This post is a continuation of my post from yesterday, available here.
I’ve been predicting the death of the classroom for three years, and wishing for it for far longer. We have classrooms, and continue to have classrooms, for the same reasons that factories organized themselves around the steam engine: it was the best response to available technology. That is, in a world without the internet and AI, in person synchronized learning with a figure of authority leading the class was the most efficient way to make learning happen.
And while we do have the internet and AI now, we have become so used to the status quo of the classrooms in universities that we find it difficult to reimagine what a classroom will look like given today’s technology.
Here’s one way to see classrooms: they’re solutions to coordination problems. A lot of students wish to learn a particular topic, a professor has knowledge about said topic, and a class in that classroom is a way to coordinate the dissemination of that knowledge to those students at the same time. For many years, if not centuries, it was the only way to disseminate that knowledge efficiently. There were, to use the language of the economist, no substitutes available that could achieve the same result at lesser cost.
But with the advent of the internet, and especially AI, that is no longer true. I can turn up tomorrow at a time and place of your choosing and give any number of students a class on, say, the principle that incentives matter. But all the students who attended that class by traveling to that place at that time could just have sat at home and learnt about this principle from ChatGPT. They could have had discussions with economists, sociologists, theologians and anthropologists and linguists about incentives. Pretty soon, they can build customized videos of their favorite sports personalities giving them a class on this topic.
Now, you might bristle at the thought and say that this couldn’t possibly be better than learning from a human. Not now, not forever, you might insist. But what if one of the students has to travel for this class from, say, Gadchiroli? What if this student cannot understand English all that much. What if this student learns best when concepts are sung to him, rather than spoken? What if he doesn’t relate to some of the examples being discussed in class? It needn’t be a student from Gadchiroli, and it needn’t be this particular list of problems. The point is that no human, no matter how good and multi-lingual she may be, can ever hope to achieve the level of customization that AI can. And once you take into account travel and coordination costs, it’s game over. You may still say that being taught by humans is better, but it is already no longer as efficient. That’s just a fact.
Why, just this past semester, I finished teaching a course in Principles of Economics to students at the Gokhale Institute. There were a hundred and fifty students in the class, and so I gave forty speeches across the semester. That is, there was absolutely no chance of in-depth conversations, detailed feedback and customized learning.
Why not split up the class instead, you ask? Because cost, of course. You save on the money you pay to the faculty by combining classes, quality be damned. From my own selfish perspective, combined classes are great, because saying the same thing twice is boring as hell – but from the point of view of the students, it is a whole other story.
So why not take the next logical step and save the cash that you have to pay for just the one combined class too? Why not have AI take the class instead? I’m quite serious, AI should be putting people like me out of my current job.
Note, however, that I’m saying it should be putting me out of my current job. When I write posts about the death of the classroom, what I am really hoping for is the death of universities structured around the concept of in-person classes the whole day, day after day, for two years.
AI solves the coordination problem, and takes away the need for in person classes. But at the same time, and as a direct consequence, it raises the need to have in person mentoring, and in person interactions with peers. The role of the in-person university with a physical campus goes up, not down, because of AI.
The classroom need not solve a coordination problem, but the university can (and should) become a coordinating point. It becomes a place where students interact with their mentors. It becomes a place where guest lectures take place. It becomes a place for in-person seminars, conferences, talks and walks. It becomes, in short, a place for ideas to blossom and bloom.
Cafeterias, amphitheatres, lawns and cafes will dominate such a campus, not classrooms. We will need Schelling points for discussions, as opposed to Schelling points for listening.
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. So all my rhetoric and flights of fancy aside, there will still be demand for (and therefore space for) classroom based learning. But it will be a supplement to other kinds of learning, as opposed to being the primary mode that it is today.
A university dedicated to the spread and discussion of ideas, as opposed to a university that drowns you in classes, day after dreary day.
My, what a revolutionary thought experiment.
EconForEverybody 