AI in Education: Will Students Build the Future or Just Consume It?

Welcome back to another episode of AGI. School's out Saturday. We're talking about preparing students for their future, not our past. Two things have thrown me on the show. One is having students who will come on and talk. And then, of course, when it's a Boilermaker, that's double the pleasure because both my kids graduated from Purdue. My youngest is considering IU for medicine, but we're still trying to talk her out of it. No, IU's a great school. But Nishad, thanks for joining us, man. Computer science student. Purdue University, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, yeah. First, I'd like to thank Jason for having me over here. And yeah, I'm Nishad. I'm at Purdue studying computer science and just got done with my second year. So I'll be in my junior year in like about nine days, we'll be starting back to school. And I'm from Abu Dhabi, so I'm an international student over here in the U.S. So, you know, it's something good to be out of your home country and get a new experience, learn something new, experience a new culture, new environment. So, yeah, it's been good two years. Yeah.

And you were part of the extern program through TechPoint. You and I met at the TechPoint event. Like, tell us all about that, man.

Yeah, so TechPoint hosted a Community Connect event, which was about two weeks ago. And I had the privilege of meeting Jason over there. And, you know, so we had something like a AI conference. And after that, we were just in tables discussing about like, you know, how AI is changing the world and some personal opinions on AI and how everyone's feeling about it. And I'm fortunate enough that Jason was just sitting beside me and, you know, we just starting having a great conversation after the table got over. And yeah, and here we are recording a podcast. So it was a great event. I mean, I'll give it to TechPoint for, you know, connecting us over there at that time. Yeah.

Well, most definitely. And I want to dive into what it was like doing your internship at Cummins and the external program. But let's start with like the difference in vibe and feeling that there are even people at that conference. I mean, you know, when you and I weren't together anymore, when we were sitting at that table, we were I think some people were a little more advanced in their exploration of AI than others. But it was all pretty much on par, like people everyone, there were some different kids from different universities as well as a professor, and they were all pretty much in the idea of AI as a part of and changing everything as we go. But I was sitting down at the end for one of the keynote speakers, and like two-thirds of the table were pretty much poo-pooing the idea of artificial general intelligence and the idea that this was going to displace much of the workforce. And I was like, Are you guys serious? Like you, you really, you really don't think that there's going to be like an enormous amount of change as this technology continues to advance at an even more rapid pace than what we're seeing right now. And that agentic AI is not really that big of a deal and isn't that effective. That was kind of what they were saying. I like, what is your