’re identical to each other, there’s not much room for for gains from trade. So actually mostly encourage the folks at the Frontier Labs to lean into making the A’s really good at things that humans are not good at, and let us be good at the things we’re good at. I think too often they do it the other way around.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:55:14 – 00:20:14:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re trying to, like, smooth the edges and and make them good at things that are that’s hard for machines and easy for us, like, you know, buttoning a shirt or, or and ultimately, the fact that it’s an alien intelligence means that we can lean on it to do some amazing things. But there will still be a role for humans, which I think is important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:14:11 – 00:20:14:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:14:20 – 00:20:31:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it’s good to not replace all the things that humans are doing. I wrote this paper, The Turing Trap, where I basically argued it’s a mistake. It’s to do what Alan Turing said, which is make AI that’s a perfect imitation of humans. We should make it different so we each have something to contribute.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:31:10 – 00:20:36:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s funny, we can flip this around, you know, almost perfectly here on the podcast and in are there conversations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:37:00 – 00:20:56:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis and I are cautious and often critical of AI, particularly the industry, but we’re also quite enchanted by the the spaces inside these models. You know, these these mysterious high dimensional spaces and their capacity and the things they seem to be able to organize and then kind of cross connect in ways that humans can’t, certainly not at that scale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:56:09 – 00:21:13:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it makes me think of, you know, the old ancient, almost economics debate between central planning and sort of, you know, action at the edges. And you, of course, know this well. But for folks listening to the podcast, there’s a few different ways you can organize an economy. You could have, you know, yeah, you could have planning. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:13:06 – 00:21:30:01\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Robin and Alexis deciding exactly how much to make of everything, you know, all fashionable t shirts and and cool. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>What a great world that would be. Yeah. And you know, this, this has the benefit of coherency. And you can actually have a plan and execute it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>It can be aligned with the values of your society, at least supposedly in theory, all these things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:30:01 – 00:21:49:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>But then way over on the other side, you have the idea of you have the sense that the real information about how the world works and what people want and what the problems are, of course, where they’re at the edges, you know, in people’s lives all distributed in their kitchens, in their businesses. Sort of the Haken view of like the great sensor of the market.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:49:18 – 00:22:12:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now it does seem so that was that was the story, you know, at least up until 2020, 2023. It does seem like maybe we have these machines now with a capacity that could change that balance a little bit. So first of all, I ask you, like do you see some of that potential. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Sure. No. This is a big like let me just say you’ve heard I’m pretty optimistic, excited about the productivity potential and creating a enormous amount of wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:12:02 – 00:22:31:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the things that I’m most worried about is it could be very badly distributed, where everything gets really, really centralized. And the core reason for that is what you just brought up. You know, Friedrich Hayek wrote this amazing paper called The Use of Knowledge in Society, which, you know, articulate what you just said, that most useful knowledge is, like widely dispersed in the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:31:07 – 00:22:47:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, you know, does this do people in this neighborhood like peppermint ice cream or is this truck half empty? And maybe we could put some more stuff on it or whatever. There’s all this, like detailed information. And he argued that there’s no way a central planner, even guy’s as smart as you two, could make all the decisions in the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:47:04 – 00:23:06:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s just too much of this detailed information. And that was totally true for the 20th century and up until recently. But Zoe Hitzig and I have written a paper called AI’s Use of Knowledge in Society, where we argue that, wait a minute, you know, you could actually go take these trillions of parameters and make all sorts of decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:07:00 – 00:23:32:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You could use the Internet of Things and other techniques to bring data and bring it all to, say, Bentonville, Arkansas, to pick up arbitrary city. And you’d be able to know all sorts of information about what’s happening and make decisions. And it’s actually beginning to happen. You know, when you look at the data and big centralized retailers are out competing, those mom and pop mom, mom and pop shops, they know more about what people want in each neighborhood and which trucks are empty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:32:13 – 00:23:41:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They have all that detailed information that hikes. It would be impossible, which is great for efficiency, but it may not be the best thing for freedom and democracy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:41:21 – 00:23:43:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>we need to think hard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:43:02 – 00:24:07:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, while we have some optionality, how can we design a world where we maintain our freedom, maintain our decentralization of decision making, and that if we go too far down the path of disempowering people, it may be very hard to reverse course later. And for what it’s worth, everyone’s noticed. It’s kind of beginning to happen, right? And we better take it seriously because we go much further down that path.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:07:04 – 00:24:08:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’ll be too late. Yeah,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:08:03 – 00:24:34:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I did want to ask you. I mean, this is from your book, Second Machine Age, of course, you coauthored \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>with Andy. Andy McAfee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis: And you have to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. We think the data support this. We’ve seen not just vast increases in wealth, but also, on the whole, more freedom, more social justice, less violence, and less less harsh conditions for the least fortunate and greater opportunities for more and more people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:34:20 – 00:24:52:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think, like there have been the majority of my life, I think I would have more or less agreed with this. I think in the last ten years, my own kind of priors have been challenged on this. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Not just you. Yeah, no, we wrote that in 2014. I’m glad that I just checked. And it’s like it’s got more and more sales and citations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:52:02 – 00:25:10:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I’m glad that it’s it’s got legs that way. And that was sort of maybe like the peak of this,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis: Obama era story optimism. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. But but speaking of Obama, you know, he modified that quote and he said that it bends. You know, I’m going to misquote him, but but the gist of what he was saying was, got a push on the ark.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:10:20 – 00:25:27:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: You got to push on it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: It doesn’t happen automatically. We won’t just sit back and watch it happen. And that’s very much, you know, you mentioned I call myself a mindful optimist. You know, that the arc of history bends if and only if we push it. And I think lately it’s been going the wrong way. It’s also long, like Martin Luther King said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:27:06 – 00:25:44:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you know, it’s not going to be monotonic where it always improves every month or every year. So I think it’s fair to say we’ve had some backsliding and some bad things have happened. I’m still optimistic, maybe a little less optimistic than I was in 2014, but I’m hopeful that that work harder. But but this is exactly why I do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:44:06 – 00:26:13:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I do is I’m not here to predict the future. I’m here to say, here are some possible futures, and here are some levers that matter. And we need to push on them, because most of us do want not just more abundance, but also more freedom and shared prosperity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Can I can I keep pushing on this one a little bit just because I think there’s, you know, even some people in this building here at KQED who their their biggest concern about AI, they have they have many environmental this and other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:13:02 – 00:26:13:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:13:08 – 00:26:42:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>it’s really about particularly being here in San Francisco. You really see it the concentration of wealth. And then, you know, our city politics has been taken over by tech wealth. It’s like it’s also the concentration of power that that goes along \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Those tend to go together, don’t they.? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yes. Yeah. And I guess the, the maybe more difficult version of this question is do you think that AI, as a result of the what the frontier models need, the amount of capital that you need to deploy to do these things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:42:10 – 00:27:04:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces, and there’s two sets that are particularly obvious to me. One is, you know, the scaling laws and the fact that the AI itself tends to work better at large scale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:04:22 – 00:27:28:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to build bigger and bigger data centers. But yeah, borrowing and and, you know, there’s just this amazing thing that Dario Modi and others noted that you make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:28:14 – 00:27:44:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Actually, I’ve been somewhat surprised how many frontier labs there still are. It hasn’t all just concentrating to one singleton. But you know, who knows where that’s going to go. It certainly you have to be pretty big to be a player in that, but the one that I’m more concerned about is the other, like 90% of the economy,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:44:22 – 00:27:56:18\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>that, you know, whether you’re in retail or manufacturing or health or whatever, you know, having decentralized information may not be as competitive with having it become more centralized.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:56:18 – 00:28:15:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that could also lead. And it has been if you look at the data, there has been more concentration. So we need to think harder about how do we decentralize it. I mean, part of one of the answers that I would put forward is this idea of pushing AI to complement humans rather than substitute for them. But we need to look at all levers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:15:22 – 00:28:41:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> Thinking about that discussion about centralization, about kind of where the power, where the money resides is that change in the capital versus labor share of the economy a warning sign? I mean, if that continues, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>yes, yes, this one I’m not going to hedge on. So so capital is inherently much more concentrated than labor. You know, the cool thing about labor, even though it’s pretty uneven, like we all have basically one brain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:41:09 – 00:28:57:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And like some of them, you know, maybe a little smarter than others, but but, you know, it’s distributed through the economy. You know, no matter how smart you are, you can’t run a whole fortune 500 corporation. So you delegate stuff, and the whole economy has all these delegated decisions to all these different brains. But with capital, you can concentrate it much more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:57:15 – 00:29:19:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And empirically, you know, the income from capital is much more concentrated in a small fraction of the people. So, you know, we were saying earlier that economic power begets political power. So that’s something I worry about. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I mean, what would that world even look like? You know, I’ve looked at some other countries that have labor share that’s like much lower.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:19:10 – 00:29:39:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, labor share of income is much lower. And it’s not a good set of countries. They’re like resource cursed countries that Saudi Arabia, it’s like mineral mining countries. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly, And you get these like gated communities and these people who have a lot of wealth. I was talking to somebody from a Latin American country. She’s very wealthy. And she said, you know, all the wealthy people in my country are in prisons.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:39:00 – 00:29:46:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And like, what do you mean they’re in prison? She said, well, the prison of our own construction, like we can’t go outside of our houses when we ever. I get into a car, I have like guards on either side of me\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:47:00 – 00:30:08:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s like one of those dystopian science fiction movies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah. What? What interventions could we at least start to prepare for now, economically? And obviously there’s a whole suite of politics and, you know, who we elect and how we organize ourselves as a city. But just thinking about economic policy, what what are what would be some smart things to start thinking about right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:08:12 – 00:30:31:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>So I think we have some levers to push back against this, and that’s why I care about it. So I did write this paper, The Turing Trap, about how it’s a trap to have AI that just replaces and imitates humans. So a couple of things we can push back on. First off, there’s a lot of economic incentives right now that I think mistakenly steer us towards favoring capital over labor, like in the United States and most countries for that matter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:31:13 – 00:30:55:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Tax policy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Tax policy is much, you know, capitalist taxed much cheaper than labor. So you have two brilliant entrepreneurs, you know, one of which says, I’m going to make a $100 billion company with thousands of employees. And the other ones, I’m going to make $100 billion company with like no employees, but lots of robots. Yeah. The US government says, oh, the first person you know, Alice, you’re going to have to like, pay a lot more taxes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:55:00 – 00:31:11:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Your whole organization is going to pay a lot more taxes. And the second one is going to pay less. And, you know, the first rule of taxation is like, whatever you tax more, you get less of. So we’re basically putting our thumb on the scale, saying we’re going to get more capital intensive and less labor intensive. Like for most of history, maybe that didn’t matter that much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:11:06 – 00:31:34:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It wasn’t that much leverage to to do things different ways. Now we really have the potential and there’s a lot of other tax things you can do. My friend Darren Asamoah, who has written a lot about this Pascual Restrepo. So those are some things that we can do. Like, you know, they’re a really hard core. I’m an economist, but I’ve come to think that actually culture and the way people think about it is more important than the like hard dollars.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:34:02 – 00:31:59:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I run into a lot of people who have this mindset that like the goal of AI is to replace humans, and that’s just wrong, I think. And when they all the benchmarks that you see being published, almost all of them are geared towards like, how well can this machine by itself do the task with Andy Hopped and we’ve developed a new set of benchmarks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:59:13 – 00:32:18:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We call them Centaur benchmarks, sort of like part human, part machine. And the the idea is to say, hey guys, think about not how well a machine by itself can do it, but how can a human and machine together do it? And in many cases, in most cases, the human machine can do better than the machine by itself or the human by itself, but it requires a different architecture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:18:20 – 00:32:41:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, Doug Engelbart years ago, you know, talked about how we should make machines that amplify humans. Steve Jobs called it bicycles for the mind, and that that philosophy has kind of been lost out a little bit. I want to revive it more. And if we design machines more to to augment humans and to complement what we’re doing, we’re likely to keep people in the loop.