HigherEd Series: What Should Students Learn When AI Can Do the Work? with Nils Gilman of Berggruen Institute

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My assumption in the piece is that AIs are already really good at doing many things that we expected students to do, like writing papers, like solving problem sets. And they're also really good at the kinds of things people are going to do in the workforce, whether it's writing marketing materials or coding things for software companies. So the value add people in that equation isn't going to be the ability to write code. It isn't going to be the ability to write marketing copy. It's going to be something else. And what I tried to do is kind of a first principles assessment of where I see the AI tools currently going based not on their current capabilities, but on their fundamental architectures. There are certain things that they actually just can't do because they're not really meant to do it.

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Welcome to the EdTech Insiders Higher Education Series, hosted by Matthew Raskoff. Matthew is an education innovation leader, a Stanford lecturer, and a regular guest on our podcast, whose work focuses on expanding access to knowledge and opportunity through digital learning. In this series, he speaks with leaders shaping the future of higher education. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Welcome to another episode of EdTech Insiders and our special mini-series focused on higher education innovation.

We have a fantastic

guest today, Nils Gilman, who is senior advisor at the Berggruen Institute, a former administrator at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of a very new and interesting provocative essay that we're going to have a chance to talk about today about higher education and AI, originally published in Persuasion, then republished in the Chronicle of Higher Education that we'll include in the show notes. Nils, thanks so much for being with us. It's really a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Matthew, thank you for having me on. Maybe

we

could

just get started with a little bit of your own biography, your own formation. I know you're an intellectual historian. Maybe you can give us a little bit of that lens on yourself. What's your own intellectual history and how did you come to where you are today professionally and intellectually?

It's