It’s Saturday morning, the kind where the sunlight feels like a personal attack and the inside of my mouth tastes like I licked the floor of a dive bar. Which, come to think of it, isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility for some nights. Fired up the laptop, blinked through the haze, and stumbled across this Forbes piece: “AI Is About To Make Us Redesign Education Around Work.” Christ, another prophet preaching from the digital mountaintop. Pour myself a little something to cut through the fog – hair of the dog, hair of the goddamn robot dog, whatever.
The piece kicks off with some poor bastard reminiscing about his waiter days, back when folks said “I’d like” or “Could I please have.” Now, it’s all “I’ll do the filet,” “I’ll do the Cobb salad.” Heard it myself. Some schmuck at a greasy spoon the other day, “I’ll do the gut-buster breakfast.” Like he’s performing surgery on the damn thing, not just shoveling it into his face. The writer calls it a symptom of the “dumbing down of work.” No shit. People think ordering lunch is an accomplishment. Next they’ll be expecting a medal for successfully operating the toaster. “I’ll do the toast, medium brown!” Pin it on ’em.
This “I’ll do” bullshit, it’s like everyone’s the star of their own shitty movie. They’re not just existing, they’re doing existence. What are they doing? They’re asking someone else to do something for them. It’s a command wrapped in the illusion of action. Pretty neat summary of half the management class, come to think of it. I need another cigarette just thinking about it.
The article then bellyaches about education. Grades are up, but the kids are learning less. They’re not even reading whole books. Why bother when you can get the TikTok summary, right? Some think tank says college kids “learn” for about 25 hours a week. The rest of the time? Probably “doing” a Netflix binge or “doing” a keg stand. Learning ain’t doing, the article says. True. Learning is usually what happens after you’ve done something incredibly stupid and survived to regret it. That, or you read a dusty old book written by someone who did.
Then we get the obligatory mention of some government bigwig, a Secretary of Education no less, confusing AI with A1 steak sauce. Perfect. That’s the level of genius we’re dealing with here. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s like a scene from a bad dream, the kind you have after too much cheap whiskey and gas station chili. “Yes, our students will be well-versed in artificial intelligence, and we’ll serve it with a nice New York strip.” Probably thinks “cloud computing” is about predicting the weather. Another drag. The world’s a goddamn circus.
So, AI in schools. The new shiny toy. Newsletters, use cases, accelerating learning. AI to organize your time, AI to spit out flashcards, AI to write your goddamn love letters if you’re too lazy. Instructors using it for lesson plans, presentations, assessments. Even feedback on student writing. Sounds like a paradise for the terminally uninspired. Why bother thinking when a machine can do it, and probably with fewer typos? Just tell the bot, “I’ll do an A-plus essay on Hamlet’s existential angst.”
But then, the hand-wringing. The fear. Cheating! Kids asking AI for summaries, breaking down problems, getting first drafts. “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” one headline screams. Well, color me surprised. It’s human nature, ain’t it? Find the shortcut. Always. Back in my day, it was crib notes scrawled on your palm or a shared term paper bought from some desperate grad student. Now, it’s a goddamn digital ghostwriter. The tools change, the grift remains the same. Makes you almost nostalgic for good old-fashioned plagiarism. At least that required some effort, some cunning.
The kicker, though, is that these little cheaters are graduating into a world that supposedly demands AI experience. Companies are slurping this AI Kool-Aid down by the gallon. So schools are stuck. Ban it and produce know-nothing Luddites? Or embrace it and pray the kids don’t just turn into high-tech parrots?
The article quotes some British fella, Tom Bewick, who nails it: classrooms built in Queen Victoria’s time, kids taught in batches like Ford cars, judged on what they can puke back up in an exam with pen and paper. An educator from 1890 would feel right at home. That’s progress for ya. Chalk-and-talk, because it’s easy and cheap. And in this glorious system, “AI literacy” means knowing how to use AI to be a better student. A better memorizer. A more efficient regurgitator of facts no one gives a damn about five minutes after the test.
This is where the piece starts to make a lick of sense, even through the bourbon haze. The world of work is different from school. Shocker, I know. In school, you’re serving yourself, your “intellectual development,” your goddamn leisure time. At work, you’re supposed to be serving someone else. Doing something productive. And here’s the rub: knowing how to use AI to learn ain’t the same as knowing how to use AI to do something useful.