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:41:15 – 00:32:48:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And ultimately, I think that’s going to not just be fairer. I think it’s going to create a lot more value than trying to get the machine to do everything by itself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:48:20 – 00:33:23:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Eric, talking about your your early apprehension of the curve we were in and kind of the trajectory of AI, let’s talk situational awareness for people on the ground level. So outside of OpenAI headquarters here in San Francisco, imagine you’re somebody who works at one of the Kaiser hospitals. Great day to day job. How are you going to know that it really is taking off, that you’re inside this exponential, and that this prediction of of a transformational AI era happening pretty fast rather than predictably slow is true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:33:23:20 – 00:33:44:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like day to day, week to week. What what should I be watching for? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, you can come to the AI economic indicators and we’ll have we’ll have a monthly update of all those metrics. You know, I’m not I’m not joking about that because I just see so many anecdotes and stories. And honestly, it’s a little frustrating because, you know, every month there’s hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed, hundreds of thousands created.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:33:44:12 – 00:34:01:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you’re a reporter with an angle, you can you can definitely find anecdotes that support your story. And you’ll have some men in the street who tells you what you know, what the people. And I’ve been reading those and I just don’t know how to aggregate them. So, you know, I’m a data person. I’m a statistician. 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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces,the AI itself tends to work better at large scale. That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. You make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And also the question of how would we know that it’s being transformed? You certainly read a lot of headlines and see a lot of stock prices go up. But like what’s actually happening out there in offices?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He was at MIT for 30 years before coming to Stanford, very early in his understanding of the potentially transformative effects of AI, and has become one of the folks who is really trying to shine a light into the kind of mysterious recesses of the economy so that the rest of us can know, like what is happening and how fast.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because it really matters the time scale. Right? If we have this incredible transformation in three months or in three years or in three decades, it will mean tremendously different society. And we need someone who can tell us, like, where are we on this, on this chart? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>There’s a lot of, as you know, definitions of AI, you know, superintelligence, AGI, you know, just like advanced AI, I’m quite taken by the definition that you used in sort of a formative ad.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah. Transformative AI. You laid this out in a research agenda, you know, for kind of the, the community last year. And there’s a bit more to it. But the core of it is, as you said, we’ll know it’s transformative AI because it’ll have this significant economic effect. It’ll accelerate economic growth from sort of the the baseline that we’ve become accustomed to for a long time now, maybe around 2%.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’ll it’ll multiply that by by 3 or 5 times almost without talking about AI specifically, it’d be really interesting to have you dramatize like what that means for for an economy. You know, if that did happen, \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Transformative AI that and that growth rate like, like how would that change our our day, our week, our year, our jobs?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, these way for me to think of it as by analogy. And so we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen going forward. But we can look back at, say, the industrial revolution. And in the Second Machine Age, Andy McAfee and I wrote about how we went through this big transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, and we call it the second Machine age, because now we’re having in the early stages of a second big transition like that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The first one was about machines doing what our muscles could do, an animal muscles, and that took growth from being sort of growing very, very slow tenths of a percent per year to growing about 2% per year, which may not sound like much, but you compound it. And now we’re like 30 or 50 times richer than our ancestors were a couple hundred years ago.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think that doing now, now, we were able to use machines to augment our minds, our brains. And I think that’s going to be at least as big as what the Industrial Revolution did. And it will transform society at least as much, not just in growth rate, but also like, you know, just what we do in our daily lives.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Think of the way farmers versus people in factories or modern society, how different that is. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Using that analogy, I feel like I should probably know this, but during the Industrial revolution, did people’s lives change in a decade in terms of the kind of work they did, how they worked in the world, the kind of goods and services they, they had access to?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Did it? Was it more of a generational change, like what was the pace of that?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> It was actually pretty slow. In fact, there’s something called Engels pause. This period of like several decades, 40, 50 years where there wasn’t much of an improvement in living standards. If you read Charles Dickens, you know, actually life could be pretty miserable, even worse than it was for the people living in agricultural society.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>As life expectancy declined, people got shorter. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. All that smoke and soot and and kids working in factories and stuff, you know, it was pretty miserable for the majority of the population. But under the surface, things were changing. And you were beginning to have this productivity gain. But it took a while and eventually it started taking off.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This time around, it’s also going to take longer than I think some of our friends here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley think, but but certainly a lot faster than the last time around\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Let’s go back into the historical example. I think it’s actually really useful for people to think about this, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You have this general purpose technology of \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>which is a term of art, I love it, \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and also I do we were talking about this earlier. I it had not occurred to me that it’s the twin GPT. It seems a little uncanny\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong>. Yeah. So my, my my friend and student, former student Daniel Rock, he wrote a great paper with some folks at OpenAI called GPT RPGs.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong>. Yeah. So my, my my friend and student, former student Daniel Rock, he wrote a great paper with some folks at OpenAI called GPT RPGs.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah, generative pre-trained transformers and general purpose technologies. It used to be when I said GPT to economists, we all knew we were talking about general purpose technologies, but the AI people have pretty much stolen that acronym \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and branded it. Yeah. And for the into it into a global brand\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> So be it. Yeah. But but but general purpose technology is pretty much what drives all economic growth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s all these inventions, but there’s just a handful that really raise our living standards. The steam engine was the first really powerful general purpose technology electricity, computers and now AI, which is kind of like the mother of all general purpose technology, I think. So, you know, Demis Hassabis has this. I was over at Google DeepMind a few weeks ago in London.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They had this mission statement. They want to let me see if I can get it right. They want to solve intelligence and then use that to solve all the other problems in the world. So, you know, modest little mission statement. But but, you know, there’s a lot of truth to the fact that if you really could solve intelligence, there’s so many other things you could solve.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yeah, that is, of course, if you trusted that that’s what people who had solved intelligence would actually do with this intelligence. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, that’s a very good question. There’s a bunch of things that you can use it for. And also, to be fair, as I’ve come to think harder about the problem, intelligence is not the be all and end all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lot of very smart people think and wish it was, but when you get into the real world, you know, just look around us. There’s there’s lots of PhDs in the economy and they don’t like, rule the economy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Seven PhDs just right in there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah. Imagine\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>imagine you pull up with a bus and you say, okay, good news. You know, we’ve got Einstein, we’ve got a bus of 200 Einsteins. They’re going to come help you. I think the manager over there be like, oh, well, like, do they know how to push a broom? I mean, what are they going to do? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>because that that kind of argument and just even that that playful vision gets into the real crunchy details of like, what happens in an economy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s not just, you know, sugar and eggs, whip them together and voila, you get growth and productivity. It’s really crunchy. And the thing I like best about your work is that kind of ongoing attempt to to dig in and sort of look for signals. You had the paper called Canary in a coal mine, which feels like exactly what we need most right now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We need those kind of early signals. You know, they might be warning signals in some cases. They might be like hopeful beacons. We’re going to steer towards \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: the Canaries. metaphor for is a little dark at times. Yeah. We didn’t really mean it that way. We meant it in the more general metaphors, like an early warning signal. Yeah. And it’s very uneven.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that’s part of it. You know, going back to the intelligence point, you know, I just want to finish that earlier point about about these general purpose technologies. They tend to take a long time to play out, because even when you speed up one part, there are other parts that are bottlenecks or weak links to take longer to emerge.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But that that gets to your question about the Canaries paper, where we did find that there are certain jobs that are already beginning to be affected and others that are actually going the other way, that are becoming more valuable. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>That’s interesting. I mean, so one of the findings, at least as I read it, you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that if there is an impact, it seems to be maybe, as you’d expect on entry level workers, the people who whose contributions can perhaps most seamlessly be replaced by Claude or ChatGPT or whatever.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I didn’t necessarily expect that in Vance. I should credit my coauthors, Baratunde and Russian, who did most of the heavy lifting on this, and the folks at ADP who provided all the data. And we went into it, you know, with with a blank slate. We just were open to whatever. Actually,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>the first cut at it, we looked at the top line.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s not much happening, actually. You know, the overall labor market, it wasn’t that much happening. And we’re kicking around like, okay, maybe write a paper that all these headlines, these newspaper articles are all kind of overblown. And then, you know, Borat and Rudy looked in a little more deeply and they said, wait a minute. There’s like, there’s one group that’s really being affected.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Early career workers, especially in the most exposed occupations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So one of the things you can do with you can take all the jobs in the economy. 950, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And each of them, you can break down to a bundle of individual tasks. And once you do, at that fine grained level, you can really make headway.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s hard to say whether that AI will replace a radiologist, some people say, but it’s much easier to look at a specific thing. Can it read a medical image? And that’s one of the 26 things that a radiologist does when you break it down to those tasks. And by the way, the paper that did that the best was this GPT are GPTs paper we were just talking about, when you break it down that way, you can rank all the occupations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>then when you also look at the age, you find that the combination of the most exposed occupations with the youngest workers had about a 16% decline in employment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin\u003c/strong>: So there’s a couple threads to pull on there and I want to do them both. One is the young workers, kind of the entry level workers and just the whole idea of like careers and and experience and everything else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the other one is the data. My perception is that right now we as a country, a society, maybe a planet probably don’t have as much data as we would like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Oh, no.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I spent a lot of time with our friends in Washington who are, like, working in the statistical agencies, and they’re having their budgets cut. It’s getting, you know, there’s more and more need for better data and less and less resources going into it. I think it’s incredibly foolish. One of the things we’re doing at Stanford is trying to help with that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We created something just last month called the Stanford AI Economic Indicators. That is like a dashboard that brings together all this data from a lot of private sources, as well as public sources, so people can look at it in one place instead of all these sort of dueling anecdotes, you know, everyone can see the data\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>The timing around this technological change of these major changes feels to me like it should be a deflationary narrative about how quickly AI is going to be deployed. But I’m kind of hearing from you, like sort of the opposite of that,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>that that you feel like there are that, that we are going to deploy this much faster than in these previous instances, even though historically we haven’t been able to do that, that it’s just there’s all this inertia across so many different sectors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it also sounds to me a little bit from the data board that like that is what’s happening. It is taking longer, you know, and I know both of us well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Erik: Well, I think both of those things are true.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What I would say, you know, I wrote about the need for these complementary investments. I wrote a paper called about the productivity paradox, about the first wave and then about this wave, and most importantly, a paper called The Productivity J curve with Chad Stephenson and Daniel Rock.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>just because you have amazing technology, it doesn’t translate into productivity, business changes, transformation of the economy. That said that said, I think it’s happening a lot faster this time than with the Industrial revolution or with electricity, which also took like 30 years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s just a lot of structural reasons why it’s going faster.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For one thing, you know, the internet has been built out, so we can just go from 0 to 100 million users of ChatGPT and like, you know, what was it, 60 days and now it’s a billion. Yeah, but like just going super fast and and a lot of the cognitive work, you can, you know, like software, you can do it a lot faster now than you could.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s still there’s still a lot of bottlenecks which you know, so I find myself sort of between these worlds when I talk to most economists and, you know, in New York or Washington or in businesses, you know, they see all the the structural barriers. When I talk to the guys at the Frontier Labs, they’re like, oh, we’re going to have RSI, recursive self-improvement.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s all going to happen super fast. And I point out a bottleneck and they’re like, oh, AI will solve that. Yeah, yeah. And I’m kind of I’m kind of between them I put myself, you know, they’re like probably two orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of rate of speed. And I’m at the geometric mean like one order of magnitude.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so I do think it’s faster than most people in the rest of the world are ready for. And that’s why we create that statement about we must act now. I do also, at the same time think that that most of the technologists, they haven’t really spent as much time in big companies as I have and realized like how hard it is to get them to change.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Can I ask this though, knowing that you have a company that is essentially trying to accelerate the change? Is there an argument to be made that letting this take some time is actually a good thing for society? Because this kind of disjunction in a labor market, or in just the value of intelligence or any of the ways that we might describe this transformation, is actually kind of a good thing to let it settle in more slowly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I agree with your core point, and but what I would say is that we need to speed up our understanding. We need to speed up our adaptation to it. We need to speed up our reskilling and, you know, be prepared or preparation. At the same time, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that those core capabilities, you know, there was just another statement that come out, these statements are all coming out about what they call it pacing, pacing, pacing the frontier.