Could AI help us, not replace us?

The time has come for humanity to make a choice: Will we build AI to replace humans or enhance them? This hour, the "humanistic AI" philosophy, a test case, and a glimpse into the future of work. Guests include Siri co-creator Tom Gruber, CENTURY Tech CEO Priya Lakhani and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more at plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, building AI that puts humans first. Fifteen years ago, millions of people around the world might have had their first interaction with AI when they talked to...

• 1:13Speaker 03

  My name? It's Siri.

• 1:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes, Siri. Apple's voice-controlled virtual assistant was added to new iPhones in 2011. That was a year after Apple CEO Steve Jobs had set his sights on the technology and the people who'd been building it.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  He's kind of surprised us. He literally called us on our iPhones at work. And he's like, hi, Steve. Yeah, sure, you're Steve. Right.

• 1:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Tom Gruber was Siri's chief technology officer and head of design. Steve Jobs invited Tom and his other two co-founders to his house.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  I mean, imagine being in Steve Jobs' house in Palo Alto. There's Ansel Adams on the wall. There's a beautiful Carver amp. Like, his taste, this guy. And it's all private and quiet. And for three hours, we talked about what would it be like to build products together. And the reality distortion field completely worked. At that point, like we were so seduced.

• 2:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  They were made an offer they couldn't refuse and sold their company to Apple, who we should mention is a financial supporter of NPR. Siri was folded into Apple products and debuted on October 4th, 2011. Celebrities were ready to demonstrate how seamlessly this little voice could fit into our everyday lives.

• 2:30Speaker 05

  Remind me to clean up tomorrow. OK, I'll remind you.

• 2:34Speaker 06

  Find me a store that sells organic mushrooms from Arizona.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  This organic market looks pretty close.

• 2:40Speaker 06

  Set timer for 14 minutes.

• 2:42Speaker 05

  OK, 14 minutes and counting.

• 2:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  It was one of Jobs's last projects ever.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  The day after Siri launched is the day Steve Jobs died. And apparently, we're told that he did get to see the demo.

• 3:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  So that was 15 years ago. At the time, were you worried about the ethical considerations since people did attribute human thinking to Siri? I mean, did you start to think, hmm, this is at the forefront of getting this kind of technology into regular people's hands? We really need to think about what's OK and what's not OK.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. If people took Siri too seriously, it means they're out there on the part of the curve where people are a bit inclined to see agency in inanimate objects more than other people. But in general, I saw that, yeah, of course, AI was moving ahead. While I was at Apple, the deep learning networks came to power. And we were then saying, look, we've got to lay down the ethical foundation because the stuff is coming fast and we need to make sure that we don't use AI to exploit people, that we use it to augment and work with people.

• 3:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the fall of 2016, big tech companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, competitors with each other, they came together to form a nonprofit called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. Apple soon joined as well. Tom Gruber was their representative. And in 2017, he shared his thoughts on what their goals should be from the TED stage.

• 4:19Speaker 07

  I'm here to offer you a new way to think about my field, artificial intelligence. I think the purpose of AI is to empower humans with machine intelligence. As machines get smarter, we get smarter.

• 4:35Speaker 07

  I call this humanistic AI, artificial intelligence designed to meet human needs by collaborating and augmenting people.

• 4:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was around the time that you gave your TED Talk in which you introduced the idea of humanistic AI. Can you define what that was in your mind?

• 4:55Speaker 04

  The idea was really like, where do we stand in the world of the future of AI? And so there was really two paths I saw. One path was you can sort of say machine intelligence or machine centric, delighting and celebrating how smart machines were getting relative to humans. And there were businesses being formed to use that to automate human work. And then the other way of looking at it, which I call humanistic AI, which wasn't just my idea, it was a lot of people had this idea, was that the purpose of AI should be to actually help people do things they're trying to do by either augmenting their intelligence or collaborating with them as an intelligence.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  And so it turns out that down the road now, that was a watershed, because now we see companies that are raising money by the billions with the explicit goal of automating white collar work. And then we have other companies that are raising billions of dollars and saying that our job is to help solve some of humanity's big problems and make people smarter. So that's why I wanted to give it a label. And that's why I call it humanistic AI.