Employers aren’t gonna throw a parade because little Timmy used ChatGPT to write a paper on the socio-economic impact of frog mating calls that no one, and I mean no one, wants to read. They want people who can use AI to do a job better, faster, or maybe even invent a new way to do it. Graduating with 120 credit hours of AI-assisted lectures doesn’t mean you can do jack shit in the real world. It’s like that Subway guy saying “I’ll do the tuna.” You haven’t done anything, pal. You just pointed.
So, the solution? The article says it’s a shift to “more effective learning modalities.” Fancy words. It means project-based learning. Actually making things. STEM kids building stuff, social science nerds running campaigns or cobbling together budgets. Artsy types putting on shows or creating simulations. They mention some University of Chicago kids simulating a papal conclave from 1492 and electing a Jewish pope. Now that sounds like a party. “As far as I know, I’m the only person in the world claiming to be the pope right now,” says the kid. Ballsy. I like it. Using AI to manage “complex negotiations and internecine feuds” from the Renaissance? Hell, that’s half the corporate world right there. Maybe there’s hope for these brats after all.
But even that, the article admits, ain’t learning to use AI for an actual employer. That’s a whole different bucket of piranhas. When today’s snot-nosed high schoolers hit the workforce, they won’t just be prompting a chatbot for fun facts. They’ll be “human copilots to intelligent agents.” Sounds like something out of a crap sci-fi novel. But it’s probably true. Employers will want people who’ve worked with these “agents,” understand business processes, know how to prompt, tune, and challenge the damn things. Analytical skills, orchestration skills, AI product experience. You don’t get that from writing a paper on the symbolism of colors in The Great Gatsby, even if AI helped you outline it.
So the whole AI-in-schools debate, the cheating, the learning tools – it’s a sideshow. The real problem is giving students experience working with AI to actually do things. And schools, bless their bureaucratic hearts, ain’t set up for that. Career services are a joke, mostly. The internship gap is wider than my bar tab on a bad Tuesday. You need willing employers, employers who’ve already got this “agentic AI” crap running their show, and who are now willing to let unproductive students fumble around with it. Good luck with that. Sounds like asking a hungry wolf to babysit a lamb chop.
And here’s another gut punch: young folks are working less anyway. High school kids aren’t scooping ice cream or bussing tables like they used to. They’re all chasing “prestigious” summer programs or “service learning trips to exotic locales” to fluff up their college applications. They think slinging hash is beneath them, but they’ll happily pay a fortune to go build a latrine in some village they can’t find on a map, all for a gold star from an admissions officer. Meanwhile, 52% of college grads are underemployed. Fifty-two percent! Doing jobs that don’t need a degree, probably still saying “I’ll do the fries with that.” It’s a goddamn tragedy, or a comedy, depending on how much you’ve had to drink. My glass is looking a little low.
So, the article lays out three “concrete steps.” Here we go.
The grand plan is that “priority A1” (cute) for education is to make sure kids get decent first jobs and understand what real work is, so they don’t go around saying “I’ll do the tuna” like they just solved world hunger. It’s a tall order. A goddamn skyscraper of an order. You’re talking about overhauling a system that’s been calcified for centuries, fighting against laziness, bureaucracy, and the general human tendency to avoid anything that looks like hard work.
Will it happen? Some of it, maybe. Bits and pieces. Some schools will try. Some kids will actually learn something useful. Most will probably muddle through, same as always. The AI will get smarter, the jobs will get weirder, and we’ll all keep stumbling along, looking for the next drink, the next distraction, the next paycheck.
Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to get this damn blog to write itself. Maybe I should ask an AI. “I’ll do a scathing, insightful, and hilarious blog post.” Yeah, right. If it were that easy, we’d all be geniuses, or at least gainfully employed.
The sun’s a little higher now. The coffee’s gone cold. Time to find some real A1. For a steak. Or maybe just another shot of something strong. That’s one kind of “doing” I still understand.
Alright, enough of this horseshit. My head hurts. Chinaski out. Going to see a man about a bottle.
Source: AI Is About To Make Us Redesign Education Around Work