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Right. Exactly. Which is, you know, that’s on the capability side. So,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>so the way I think about it is that there are these two lines. One of them is skyrocketing, which is the capabilities. The other one is our ability to adapt to it, which is barely moving. And that gap is where most of the big problems and challenges and opportunities lie over the next 5 or 10 years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s where all the action is. Until all my economist friends, you should be focusing on that gap. My part of it is to close the gap from the bottom and like, speed up our understanding. Other people can think about the technology.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> You know, we’re talking about sort of the acceleration of an economy, but there’s also this simultaneous thing that that maybe is different.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like maybe there’s a historical analogy for this, maybe there’s not. I think of it almost as like the weirding of the economy. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> Yes\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>And this connects to a couple of things that we’ve talked about. You know, the idea that suddenly there’s no such thing as an entry level worker. Instead, you can only be, you know, a senior software engineer with an army of AI bots, and you’re really good at them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it raises the question of like, where do senior engineers or senior people of any kind come from anymore? Also, you know, again, to to make that industrial Revolution analogy, it’s interesting to consider that when you replace your, you know, horses going around a post with a steam engine, even though that’s new and kind of radical, you fundamentally do understand how that works.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Whereas when you replace your software engineering team with bots, you probably don’t understand how it works anymore. Do these differences I mean, do these matter? Should we really be looking closely at these, this this weirdness?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Whereas when you replace your software engineering team with bots, you probably don’t understand how it works anymore. Do these differences I mean, do these matter? Should we really be looking closely at these, this this weirdness?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> I mean, those are those two parts of your question are so different in my mind. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, they’re both weird.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> I mean, those are those two parts of your question are so different in my mind. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, they’re both weird.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We can talk. Yeah, I’ll put them on that. So let me let me do one at a time because I think they’re both interesting to talk about. So on the on the junior versus senior this is this is a real problem. Like we describe earlier the data that there’s less demand for these young workers. But where do the middle managers come from.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We can talk. Yeah, I’ll put them on that. So let me let me do one at a time because I think they’re both interesting to talk about. So on the on the junior versus senior this is this is a real problem. Like we describe earlier the data that there’s less demand for these young workers. But where do the middle managers come from.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Where are the senior workers come from. And you need them. And you need people with that kind of judgment. And we used to have this grand bargain where people come in sometimes do some kind of boring Scott work. But in the process, sort of by osmosis, they would learn how the business ran, learn how to be a lawyer or a doctor or investment bank or whatever.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now they don’t have that opportunity. And I think part of the answer has to be we have to like, consciously and explicitly train them. I was talking to some folks at Infosys and, you know, they their junior people are very much in the bullseye of not being needed as much, but they tell me that they’re still hiring a bunch of them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now instead of having them do some of that boring work that AI could now do, they are explicitly training them with an AI system. Actually, AI can be a really good tutor and it can help them learn faster. So that’s that’s part of the. That’s one approach to the answer. I think it’s going to be kind of a new social contract that we have to think about, because we don’t just abandon this whole generation of people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, I’ll tell you a little bit of a, of a of a sad story. Well, hopefully it has a good ending. A student came to me in my office a couple of months ago graduating from Stanford. Pretty good school. And she said, I don’t have a job. My friends don’t have jobs. Is my generation doomed? And I was like, whoa, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, you’re a Stanford student. You should be optimistic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis:\u003c/strong> I know I’m a mindful optimist what do you mean?.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> You should be. You’re graduating. And what I tried to say was, look, you know, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. There’s a bunch of jobs disappearing, like you just said, but the other on the other side, you know, you can use these tools to do things you never could have before.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’ve got superpowers where you can do vibe coding and create all sorts of software. That would have been impossible five years ago or even one year ago, and you needed to lean into those new possibilities. There’s more startups being started than ever before, because a lot of people are seeing this opportunity to create things they couldn’t have done before.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, you know, that’s what I tried to teach my class. I have a master class that also does this, but I really want people to, you know, you know, I understand the downside, but I think there’s almost too much emphasis on that. And there should be more of a leaning in to AI allowing you to do new things you never could have done before.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’re harder to see because a lot of them didn’t exist before, but that’s where the opportunity is. And that’s the part I want to speed up, is that is the transition to those new opportunities. I don’t want to just ossify everything and try to freeze everything in place. I don’t think that’s the strategy. We need to be nimble and have that more flexible opportunity to create new jobs, new opportunities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>another recent historical analogy to this is, you know, self-driving cars, where we essentially see them being, generally speaking, safer drivers than human drivers. But when they do make a mistake, it tends to be sort of a novel mistake or the kind of the way the system breaks down is we could not have anticipated, you know, power outage.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah, it’s like an alien intelligence. Yeah. It is it exactly. Respect.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> They respect the cones too much. You know yourself driving cars. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. They worship the code, but they don’t worship some other things. And, you know, as an economist, actually, you know, this is can be a little dangerous and off putting. It’s also an opportunity like for in economics, gains from trade happen when there’s two entities that are very different from each other.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If they’re identical to each other, there’s not much room for for gains from trade. So actually mostly encourage the folks at the Frontier Labs to lean into making the A’s really good at things that humans are not good at, and let us be good at the things we’re good at. I think too often they do it the other way around.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’re trying to, like, smooth the edges and and make them good at things that are that’s hard for machines and easy for us, like, you know, buttoning a shirt or, or and ultimately, the fact that it’s an alien intelligence means that we can lean on it to do some amazing things. But there will still be a role for humans, which I think is important.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think it’s good to not replace all the things that humans are doing. I wrote this paper, The Turing Trap, where I basically argued it’s a mistake. It’s to do what Alan Turing said, which is make AI that’s a perfect imitation of humans. We should make it different so we each have something to contribute.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s funny, we can flip this around, you know, almost perfectly here on the podcast and in are there conversations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Alexis and I are cautious and often critical of AI, particularly the industry, but we’re also quite enchanted by the the spaces inside these models. You know, these these mysterious high dimensional spaces and their capacity and the things they seem to be able to organize and then kind of cross connect in ways that humans can’t, certainly not at that scale.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it makes me think of, you know, the old ancient, almost economics debate between central planning and sort of, you know, action at the edges. And you, of course, know this well. But for folks listening to the podcast, there’s a few different ways you can organize an economy. You could have, you know, yeah, you could have planning. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Robin and Alexis deciding exactly how much to make of everything, you know, all fashionable t shirts and and cool. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>What a great world that would be. Yeah. And you know, this, this has the benefit of coherency. And you can actually have a plan and execute it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>It can be aligned with the values of your society, at least supposedly in theory, all these things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>But then way over on the other side, you have the idea of you have the sense that the real information about how the world works and what people want and what the problems are, of course, where they’re at the edges, you know, in people’s lives all distributed in their kitchens, in their businesses. Sort of the Haken view of like the great sensor of the market.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now it does seem so that was that was the story, you know, at least up until 2020, 2023. It does seem like maybe we have these machines now with a capacity that could change that balance a little bit. So first of all, I ask you, like do you see some of that potential. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Sure. No. This is a big like let me just say you’ve heard I’m pretty optimistic, excited about the productivity potential and creating a enormous amount of wealth.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One of the things that I’m most worried about is it could be very badly distributed, where everything gets really, really centralized. And the core reason for that is what you just brought up. You know, Friedrich Hayek wrote this amazing paper called The Use of Knowledge in Society, which, you know, articulate what you just said, that most useful knowledge is, like widely dispersed in the economy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like, you know, does this do people in this neighborhood like peppermint ice cream or is this truck half empty? And maybe we could put some more stuff on it or whatever. There’s all this, like detailed information. And he argued that there’s no way a central planner, even guy’s as smart as you two, could make all the decisions in the economy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s just too much of this detailed information. And that was totally true for the 20th century and up until recently. But Zoe Hitzig and I have written a paper called AI’s Use of Knowledge in Society, where we argue that, wait a minute, you know, you could actually go take these trillions of parameters and make all sorts of decisions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You could use the Internet of Things and other techniques to bring data and bring it all to, say, Bentonville, Arkansas, to pick up arbitrary city. And you’d be able to know all sorts of information about what’s happening and make decisions. And it’s actually beginning to happen. You know, when you look at the data and big centralized retailers are out competing, those mom and pop mom, mom and pop shops, they know more about what people want in each neighborhood and which trucks are empty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They have all that detailed information that hikes. It would be impossible, which is great for efficiency, but it may not be the best thing for freedom and democracy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, while we have some optionality, how can we design a world where we maintain our freedom, maintain our decentralization of decision making, and that if we go too far down the path of disempowering people, it may be very hard to reverse course later. And for what it’s worth, everyone’s noticed. It’s kind of beginning to happen, right? And we better take it seriously because we go much further down that path.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’ll be too late. Yeah,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I did want to ask you. I mean, this is from your book, Second Machine Age, of course, you coauthored \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>with Andy. Andy McAfee. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Alexis: And you have to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. We think the data support this. We’ve seen not just vast increases in wealth, but also, on the whole, more freedom, more social justice, less violence, and less less harsh conditions for the least fortunate and greater opportunities for more and more people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think, like there have been the majority of my life, I think I would have more or less agreed with this. I think in the last ten years, my own kind of priors have been challenged on this. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Not just you. Yeah, no, we wrote that in 2014. I’m glad that I just checked. And it’s like it’s got more and more sales and citations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I’m glad that it’s it’s got legs that way. And that was sort of maybe like the peak of this,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Alexis: Obama era story optimism. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. But but speaking of Obama, you know, he modified that quote and he said that it bends. You know, I’m going to misquote him, but but the gist of what he was saying was, got a push on the ark.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: You got to push on it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: It doesn’t happen automatically. We won’t just sit back and watch it happen. And that’s very much, you know, you mentioned I call myself a mindful optimist. You know, that the arc of history bends if and only if we push it. And I think lately it’s been going the wrong way. It’s also long, like Martin Luther King said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: It doesn’t happen automatically. We won’t just sit back and watch it happen. And that’s very much, you know, you mentioned I call myself a mindful optimist. You know, that the arc of history bends if and only if we push it. And I think lately it’s been going the wrong way. It’s also long, like Martin Luther King said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you know, it’s not going to be monotonic where it always improves every month or every year. So I think it’s fair to say we’ve had some backsliding and some bad things have happened. I’m still optimistic, maybe a little less optimistic than I was in 2014, but I’m hopeful that that work harder. But but this is exactly why I do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What I do is I’m not here to predict the future. I’m here to say, here are some possible futures, and here are some levers that matter. And we need to push on them, because most of us do want not just more abundance, but also more freedom and shared prosperity. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Can I can I keep pushing on this one a little bit just because I think there’s, you know, even some people in this building here at KQED who their their biggest concern about AI, they have they have many environmental this and other things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>it’s really about particularly being here in San Francisco. You really see it the concentration of wealth. And then, you know, our city politics has been taken over by tech wealth. It’s like it’s also the concentration of power that that goes along \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Those tend to go together, don’t they.? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yes. Yeah. And I guess the, the maybe more difficult version of this question is do you think that AI, as a result of the what the frontier models need, the amount of capital that you need to deploy to do these things?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces, and there’s two sets that are particularly obvious to me. One is, you know, the scaling laws and the fact that the AI itself tends to work better at large scale.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to build bigger and bigger data centers. But yeah, borrowing and and, you know, there’s just this amazing thing that Dario Modi and others noted that you make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to build bigger and bigger data centers. But yeah, borrowing and and, you know, there’s just this amazing thing that Dario Modi and others noted that you make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Actually, I’ve been somewhat surprised how many frontier labs there still are. It hasn’t all just concentrating to one singleton. But you know, who knows where that’s going to go. It certainly you have to be pretty big to be a player in that, but the one that I’m more concerned about is the other, like 90% of the economy,\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>that, you know, whether you’re in retail or manufacturing or health or whatever, you know, having decentralized information may not be as competitive with having it become more centralized.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that could also lead. And it has been if you look at the data, there has been more concentration. So we need to think harder about how do we decentralize it. I mean, part of one of the answers that I would put forward is this idea of pushing AI to complement humans rather than substitute for them. But we need to look at all levers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> Thinking about that discussion about centralization, about kind of where the power, where the money resides is that change in the capital versus labor share of the economy a warning sign? I mean, if that continues, \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> Thinking about that discussion about centralization, about kind of where the power, where the money resides is that change in the capital versus labor share of the economy a warning sign? I mean, if that continues, \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>yes, yes, this one I’m not going to hedge on. So so capital is inherently much more concentrated than labor. You know, the cool thing about labor, even though it’s pretty uneven, like we all have basically one brain.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>yes, yes, this one I’m not going to hedge on. So so capital is inherently much more concentrated than labor. You know, the cool thing about labor, even though it’s pretty uneven, like we all have basically one brain.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And like some of them, you know, maybe a little smarter than others, but but, you know, it’s distributed through the economy. You know, no matter how smart you are, you can’t run a whole fortune 500 corporation. So you delegate stuff, and the whole economy has all these delegated decisions to all these different brains. But with capital, you can concentrate it much more.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And empirically, you know, the income from capital is much more concentrated in a small fraction of the people. So, you know, we were saying earlier that economic power begets political power. So that’s something I worry about. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I mean, what would that world even look like? You know, I’ve looked at some other countries that have labor share that’s like much lower.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah, labor share of income is much lower. And it’s not a good set of countries. They’re like resource cursed countries that Saudi Arabia, it’s like mineral mining countries. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly, And you get these like gated communities and these people who have a lot of wealth. I was talking to somebody from a Latin American country. She’s very wealthy. And she said, you know, all the wealthy people in my country are in prisons.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And like, what do you mean they’re in prison? She said, well, the prison of our own construction, like we can’t go outside of our houses when we ever. I get into a car, I have like guards on either side of me\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s like one of those dystopian science fiction movies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah. What? What interventions could we at least start to prepare for now, economically? And obviously there’s a whole suite of politics and, you know, who we elect and how we organize ourselves as a city. But just thinking about economic policy, what what are what would be some smart things to start thinking about right now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>So I think we have some levers to push back against this, and that’s why I care about it. So I did write this paper, The Turing Trap, about how it’s a trap to have AI that just replaces and imitates humans. So a couple of things we can push back on. First off, there’s a lot of economic incentives right now that I think mistakenly steer us towards favoring capital over labor, like in the United States and most countries for that matter.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Tax policy. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Tax policy is much, you know, capitalist taxed much cheaper than labor. So you have two brilliant entrepreneurs, you know, one of which says, I’m going to make a $100 billion company with thousands of employees. And the other ones, I’m going to make $100 billion company with like no employees, but lots of robots. Yeah. The US government says, oh, the first person you know, Alice, you’re going to have to like, pay a lot more taxes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Your whole organization is going to pay a lot more taxes. And the second one is going to pay less. And, you know, the first rule of taxation is like, whatever you tax more, you get less of. So we’re basically putting our thumb on the scale, saying we’re going to get more capital intensive and less labor intensive. Like for most of history, maybe that didn’t matter that much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It wasn’t that much leverage to to do things different ways. Now we really have the potential and there’s a lot of other tax things you can do. My friend Darren Asamoah, who has written a lot about this Pascual Restrepo. So those are some things that we can do. Like, you know, they’re a really hard core. I’m an economist, but I’ve come to think that actually culture and the way people think about it is more important than the like hard dollars.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I run into a lot of people who have this mindset that like the goal of AI is to replace humans, and that’s just wrong, I think. And when they all the benchmarks that you see being published, almost all of them are geared towards like, how well can this machine by itself do the task with Andy Hopped and we’ve developed a new set of benchmarks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We call them Centaur benchmarks, sort of like part human, part machine. And the the idea is to say, hey guys, think about not how well a machine by itself can do it, but how can a human and machine together do it? And in many cases, in most cases, the human machine can do better than the machine by itself or the human by itself, but it requires a different architecture.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, Doug Engelbart years ago, you know, talked about how we should make machines that amplify humans. Steve Jobs called it bicycles for the mind, and that that philosophy has kind of been lost out a little bit. I want to revive it more. And if we design machines more to to augment humans and to complement what we’re doing, we’re likely to keep people in the loop.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And ultimately, I think that’s going to not just be fairer. I think it’s going to create a lot more value than trying to get the machine to do everything by itself.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Eric, talking about your your early apprehension of the curve we were in and kind of the trajectory of AI, let’s talk situational awareness for people on the ground level. So outside of OpenAI headquarters here in San Francisco, imagine you’re somebody who works at one of the Kaiser hospitals. Great day to day job. How are you going to know that it really is taking off, that you’re inside this exponential, and that this prediction of of a transformational AI era happening pretty fast rather than predictably slow is true.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like day to day, week to week. What what should I be watching for? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, you can come to the AI economic indicators and we’ll have we’ll have a monthly update of all those metrics. You know, I’m not I’m not joking about that because I just see so many anecdotes and stories. And honestly, it’s a little frustrating because, you know, every month there’s hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed, hundreds of thousands created.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if you’re a reporter with an angle, you can you can definitely find anecdotes that support your story. And you’ll have some men in the street who tells you what you know, what the people. And I’ve been reading those and I just don’t know how to aggregate them. So, you know, I’m a data person. I’m a statistician. I’m an economist.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So so, you know, getting the stuff aggregated, I think is the way to do it. The problem is that most of our indicators are kind of lagging indicators. And we need more so forward looking leading indicators. And we’re trying to invest in creating those. But but I think that that’s my answer. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Promise me when the day comes that you’re like, oh, you’re just going to put it all in one big blink tech.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yeah. It’s just like a little siren. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> Well, we do actually have these color coded like the transformation tracker. We’ve got like the 12 different metrics, and we color code them by like which ones are moving in the direction. Right now only two of the 12 are moving in that direction. You know, above a significant level. They’re all kind of moving a little bit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So yeah, we can we can you can take a look at that. I just want is it happening dot Stanford. Yes. All right. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You give me an idea, we’ll put a little sign up sheet that like if you want, we’ll send you a text message. You know, it’ll be like all 12 indicators. 459 on Thursday. Okay. We were officially hitting the singularity.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Okay. Until then, yes, until next Thursday. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Such a pleasure. Yeah. Wonderful.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "A Stanford economist on challenges and opportunities of the AI boom for workers, markets, and democracy",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, but how quickly will that \u003cstrong>actually\u003c/strong> transform the economy? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson about what the data can tell us so far, why previous technological revolutions took decades to reshape everyday life, and whether this time will be different. They discuss early signs that AI may already be affecting young workers, what happens to the career ladder when machines take over junior tasks, and where the biggest challenges — and opportunities — lie.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Guest: Erik Brynjolfsson, economist and Director of the \u003ca href=\"https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/\">Stanford Digital Economy Lab\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/5HI0RBP-jDk'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/5HI0RBP-jDk'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Episode transcript\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:00:00 – 00:00:06:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>00:00:06:14 – 00:00:12:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces,the AI itself tends to work better at large scale. That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. You make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:31:16 – 00:00:39:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: I’m Alexis Madrigal,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin\u003c/strong>: I’m Robin Sloan, and this is Dream Machines. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>It’s a podcast about how AI works, also about how it feels.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:39:14 – 00:00:49:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And of course, we make it right here in San Francisco, where it’s all happening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>And nobody really disagrees at this point that AI is going to transform the economy in some way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:49:16 – 00:00:54:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But one of the questions that is still really open and hotly debated is how fast that is going to happen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:00:55:01 – 00:01:12:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And also the question of how would we know that it’s being transformed? You certainly read a lot of headlines and see a lot of stock prices go up. But like what’s actually happening out there in offices?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Do we have the economic data that we need to make sense? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah, exactly. It’s sort of the question of like, what would be the canary in the coal mine?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:12:12 – 00:01:25:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And as we were looking around for answers to these questions, turns out there’s a paper called \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin & Alexis: \u003c/strong>Canary in the Coal Mine \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Out of the Stanford Digital Economy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah. That’s right. And it’s the work of a scholar there named Erik Brynjolfsson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:25:08 – 00:01:46:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was at MIT for 30 years before coming to Stanford, very early in his understanding of the potentially transformative effects of AI, and has become one of the folks who is really trying to shine a light into the kind of mysterious recesses of the economy so that the rest of us can know, like what is happening and how fast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:46:23 – 00:01:47:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yeah,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:01:47:11 – 00:02:08:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because it really matters the time scale. Right? If we have this incredible transformation in three months or in three years or in three decades, it will mean tremendously different society. And we need someone who can tell us, like, where are we on this, on this chart? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>So here is our very own canary in the coal mine Erik\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:08:22 – 00:02:10:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Brynjolfsson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:10:11 – 00:02:25:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>There’s a lot of, as you know, definitions of AI, you know, superintelligence, AGI, you know, just like advanced AI, I’m quite taken by the definition that you used in sort of a formative ad.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:25:22 – 00:02:47:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah. Transformative AI. You laid this out in a research agenda, you know, for kind of the, the community last year. And there’s a bit more to it. But the core of it is, as you said, we’ll know it’s transformative AI because it’ll have this significant economic effect. It’ll accelerate economic growth from sort of the the baseline that we’ve become accustomed to for a long time now, maybe around 2%.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:02:47:17 – 00:03:09:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’ll it’ll multiply that by by 3 or 5 times almost without talking about AI specifically, it’d be really interesting to have you dramatize like what that means for for an economy. You know, if that did happen, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>transformative AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Transformative AI that and that growth rate like, like how would that change our our day, our week, our year, our jobs?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:09:11 – 00:03:35:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, these way for me to think of it as by analogy. And so we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen going forward. But we can look back at, say, the industrial revolution. And in the Second Machine Age, Andy McAfee and I wrote about how we went through this big transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, and we call it the second Machine age, because now we’re having in the early stages of a second big transition like that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:35:20 – 00:03:56:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The first one was about machines doing what our muscles could do, an animal muscles, and that took growth from being sort of growing very, very slow tenths of a percent per year to growing about 2% per year, which may not sound like much, but you compound it. And now we’re like 30 or 50 times richer than our ancestors were a couple hundred years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:03:56:03 – 00:04:13:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that doing now, now, we were able to use machines to augment our minds, our brains. And I think that’s going to be at least as big as what the Industrial Revolution did. And it will transform society at least as much, not just in growth rate, but also like, you know, just what we do in our daily lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:13:13 – 00:04:33:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Think of the way farmers versus people in factories or modern society, how different that is. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Using that analogy, I feel like I should probably know this, but during the Industrial revolution, did people’s lives change in a decade in terms of the kind of work they did, how they worked in the world, the kind of goods and services they, they had access to?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:33:01 – 00:04:53:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Did it? Was it more of a generational change, like what was the pace of that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> It was actually pretty slow. In fact, there’s something called Engels pause. This period of like several decades, 40, 50 years where there wasn’t much of an improvement in living standards. If you read Charles Dickens, you know, actually life could be pretty miserable, even worse than it was for the people living in agricultural society.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:04:53:06 – 00:05:11:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>As life expectancy declined, people got shorter. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. All that smoke and soot and and kids working in factories and stuff, you know, it was pretty miserable for the majority of the population. But under the surface, things were changing. And you were beginning to have this productivity gain. But it took a while and eventually it started taking off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:11:11 – 00:05:19:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This time around, it’s also going to take longer than I think some of our friends here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley think, but but certainly a lot faster than the last time around\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:19:19 – 00:05:24:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Let’s go back into the historical example. I think it’s actually really useful for people to think about this, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:24:05 – 00:05:44:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You have this general purpose technology of \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>general purpose technology, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>which is a term of art, I love it, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and also I do we were talking about this earlier. I it had not occurred to me that it’s the twin GPT. It seems a little uncanny\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong>. Yeah. So my, my my friend and student, former student Daniel Rock, he wrote a great paper with some folks at OpenAI called GPT RPGs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:05:44:12 – 00:06:03:18\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, generative pre-trained transformers and general purpose technologies. It used to be when I said GPT to economists, we all knew we were talking about general purpose technologies, but the AI people have pretty much stolen that acronym \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>and branded it. Yeah. And for the into it into a global brand\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> So be it. Yeah. But but but general purpose technology is pretty much what drives all economic growth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:03:18 – 00:06:23:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s all these inventions, but there’s just a handful that really raise our living standards. The steam engine was the first really powerful general purpose technology electricity, computers and now AI, which is kind of like the mother of all general purpose technology, I think. So, you know, Demis Hassabis has this. I was over at Google DeepMind a few weeks ago in London.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:23:16 – 00:06:41:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They had this mission statement. They want to let me see if I can get it right. They want to solve intelligence and then use that to solve all the other problems in the world. So, you know, modest little mission statement. But but, you know, there’s a lot of truth to the fact that if you really could solve intelligence, there’s so many other things you could solve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:41:11 – 00:06:56:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yeah, that is, of course, if you trusted that that’s what people who had solved intelligence would actually do with this intelligence. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, that’s a very good question. There’s a bunch of things that you can use it for. And also, to be fair, as I’ve come to think harder about the problem, intelligence is not the be all and end all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:06:56:01 – 00:07:06:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of very smart people think and wish it was, but when you get into the real world, you know, just look around us. There’s there’s lots of PhDs in the economy and they don’t like, rule the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:06:12 – 00:07:14:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, you go into a I was at the Starbucks across the street just before coming here, and you walk in there and l\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Seven PhDs just right in there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:14:05 – 00:07:14:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah. Imagine\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:14:17 – 00:07:27:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>imagine you pull up with a bus and you say, okay, good news. You know, we’ve got Einstein, we’ve got a bus of 200 Einsteins. They’re going to come help you. I think the manager over there be like, oh, well, like, do they know how to push a broom? I mean, what are they going to do? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>I love that\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:27:23 – 00:07:33:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>because that that kind of argument and just even that that playful vision gets into the real crunchy details of like, what happens in an economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:33:19 – 00:07:54:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not just, you know, sugar and eggs, whip them together and voila, you get growth and productivity. It’s really crunchy. And the thing I like best about your work is that kind of ongoing attempt to to dig in and sort of look for signals. You had the paper called Canary in a coal mine, which feels like exactly what we need most right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:07:54:09 – 00:08:11:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We need those kind of early signals. You know, they might be warning signals in some cases. They might be like hopeful beacons. We’re going to steer towards \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: the Canaries. metaphor for is a little dark at times. Yeah. We didn’t really mean it that way. We meant it in the more general metaphors, like an early warning signal. Yeah. And it’s very uneven.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:08:11:20 – 00:08:27:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s part of it. You know, going back to the intelligence point, you know, I just want to finish that earlier point about about these general purpose technologies. They tend to take a long time to play out, because even when you speed up one part, there are other parts that are bottlenecks or weak links to take longer to emerge.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:08:27:17 – 00:09:00:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that that gets to your question about the Canaries paper, where we did find that there are certain jobs that are already beginning to be affected and others that are actually going the other way, that are becoming more valuable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>That’s interesting. I mean, so one of the findings, at least as I read it, you can correct me if I’m wrong, is that if there is an impact, it seems to be maybe, as you’d expect on entry level workers, the people who whose contributions can perhaps most seamlessly be replaced by Claude or ChatGPT or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:00:23 – 00:09:14:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I didn’t necessarily expect that in Vance. I should credit my coauthors, Baratunde and Russian, who did most of the heavy lifting on this, and the folks at ADP who provided all the data. And we went into it, you know, with with a blank slate. We just were open to whatever. Actually,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:14:10 – 00:09:16:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>the first cut at it, we looked at the top line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:16:15 – 00:09:32:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s not much happening, actually. You know, the overall labor market, it wasn’t that much happening. And we’re kicking around like, okay, maybe write a paper that all these headlines, these newspaper articles are all kind of overblown. And then, you know, Borat and Rudy looked in a little more deeply and they said, wait a minute. There’s like, there’s one group that’s really being affected.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:32:14 – 00:09:36:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Early career workers, especially in the most exposed occupations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:36:21 – 00:09:50:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So one of the things you can do with you can take all the jobs in the economy. 950, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And each of them, you can break down to a bundle of individual tasks. And once you do, at that fine grained level, you can really make headway.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:09:50:19 – 00:10:14:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s hard to say whether that AI will replace a radiologist, some people say, but it’s much easier to look at a specific thing. Can it read a medical image? And that’s one of the 26 things that a radiologist does when you break it down to those tasks. And by the way, the paper that did that the best was this GPT are GPTs paper we were just talking about, when you break it down that way, you can rank all the occupations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:14:15 – 00:10:14:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:14:23 – 00:10:24:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>then when you also look at the age, you find that the combination of the most exposed occupations with the youngest workers had about a 16% decline in employment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:24:05 – 00:10:33:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin\u003c/strong>: So there’s a couple threads to pull on there and I want to do them both. One is the young workers, kind of the entry level workers and just the whole idea of like careers and and experience and everything else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:33:03 – 00:10:44:17\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the other one is the data. My perception is that right now we as a country, a society, maybe a planet probably don’t have as much data as we would like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:44:19 – 00:10:45:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Oh, no.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:45:09 – 00:10:46:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>it’s a tragedy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:10:46:04 – 00:11:01:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I spent a lot of time with our friends in Washington who are, like, working in the statistical agencies, and they’re having their budgets cut. It’s getting, you know, there’s more and more need for better data and less and less resources going into it. I think it’s incredibly foolish. One of the things we’re doing at Stanford is trying to help with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:01:06 – 00:11:17:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We created something just last month called the Stanford AI Economic Indicators. That is like a dashboard that brings together all this data from a lot of private sources, as well as public sources, so people can look at it in one place instead of all these sort of dueling anecdotes, you know, everyone can see the data\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:17:11 – 00:11:31:07\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>The timing around this technological change of these major changes feels to me like it should be a deflationary narrative about how quickly AI is going to be deployed. But I’m kind of hearing from you, like sort of the opposite of that,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:31:07 – 00:11:45:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>that that you feel like there are that, that we are going to deploy this much faster than in these previous instances, even though historically we haven’t been able to do that, that it’s just there’s all this inertia across so many different sectors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:45:21 – 00:11:54:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it also sounds to me a little bit from the data board that like that is what’s happening. It is taking longer, you know, and I know both of us well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:54:10 – 00:11:56:01\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Erik: Well, I think both of those things are true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:11:56:02 – 00:12:11:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I would say, you know, I wrote about the need for these complementary investments. I wrote a paper called about the productivity paradox, about the first wave and then about this wave, and most importantly, a paper called The Productivity J curve with Chad Stephenson and Daniel Rock.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:11:02 – 00:12:13:07\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they all make this point that, you know,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:13:07 – 00:12:31:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>just because you have amazing technology, it doesn’t translate into productivity, business changes, transformation of the economy. That said that said, I think it’s happening a lot faster this time than with the Industrial revolution or with electricity, which also took like 30 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:31:10 – 00:12:34:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s just a lot of structural reasons why it’s going faster.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:34:08 – 00:12:53:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For one thing, you know, the internet has been built out, so we can just go from 0 to 100 million users of ChatGPT and like, you know, what was it, 60 days and now it’s a billion. Yeah, but like just going super fast and and a lot of the cognitive work, you can, you know, like software, you can do it a lot faster now than you could.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:12:53:07 – 00:13:10:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s still there’s still a lot of bottlenecks which you know, so I find myself sort of between these worlds when I talk to most economists and, you know, in New York or Washington or in businesses, you know, they see all the the structural barriers. When I talk to the guys at the Frontier Labs, they’re like, oh, we’re going to have RSI, recursive self-improvement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:10:21 – 00:13:26:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s all going to happen super fast. And I point out a bottleneck and they’re like, oh, AI will solve that. Yeah, yeah. And I’m kind of I’m kind of between them I put myself, you know, they’re like probably two orders of magnitude apart from each other in terms of rate of speed. And I’m at the geometric mean like one order of magnitude.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:26:11 – 00:13:45:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so I do think it’s faster than most people in the rest of the world are ready for. And that’s why we create that statement about we must act now. I do also, at the same time think that that most of the technologists, they haven’t really spent as much time in big companies as I have and realized like how hard it is to get them to change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:13:45:04 – 00:14:11:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: Can I ask this though, knowing that you have a company that is essentially trying to accelerate the change? Is there an argument to be made that letting this take some time is actually a good thing for society? Because this kind of disjunction in a labor market, or in just the value of intelligence or any of the ways that we might describe this transformation, is actually kind of a good thing to let it settle in more slowly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:11:16 – 00:14:36:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I agree with your core point, and but what I would say is that we need to speed up our understanding. We need to speed up our adaptation to it. We need to speed up our reskilling and, you know, be prepared or preparation. At the same time, I’m very sympathetic to the idea that those core capabilities, you know, there was just another statement that come out, these statements are all coming out about what they call it pacing, pacing, pacing the frontier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:36:13 – 00:14:39:17\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Right. Exactly. Which is, you know, that’s on the capability side. So,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:39:17 – 00:14:54:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>so the way I think about it is that there are these two lines. One of them is skyrocketing, which is the capabilities. The other one is our ability to adapt to it, which is barely moving. And that gap is where most of the big problems and challenges and opportunities lie over the next 5 or 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:14:54:11 – 00:15:05:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s where all the action is. Until all my economist friends, you should be focusing on that gap. My part of it is to close the gap from the bottom and like, speed up our understanding. Other people can think about the technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:05:16 – 00:15:12:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> You know, we’re talking about sort of the acceleration of an economy, but there’s also this simultaneous thing that that maybe is different.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:12:01 – 00:15:31:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like maybe there’s a historical analogy for this, maybe there’s not. I think of it almost as like the weirding of the economy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik:\u003c/strong> Yes\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>And this connects to a couple of things that we’ve talked about. You know, the idea that suddenly there’s no such thing as an entry level worker. Instead, you can only be, you know, a senior software engineer with an army of AI bots, and you’re really good at them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:31:00 – 00:15:52:21\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it raises the question of like, where do senior engineers or senior people of any kind come from anymore? Also, you know, again, to to make that industrial Revolution analogy, it’s interesting to consider that when you replace your, you know, horses going around a post with a steam engine, even though that’s new and kind of radical, you fundamentally do understand how that works.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:15:52:23 – 00:16:12:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas when you replace your software engineering team with bots, you probably don’t understand how it works anymore. Do these differences I mean, do these matter? Should we really be looking closely at these, this this weirdness?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> I mean, those are those two parts of your question are so different in my mind. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, they’re both weird.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:12:20 – 00:16:28:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We can talk. Yeah, I’ll put them on that. So let me let me do one at a time because I think they’re both interesting to talk about. So on the on the junior versus senior this is this is a real problem. Like we describe earlier the data that there’s less demand for these young workers. But where do the middle managers come from.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:28:08 – 00:16:44:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Where are the senior workers come from. And you need them. And you need people with that kind of judgment. And we used to have this grand bargain where people come in sometimes do some kind of boring Scott work. But in the process, sort of by osmosis, they would learn how the business ran, learn how to be a lawyer or a doctor or investment bank or whatever.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:16:44:11 – 00:17:01:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now they don’t have that opportunity. And I think part of the answer has to be we have to like, consciously and explicitly train them. I was talking to some folks at Infosys and, you know, they their junior people are very much in the bullseye of not being needed as much, but they tell me that they’re still hiring a bunch of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:01:23 – 00:17:23:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now instead of having them do some of that boring work that AI could now do, they are explicitly training them with an AI system. Actually, AI can be a really good tutor and it can help them learn faster. So that’s that’s part of the. That’s one approach to the answer. I think it’s going to be kind of a new social contract that we have to think about, because we don’t just abandon this whole generation of people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:23:12 – 00:17:44:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, I’ll tell you a little bit of a, of a of a sad story. Well, hopefully it has a good ending. A student came to me in my office a couple of months ago graduating from Stanford. Pretty good school. And she said, I don’t have a job. My friends don’t have jobs. Is my generation doomed? And I was like, whoa, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:44:04 – 00:17:59:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, you’re a Stanford student. You should be optimistic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis:\u003c/strong> I know I’m a mindful optimist what do you mean?.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> You should be. You’re graduating. And what I tried to say was, look, you know, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. There’s a bunch of jobs disappearing, like you just said, but the other on the other side, you know, you can use these tools to do things you never could have before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:17:59:14 – 00:18:16:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’ve got superpowers where you can do vibe coding and create all sorts of software. That would have been impossible five years ago or even one year ago, and you needed to lean into those new possibilities. There’s more startups being started than ever before, because a lot of people are seeing this opportunity to create things they couldn’t have done before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:16:08 – 00:18:33:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, you know, that’s what I tried to teach my class. I have a master class that also does this, but I really want people to, you know, you know, I understand the downside, but I think there’s almost too much emphasis on that. And there should be more of a leaning in to AI allowing you to do new things you never could have done before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:33:22 – 00:18:55:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re harder to see because a lot of them didn’t exist before, but that’s where the opportunity is. And that’s the part I want to speed up, is that is the transition to those new opportunities. I don’t want to just ossify everything and try to freeze everything in place. I don’t think that’s the strategy. We need to be nimble and have that more flexible opportunity to create new jobs, new opportunities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:18:55:15 – 00:19:16:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>another recent historical analogy to this is, you know, self-driving cars, where we essentially see them being, generally speaking, safer drivers than human drivers. But when they do make a mistake, it tends to be sort of a novel mistake or the kind of the way the system breaks down is we could not have anticipated, you know, power outage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:16:18 – 00:19:39:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: Yeah, it’s like an alien intelligence. Yeah. It is it exactly. Respect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> They respect the cones too much. You know yourself driving cars. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. They worship the code, but they don’t worship some other things. And, you know, as an economist, actually, you know, this is can be a little dangerous and off putting. It’s also an opportunity like for in economics, gains from trade happen when there’s two entities that are very different from each other.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:39:05 – 00:19:55:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If they’re identical to each other, there’s not much room for for gains from trade. So actually mostly encourage the folks at the Frontier Labs to lean into making the A’s really good at things that humans are not good at, and let us be good at the things we’re good at. I think too often they do it the other way around.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:19:55:14 – 00:20:14:10\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re trying to, like, smooth the edges and and make them good at things that are that’s hard for machines and easy for us, like, you know, buttoning a shirt or, or and ultimately, the fact that it’s an alien intelligence means that we can lean on it to do some amazing things. But there will still be a role for humans, which I think is important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:14:11 – 00:20:14:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:14:20 – 00:20:31:08\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it’s good to not replace all the things that humans are doing. I wrote this paper, The Turing Trap, where I basically argued it’s a mistake. It’s to do what Alan Turing said, which is make AI that’s a perfect imitation of humans. We should make it different so we each have something to contribute.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:31:10 – 00:20:36:23\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s funny, we can flip this around, you know, almost perfectly here on the podcast and in are there conversations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:37:00 – 00:20:56:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis and I are cautious and often critical of AI, particularly the industry, but we’re also quite enchanted by the the spaces inside these models. You know, these these mysterious high dimensional spaces and their capacity and the things they seem to be able to organize and then kind of cross connect in ways that humans can’t, certainly not at that scale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:20:56:09 – 00:21:13:05\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it makes me think of, you know, the old ancient, almost economics debate between central planning and sort of, you know, action at the edges. And you, of course, know this well. But for folks listening to the podcast, there’s a few different ways you can organize an economy. You could have, you know, yeah, you could have planning. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:13:06 – 00:21:30:01\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Robin and Alexis deciding exactly how much to make of everything, you know, all fashionable t shirts and and cool. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>What a great world that would be. Yeah. And you know, this, this has the benefit of coherency. And you can actually have a plan and execute it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>It can be aligned with the values of your society, at least supposedly in theory, all these things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:30:01 – 00:21:49:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>But then way over on the other side, you have the idea of you have the sense that the real information about how the world works and what people want and what the problems are, of course, where they’re at the edges, you know, in people’s lives all distributed in their kitchens, in their businesses. Sort of the Haken view of like the great sensor of the market.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:21:49:18 – 00:22:12:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now it does seem so that was that was the story, you know, at least up until 2020, 2023. It does seem like maybe we have these machines now with a capacity that could change that balance a little bit. So first of all, I ask you, like do you see some of that potential. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Sure. No. This is a big like let me just say you’ve heard I’m pretty optimistic, excited about the productivity potential and creating a enormous amount of wealth.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:12:02 – 00:22:31:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One of the things that I’m most worried about is it could be very badly distributed, where everything gets really, really centralized. And the core reason for that is what you just brought up. You know, Friedrich Hayek wrote this amazing paper called The Use of Knowledge in Society, which, you know, articulate what you just said, that most useful knowledge is, like widely dispersed in the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:31:07 – 00:22:47:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like, you know, does this do people in this neighborhood like peppermint ice cream or is this truck half empty? And maybe we could put some more stuff on it or whatever. There’s all this, like detailed information. And he argued that there’s no way a central planner, even guy’s as smart as you two, could make all the decisions in the economy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:22:47:04 – 00:23:06:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s just too much of this detailed information. And that was totally true for the 20th century and up until recently. But Zoe Hitzig and I have written a paper called AI’s Use of Knowledge in Society, where we argue that, wait a minute, you know, you could actually go take these trillions of parameters and make all sorts of decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:07:00 – 00:23:32:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You could use the Internet of Things and other techniques to bring data and bring it all to, say, Bentonville, Arkansas, to pick up arbitrary city. And you’d be able to know all sorts of information about what’s happening and make decisions. And it’s actually beginning to happen. You know, when you look at the data and big centralized retailers are out competing, those mom and pop mom, mom and pop shops, they know more about what people want in each neighborhood and which trucks are empty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:32:13 – 00:23:41:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They have all that detailed information that hikes. It would be impossible, which is great for efficiency, but it may not be the best thing for freedom and democracy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:41:21 – 00:23:43:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>we need to think hard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:23:43:02 – 00:24:07:04\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, while we have some optionality, how can we design a world where we maintain our freedom, maintain our decentralization of decision making, and that if we go too far down the path of disempowering people, it may be very hard to reverse course later. And for what it’s worth, everyone’s noticed. It’s kind of beginning to happen, right? And we better take it seriously because we go much further down that path.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:07:04 – 00:24:08:03\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’ll be too late. Yeah,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:08:03 – 00:24:34:16\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I did want to ask you. I mean, this is from your book, Second Machine Age, of course, you coauthored \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>with Andy. Andy McAfee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis: And you have to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. We think the data support this. We’ve seen not just vast increases in wealth, but also, on the whole, more freedom, more social justice, less violence, and less less harsh conditions for the least fortunate and greater opportunities for more and more people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:34:20 – 00:24:52:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think, like there have been the majority of my life, I think I would have more or less agreed with this. I think in the last ten years, my own kind of priors have been challenged on this. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Not just you. Yeah, no, we wrote that in 2014. I’m glad that I just checked. And it’s like it’s got more and more sales and citations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:24:52:02 – 00:25:10:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I’m glad that it’s it’s got legs that way. And that was sort of maybe like the peak of this,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Alexis: Obama era story optimism. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly. But but speaking of Obama, you know, he modified that quote and he said that it bends. You know, I’m going to misquote him, but but the gist of what he was saying was, got a push on the ark.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:10:20 – 00:25:27:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis\u003c/strong>: You got to push on it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik\u003c/strong>: It doesn’t happen automatically. We won’t just sit back and watch it happen. And that’s very much, you know, you mentioned I call myself a mindful optimist. You know, that the arc of history bends if and only if we push it. And I think lately it’s been going the wrong way. It’s also long, like Martin Luther King said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:27:06 – 00:25:44:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you know, it’s not going to be monotonic where it always improves every month or every year. So I think it’s fair to say we’ve had some backsliding and some bad things have happened. I’m still optimistic, maybe a little less optimistic than I was in 2014, but I’m hopeful that that work harder. But but this is exactly why I do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:25:44:06 – 00:26:13:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What I do is I’m not here to predict the future. I’m here to say, here are some possible futures, and here are some levers that matter. And we need to push on them, because most of us do want not just more abundance, but also more freedom and shared prosperity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Can I can I keep pushing on this one a little bit just because I think there’s, you know, even some people in this building here at KQED who their their biggest concern about AI, they have they have many environmental this and other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:13:02 – 00:26:13:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:13:08 – 00:26:42:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>it’s really about particularly being here in San Francisco. You really see it the concentration of wealth. And then, you know, our city politics has been taken over by tech wealth. It’s like it’s also the concentration of power that that goes along \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Those tend to go together, don’t they.? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Yes. Yeah. And I guess the, the maybe more difficult version of this question is do you think that AI, as a result of the what the frontier models need, the amount of capital that you need to deploy to do these things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:26:42:10 – 00:27:04:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Is this a kind of technology that inherently leads to higher concentrations of wealth and therefore a power? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>I don’t want to say inherently, because I don’t want to be in the prediction business, I want to be in the design business. But there’s a lot of strong forces, and there’s two sets that are particularly obvious to me. One is, you know, the scaling laws and the fact that the AI itself tends to work better at large scale.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:04:22 – 00:27:28:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s why they’re raising hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to build bigger and bigger data centers. But yeah, borrowing and and, you know, there’s just this amazing thing that Dario Modi and others noted that you make the model bigger and it works better. So they said, let’s make it even bigger. And it just keeps working. So that tends to lead to kind of a bit of a winner take most outcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:28:14 – 00:27:44:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Actually, I’ve been somewhat surprised how many frontier labs there still are. It hasn’t all just concentrating to one singleton. But you know, who knows where that’s going to go. It certainly you have to be pretty big to be a player in that, but the one that I’m more concerned about is the other, like 90% of the economy,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:44:22 – 00:27:56:18\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>that, you know, whether you’re in retail or manufacturing or health or whatever, you know, having decentralized information may not be as competitive with having it become more centralized.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:27:56:18 – 00:28:15:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that could also lead. And it has been if you look at the data, there has been more concentration. So we need to think harder about how do we decentralize it. I mean, part of one of the answers that I would put forward is this idea of pushing AI to complement humans rather than substitute for them. But we need to look at all levers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:15:22 – 00:28:41:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin:\u003c/strong> Thinking about that discussion about centralization, about kind of where the power, where the money resides is that change in the capital versus labor share of the economy a warning sign? I mean, if that continues, \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>yes, yes, this one I’m not going to hedge on. So so capital is inherently much more concentrated than labor. You know, the cool thing about labor, even though it’s pretty uneven, like we all have basically one brain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:41:09 – 00:28:57:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And like some of them, you know, maybe a little smarter than others, but but, you know, it’s distributed through the economy. You know, no matter how smart you are, you can’t run a whole fortune 500 corporation. So you delegate stuff, and the whole economy has all these delegated decisions to all these different brains. But with capital, you can concentrate it much more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:28:57:15 – 00:29:19:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And empirically, you know, the income from capital is much more concentrated in a small fraction of the people. So, you know, we were saying earlier that economic power begets political power. So that’s something I worry about. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>I mean, what would that world even look like? You know, I’ve looked at some other countries that have labor share that’s like much lower.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:19:10 – 00:29:39:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah, labor share of income is much lower. And it’s not a good set of countries. They’re like resource cursed countries that Saudi Arabia, it’s like mineral mining countries. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Exactly, And you get these like gated communities and these people who have a lot of wealth. I was talking to somebody from a Latin American country. She’s very wealthy. And she said, you know, all the wealthy people in my country are in prisons.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:39:00 – 00:29:46:22\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And like, what do you mean they’re in prison? She said, well, the prison of our own construction, like we can’t go outside of our houses when we ever. I get into a car, I have like guards on either side of me\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:29:47:00 – 00:30:08:11\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s like one of those dystopian science fiction movies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Yeah. What? What interventions could we at least start to prepare for now, economically? And obviously there’s a whole suite of politics and, you know, who we elect and how we organize ourselves as a city. But just thinking about economic policy, what what are what would be some smart things to start thinking about right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:08:12 – 00:30:31:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>So I think we have some levers to push back against this, and that’s why I care about it. So I did write this paper, The Turing Trap, about how it’s a trap to have AI that just replaces and imitates humans. So a couple of things we can push back on. First off, there’s a lot of economic incentives right now that I think mistakenly steer us towards favoring capital over labor, like in the United States and most countries for that matter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:31:13 – 00:30:55:00\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Tax policy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Tax policy is much, you know, capitalist taxed much cheaper than labor. So you have two brilliant entrepreneurs, you know, one of which says, I’m going to make a $100 billion company with thousands of employees. And the other ones, I’m going to make $100 billion company with like no employees, but lots of robots. Yeah. The US government says, oh, the first person you know, Alice, you’re going to have to like, pay a lot more taxes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:30:55:00 – 00:31:11:06\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Your whole organization is going to pay a lot more taxes. And the second one is going to pay less. And, you know, the first rule of taxation is like, whatever you tax more, you get less of. So we’re basically putting our thumb on the scale, saying we’re going to get more capital intensive and less labor intensive. Like for most of history, maybe that didn’t matter that much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:11:06 – 00:31:34:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It wasn’t that much leverage to to do things different ways. Now we really have the potential and there’s a lot of other tax things you can do. My friend Darren Asamoah, who has written a lot about this Pascual Restrepo. So those are some things that we can do. Like, you know, they’re a really hard core. I’m an economist, but I’ve come to think that actually culture and the way people think about it is more important than the like hard dollars.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:34:02 – 00:31:59:13\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, I run into a lot of people who have this mindset that like the goal of AI is to replace humans, and that’s just wrong, I think. And when they all the benchmarks that you see being published, almost all of them are geared towards like, how well can this machine by itself do the task with Andy Hopped and we’ve developed a new set of benchmarks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:31:59:13 – 00:32:18:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We call them Centaur benchmarks, sort of like part human, part machine. And the the idea is to say, hey guys, think about not how well a machine by itself can do it, but how can a human and machine together do it? And in many cases, in most cases, the human machine can do better than the machine by itself or the human by itself, but it requires a different architecture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:18:20 – 00:32:41:15\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, Doug Engelbart years ago, you know, talked about how we should make machines that amplify humans. Steve Jobs called it bicycles for the mind, and that that philosophy has kind of been lost out a little bit. I want to revive it more. And if we design machines more to to augment humans and to complement what we’re doing, we’re likely to keep people in the loop.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:41:15 – 00:32:48:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And ultimately, I think that’s going to not just be fairer. I think it’s going to create a lot more value than trying to get the machine to do everything by itself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:32:48:20 – 00:33:23:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin: \u003c/strong>Eric, talking about your your early apprehension of the curve we were in and kind of the trajectory of AI, let’s talk situational awareness for people on the ground level. So outside of OpenAI headquarters here in San Francisco, imagine you’re somebody who works at one of the Kaiser hospitals. Great day to day job. How are you going to know that it really is taking off, that you’re inside this exponential, and that this prediction of of a transformational AI era happening pretty fast rather than predictably slow is true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:33:23:20 – 00:33:44:12\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like day to day, week to week. What what should I be watching for? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong>Well, you can come to the AI economic indicators and we’ll have we’ll have a monthly update of all those metrics. You know, I’m not I’m not joking about that because I just see so many anecdotes and stories. And honestly, it’s a little frustrating because, you know, every month there’s hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed, hundreds of thousands created.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:33:44:12 – 00:34:01:02\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if you’re a reporter with an angle, you can you can definitely find anecdotes that support your story. And you’ll have some men in the street who tells you what you know, what the people. And I’ve been reading those and I just don’t know how to aggregate them. So, you know, I’m a data person. I’m a statistician. I’m an economist.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:34:01:02 – 00:34:21:14\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So so, you know, getting the stuff aggregated, I think is the way to do it. The problem is that most of our indicators are kind of lagging indicators. And we need more so forward looking leading indicators. And we’re trying to invest in creating those. But but I think that that’s my answer. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis: \u003c/strong>Promise me when the day comes that you’re like, oh, you’re just going to put it all in one big blink tech.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:34:21:16 – 00:34:42:09\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Unknown\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yeah. It’s just like a little siren. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Erik: \u003c/strong> Well, we do actually have these color coded like the transformation tracker. We’ve got like the 12 different metrics, and we color code them by like which ones are moving in the direction. Right now only two of the 12 are moving in that direction. You know, above a significant level. They’re all kind of moving a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:34:42:12 – 00:35:02:19\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So yeah, we can we can you can take a look at that. I just want is it happening dot Stanford. Yes. All right. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You give me an idea, we’ll put a little sign up sheet that like if you want, we’ll send you a text message. You know, it’ll be like all 12 indicators. 459 on Thursday. Okay. We were officially hitting the singularity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:35:02:21 – 00:35:16:18\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Okay. Until then, yes, until next Thursday. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. Such a pleasure. Yeah. Wonderful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>00:35:16:20 – 00:35:20:20\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Several Oaklanders say that Behring Companies can position \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095308/developer-councilmember-say-proposed-oakland-data-center-isnt-what-you-might-think\">its proposed data center\u003c/a> as an outlier to the larger-scale facilities that’ve come under fire for high energy and water usage, but their feelings won’t change for the most part.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s largely because of distrust in the developer’s intentions and environmental impacts that centers have had on communities in other states. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Keep data centers out of Oakland,” said Bryan Ortega, 30, who has been an Oakland resident for years. “I don’t like data centers. I don’t agree with them.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095475\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The location of a proposed data center at 415 20th St. in Oakland on Aug. 14, 2026. Residents and workers cite the environmental concerns associated with the centers and distrust of developers as reasons for their opposition to the project. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring is in the early stages of what it calls an innovation hub on 20th Street that includes about 20,000 square feet dedicated to a data center. The project is a single piece in a four-building project that would provide housing, office space and parking. Its addition could help bring jobs to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12075755/as-kaisers-presence-in-downtown-oakland-dwindles-so-does-foot-traffic\">the struggling downtown area\u003c/a>, according to the developer and Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ortega doesn’t buy it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The intention is not good,” Ortega said. “I don’t think they’re opening data centers for any good reasons; it’s all capital gain.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ortega linked his opposition to other data centers popping up in the Bay Area that have drawn large pushback. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In some cases, like in Oakley, the plan has been stopped in its tracks. The developer of a project that included the possibility of a data center \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">pulled that suggestion after residents rallied against it\u003c/a>. Soon after, Oakley council members \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-data-center-ban-22208938.php\">implemented the Bay Area’s first ban\u003c/a> on the centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has been active in organizing against projects in Oakley and Pittsburg, is pushing for a similar ban in Oakland. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The group started a petition this week to call on the city council to ban all data centers in the city. Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL who lives and works in Oakland, said the more than 3,500 signatures they’ve gathered show that residents don’t want a data center at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If you ask most members of this community, they would want something that actually benefits our community in that space,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Officials facing the possibility of a data center coming to their cities have usually opted to regulate the facilities instead of pursuing outright bans. Oakley’s ban is temporary, while Pittsburg and San Jose have instead suggested regulating proposed centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fife, who represents downtown Oakland where the data center would be, said at a Friday press conference that she was working toward developing regulations on what responsible AI looks like. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Colin Behring, CEO and founder of Behring Companies, addresses the media in front of 415 20th St. in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, as Councilmember Carroll Fife, to the right, listens in. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If part of the project in Oakland doesn’t happen, Behring Companies CEO Colin Behring said: “The whole picture falls apart.” Possibilities of high water and energy usage at the site, he said, are not a concern because newer technology for water cooling wouldn’t waste water and California produces plenty of energy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Areli Hernandez, an Oakland resident for about a decade, was alarmed to learn about the project. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“No, no,” Hernandez said about Behring’s reasoning behind the proposal not using large amounts of water or energy. “There should be something citizens of Oakland can sign to contest the data center.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most people who KQED spoke with in the city weren’t aware of the proposal. Instead, they mentioned data centers in other states or, less so, others in the Bay Area. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This issue of disclosure is a huge part of community concerns around data centers,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea Wash, who lives in Concord but works in Oakland, hadn’t heard of the proposal either. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“In the suburban areas, it may be a better idea just because there’s more land, more area for development,” Wash, 38, said. “Here in Oakland, especially in this area, it is a bit more congested so I could see how that would pose a problem for a lot of the neighbors.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The council member said she’s working on an AI forum to ensure communities are aware of the impacts data centers could have on the city. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fife said Friday that the circulating petition and other similar ones often go out because some people are not clear on what is being proposed. That’s why she said more information is needed — for everyone. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Varshneya said PSL will continue to oppose the project while raising awareness about it in the community. On Friday at 7 p.m., the group will host an organizing meeting about the data center at the Oakland Liberation Center.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Keep data centers out of Oakland,” said Bryan Ortega, 30, who has been an Oakland resident for years. “I don’t like data centers. I don’t agree with them.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095475\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The location of a proposed data center at 415 20th St. in Oakland on Aug. 14, 2026. Residents and workers cite the environmental concerns associated with the centers and distrust of developers as reasons for their opposition to the project.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Behring is in the early stages of what it calls an innovation hub on 20th Street that includes about 20,000 square feet dedicated to a data center. The project is a single piece in a four-building project that would provide housing, office space and parking. Its addition could help bring jobs to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12075755/as-kaisers-presence-in-downtown-oakland-dwindles-so-does-foot-traffic\">the struggling downtown area\u003c/a>, according to the developer and Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“The intention is not good,” Ortega said. “I don’t think they’re opening data centers for any good reasons; it’s all capital gain.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ortega linked his opposition to other data centers popping up in the Bay Area that have drawn large pushback. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In some cases, like in Oakley, the plan has been stopped in its tracks. The developer of a project that included the possibility of a data center \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">pulled that suggestion after residents rallied against it\u003c/a>. Soon after, Oakley council members \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-data-center-ban-22208938.php\">implemented the Bay Area’s first ban\u003c/a> on the centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The group started a petition this week to call on the city council to ban all data centers in the city. Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL who lives and works in Oakland, said the more than 3,500 signatures they’ve gathered show that residents don’t want a data center at all. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The group started a petition this week to call on the city council to ban all data centers in the city. Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL who lives and works in Oakland, said the more than 3,500 signatures they’ve gathered show that residents don’t want a data center at all. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“If you ask most members of this community, they would want something that actually benefits our community in that space,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Officials facing the possibility of a data center coming to their cities have usually opted to regulate the facilities instead of pursuing outright bans. Oakley’s ban is temporary, while Pittsburg and San Jose have instead suggested regulating proposed centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Fife, who represents downtown Oakland where the data center would be, said at a Friday press conference that she was working toward developing regulations on what responsible AI looks like. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Colin Behring, CEO and founder of Behring Companies, addresses the media in front of 415 20th St. in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, as Councilmember Carroll Fife, to the right, listens in. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If part of the project in Oakland doesn’t happen, Behring Companies CEO Colin Behring said: “The whole picture falls apart.” Possibilities of high water and energy usage at the site, he said, are not a concern because newer technology for water cooling wouldn’t waste water and California produces plenty of energy. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Most people who KQED spoke with in the city weren’t aware of the proposal. Instead, they mentioned data centers in other states or, less so, others in the Bay Area. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“In the suburban areas, it may be a better idea just because there’s more land, more area for development,” Wash, 38, said. “Here in Oakland, especially in this area, it is a bit more congested so I could see how that would pose a problem for a lot of the neighbors.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Several Oaklanders say that Behring Companies can position \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095308/developer-councilmember-say-proposed-oakland-data-center-isnt-what-you-might-think\">its proposed data center\u003c/a> as an outlier to the larger-scale facilities that’ve come under fire for high energy and water usage, but their feelings won’t change for the most part.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s largely because of distrust in the developer’s intentions and environmental impacts that centers have had on communities in other states. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Keep data centers out of Oakland,” said Bryan Ortega, 30, who has been an Oakland resident for years. “I don’t like data centers. I don’t agree with them.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095475\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The location of a proposed data center at 415 20th St. in Oakland on Aug. 14, 2026. Residents and workers cite the environmental concerns associated with the centers and distrust of developers as reasons for their opposition to the project. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring is in the early stages of what it calls an innovation hub on 20th Street that includes about 20,000 square feet dedicated to a data center. The project is a single piece in a four-building project that would provide housing, office space and parking. Its addition could help bring jobs to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12075755/as-kaisers-presence-in-downtown-oakland-dwindles-so-does-foot-traffic\">the struggling downtown area\u003c/a>, according to the developer and Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ortega doesn’t buy it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The intention is not good,” Ortega said. “I don’t think they’re opening data centers for any good reasons; it’s all capital gain.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ortega linked his opposition to other data centers popping up in the Bay Area that have drawn large pushback. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In some cases, like in Oakley, the plan has been stopped in its tracks. The developer of a project that included the possibility of a data center \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">pulled that suggestion after residents rallied against it\u003c/a>. Soon after, Oakley council members \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-data-center-ban-22208938.php\">implemented the Bay Area’s first ban\u003c/a> on the centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has been active in organizing against projects in Oakley and Pittsburg, is pushing for a similar ban in Oakland. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The group started a petition this week to call on the city council to ban all data centers in the city. Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL who lives and works in Oakland, said the more than 3,500 signatures they’ve gathered show that residents don’t want a data center at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If you ask most members of this community, they would want something that actually benefits our community in that space,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Officials facing the possibility of a data center coming to their cities have usually opted to regulate the facilities instead of pursuing outright bans. Oakley’s ban is temporary, while Pittsburg and San Jose have instead suggested regulating proposed centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fife, who represents downtown Oakland where the data center would be, said at a Friday press conference that she was working toward developing regulations on what responsible AI looks like. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Colin Behring, CEO and founder of Behring Companies, addresses the media in front of 415 20th St. in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, as Councilmember Carroll Fife, to the right, listens in. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If part of the project in Oakland doesn’t happen, Behring Companies CEO Colin Behring said: “The whole picture falls apart.” Possibilities of high water and energy usage at the site, he said, are not a concern because newer technology for water cooling wouldn’t waste water and California produces plenty of energy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Areli Hernandez, an Oakland resident for about a decade, was alarmed to learn about the project. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“No, no,” Hernandez said about Behring’s reasoning behind the proposal not using large amounts of water or energy. “There should be something citizens of Oakland can sign to contest the data center.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Most people who KQED spoke with in the city weren’t aware of the proposal. Instead, they mentioned data centers in other states or, less so, others in the Bay Area. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This issue of disclosure is a huge part of community concerns around data centers,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andrea Wash, who lives in Concord but works in Oakland, hadn’t heard of the proposal either. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“In the suburban areas, it may be a better idea just because there’s more land, more area for development,” Wash, 38, said. “Here in Oakland, especially in this area, it is a bit more congested so I could see how that would pose a problem for a lot of the neighbors.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The council member said she’s working on an AI forum to ensure communities are aware of the impacts data centers could have on the city. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fife said Friday that the circulating petition and other similar ones often go out because some people are not clear on what is being proposed. That’s why she said more information is needed — for everyone. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Varshneya said PSL will continue to oppose the project while raising awareness about it in the community. On Friday at 7 p.m., the group will host an organizing meeting about the data center at the Oakland Liberation Center.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A proposed data center in downtown \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/news/tag/oakland\">Oakland\u003c/a> is the latest artificial intelligence project to face backlash, but proponents say this one’s different. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Developer Behring Companies is planning to use a portion of an almost 83,000 square-foot 4-story building at 415 20th St. as a data center to complement a larger AI campus. About 20,000 square-foot would be used for the data center, according to Behring’s plans. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The building \u003ca href=\"https://www.nersc.gov/news-and-events/news/berkeley-lab-dedicates-first-oakland-city-facility\">used to be a supercomputing complex\u003c/a> for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Behring Companies’ CEO Colin Behring says those operations are not different from what the project proposes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Colin Behring, CEO and founder of Behring Companies, addresses the media in front of 415 20th St. in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, as Councilmember Carroll Fife, to the right, listens in. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Nothing has changed, and our proposal at this point is to use the same building doing what it used to do the same way,” said Behring, who spoke at a Friday press conference alongside Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife. “While it might be big headlines to talk about data centers, this project is very much different.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring said there are various definitions of what a “data center” is and the space is not like a typical data center that is made up of racks and computing for different outside parties in a dark place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For us, the data center is effectively really strong computers in your office,” Behring said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The project includes three neighboring buildings and would house a 39-story apartment complex directly above the 19th Street BART station, 20 stories of office space and a parking area. The site already supports up to 20 megawatts of computing capacity because of its past use, according to Behring. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For comparison, that’s about 15 times smaller than the \u003ca href=\"https://www.imperial.ca.gov/276/Data-Center-Info\">largest proposed data center\u003c/a> in the state, which would consume 330 megawatts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI data centers popping up around the country have sparked concerns about water and energy usage, noise pollution and health effects. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the Bay Area, data center proposals have not gone over well with residents. From \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">Oakley \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12093604/theyve-been-very-quiet-pittsburg-residents-seek-answers-as-data-center-sets-up-shop-in-city\">Pittsburg \u003c/a>in the East Bay to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101914179/bay-area-communities-resist-data-center-boom\">Gilroy in Silicon Valley\u003c/a>, advocates have cited a range of environmental and aesthetic concerns with facilities planned in their communities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I wanted to be absolutely critically clear that this is not the large-scale mega-facility that people have expressed, and legitimately so, concerns,” Fife, who represents downtown Oakland where the project is proposed, said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The councilmember told reporters her goal is to revitalize the downtown area by bringing responsible development to the city, and that she’ll be communicating with Behring to keep an eye on the proposal and ensure the public is informed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents still aren’t so sure. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Party for Socialism and Liberation has emerged as one of the project’s primary opponents, starting an online petition over concerns AI data centers “destroy jobs and the environment,” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“As long as tech billionaires control AI, they’ll use the technology to raise profits by eliminating millions of jobs. And they don’t care if they have to destroy the planet to do so,” the website reads. “This fight is about who decides the future of Oakland: the people, or the ultra wealthy.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring said the project would provide up to 2,300 jobs, with neighboring businesses producing more. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposal, which was sent to city staff a week ago, is still in the beginning stages, so it hasn’t reached the City Council. Fife said it may not need additional approval if Behring’s uses conform with existing uses by the Lawrence lab. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Either way, Fife said she’s in the process of developing legislation that would define what responsible AI use is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/jlara\">\u003cem>Juan Carlos Lara\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>AI data centers popping up around the country have sparked concerns about water and energy usage, noise pollution and health effects. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In the Bay Area, data center proposals have not gone over well with residents. From \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">Oakley \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12093604/theyve-been-very-quiet-pittsburg-residents-seek-answers-as-data-center-sets-up-shop-in-city\">Pittsburg \u003c/a>in the East Bay to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101914179/bay-area-communities-resist-data-center-boom\">Gilroy in Silicon Valley\u003c/a>, advocates have cited a range of environmental and aesthetic concerns with facilities planned in their communities. \u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The proposal from Behring Companies is part of a larger artificial intelligence campus that formerly housed a supercomputer facility. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A proposed data center in downtown \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/news/tag/oakland\">Oakland\u003c/a> is the latest artificial intelligence project to face backlash, but proponents say this one’s different. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Developer Behring Companies is planning to use a portion of an almost 83,000 square-foot 4-story building at 415 20th St. as a data center to complement a larger AI campus. About 20,000 square-foot would be used for the data center, according to Behring’s plans. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The building \u003ca href=\"https://www.nersc.gov/news-and-events/news/berkeley-lab-dedicates-first-oakland-city-facility\">used to be a supercomputing complex\u003c/a> for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Behring Companies’ CEO Colin Behring says those operations are not different from what the project proposes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095480\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-Behring-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Colin Behring, CEO and founder of Behring Companies, addresses the media in front of 415 20th St. in Oakland on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026, as Councilmember Carroll Fife, to the right, listens in. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Nothing has changed, and our proposal at this point is to use the same building doing what it used to do the same way,” said Behring, who spoke at a Friday press conference alongside Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife. “While it might be big headlines to talk about data centers, this project is very much different.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring said there are various definitions of what a “data center” is and the space is not like a typical data center that is made up of racks and computing for different outside parties in a dark place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For us, the data center is effectively really strong computers in your office,” Behring said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The project includes three neighboring buildings and would house a 39-story apartment complex directly above the 19th Street BART station, 20 stories of office space and a parking area. The site already supports up to 20 megawatts of computing capacity because of its past use, according to Behring. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For comparison, that’s about 15 times smaller than the \u003ca href=\"https://www.imperial.ca.gov/276/Data-Center-Info\">largest proposed data center\u003c/a> in the state, which would consume 330 megawatts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI data centers popping up around the country have sparked concerns about water and energy usage, noise pollution and health effects. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the Bay Area, data center proposals have not gone over well with residents. From \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076074/oakley-drops-data-center-plans-approves-massive-industrial-project\">Oakley \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12093604/theyve-been-very-quiet-pittsburg-residents-seek-answers-as-data-center-sets-up-shop-in-city\">Pittsburg \u003c/a>in the East Bay to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101914179/bay-area-communities-resist-data-center-boom\">Gilroy in Silicon Valley\u003c/a>, advocates have cited a range of environmental and aesthetic concerns with facilities planned in their communities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I wanted to be absolutely critically clear that this is not the large-scale mega-facility that people have expressed, and legitimately so, concerns,” Fife, who represents downtown Oakland where the project is proposed, said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The councilmember told reporters her goal is to revitalize the downtown area by bringing responsible development to the city, and that she’ll be communicating with Behring to keep an eye on the proposal and ensure the public is informed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents still aren’t so sure. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Party for Socialism and Liberation has emerged as one of the project’s primary opponents, starting an online petition over concerns AI data centers “destroy jobs and the environment,” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“As long as tech billionaires control AI, they’ll use the technology to raise profits by eliminating millions of jobs. And they don’t care if they have to destroy the planet to do so,” the website reads. “This fight is about who decides the future of Oakland: the people, or the ultra wealthy.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Behring said the project would provide up to 2,300 jobs, with neighboring businesses producing more. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposal, which was sent to city staff a week ago, is still in the beginning stages, so it hasn’t reached the City Council. Fife said it may not need additional approval if Behring’s uses conform with existing uses by the Lawrence lab. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Either way, Fife said she’s in the process of developing legislation that would define what responsible AI use is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/jlara\">\u003cem>Juan Carlos Lara\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
"airtime": "SUN 9pm-10pm",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.commonwealthclub.org/podcasts",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"id": "here-and-now",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/hiddenbrain.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
"subscribe": {
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Science-Podcasts/Hidden-Brain-p787503/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510308/podcast.xml"
}
},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
"imageAlt": "KQED Hyphenación",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/xtTd",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id73801135",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/M4f5",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Planet-Money-p164680/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Political Breakdown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"subscribe": {
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0c2d153-ad36-4c8d-901d-f1da6a724824/political-breakdown",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown",
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