• 6:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, I mean, I have to admit, I was in the audience, I didn't get it at the time. I was like, this guy lives in the future. But the future came pretty fast. 2022, 2023, LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude and perplexity, regular people started using them. And do you get that sense that people get it now?

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Oh, I think so now.

• 6:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  It is 2026, and in the US, AI anxiety is at a fever pitch from fears about the destruction of white collar work.

• 6:37Speaker 08

  What is happening? Why is this happening so fast?

• 6:39Speaker 09

  I value my brain. I value my ability to think. I don't want to outsource it.

• 6:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  To protests in towns where massive data centers are being built.

• 6:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  To debates over the government using AI as part of its military operations.

• 6:54Speaker 08

  Anthropic refusing to allow its powerful AI models to be used for autonomous lethal weapons and.

• 6:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  For those who have been calling for ethical guidelines all along, this moment represents an opportunity. It's time, they say, for these conversations about how AI is built to move beyond Silicon Valley to the public. Because AI is no longer a futuristic possibility, it's here now, and decisions need to be made. Recently, a declaration of human rights for the AI age was signed by a cross-section of leaders from across the political spectrum, including Ralph Nader and Steve Bannon. Ensuring AI allows humans to flourish could just be the one idea that everyone, no matter their politics, can agree

• 7:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  on. Making sure tech is built to serve humanity has been Tom Gruber's goal for decades. It all started when he was studying psychology and computer science in college in the 1970s.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  I was a little frustrated that the psychology of the day didn't have very good experimental methods to truly understand the mind. There wasn't really cognitive science yet. Then a computer showed up at my university in the late 70s, so I was able to start programming. And just by reading some papers and so on, I discovered artificial intelligence. And I said, wow, this is the way to start studying intelligence, by making it.

• 8:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  A few years later, Tom began a graduate degree focusing on cognitive science and AI, working to build machines that could mimic the mind, at least a little bit.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  The models that we could build then were nothing like human intelligence. They were just crude approximations. So then we decided, okay, well, how would you augment human intelligence? And one of the ways is to shore up where there's some kind of impairment in a human capability. And so the first project I did was to build what I call the communications assistant for people who can't speak, who have like cerebral palsy in this case, but also ALS and folks like that, that have neurological conditions that makes it hard to speak like we're speaking here. And so we built an AI program that had an LLM, a little language model, maybe a TLM, tiny language model.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  That actually predicted the next word and the next phrase based on single motor action, like a switch on their muscle. They could actually communicate in sentences.

• 9:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  So was that voice then or no, not voice?

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was voice even then. They all sounded like a strangled Swedish person back then. Something called a Votrox, voice synthesizer, very primitive. And no prosody, but it was voice.

• 9:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, this is pretty common, right, Tom? That like a lot of extremely hard, technical problems. They're often built for people who need them the absolute most. But then, once the tech gets going, often developers find a way to get it into the hands of all of us. Is that what happened with Siri?

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Siri wasn't so much by disability, but it was definitely a kind of handicap. Imagine you're in a car and you're trying to text somebody or you're trying to get the directions and you are cognitively loaded.

• 10:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Meaning you're concentrating big time.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, you should be concentrating on the road. And if you're distracted, it's dangerous. You're not supposed to touch it. So it's as if you can't use your hands.

• 10:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  And you're not supposed to look at it. And so how would you use your mobile phone? Well, you have to have a voice interface. That's a dialogue. And so that's the kind of thing that Siri was bailed for.

• 10:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Where are we now with AI in our lives? It's not just a voice in the room. We're sort of at a tipping point in terms of understanding how they might change the way we live.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. We are at a tipping point. I mean, everybody now has access to a real amazing, intelligent partner to help them do things in their lives. It's almost free. It's unbelievable. And it's the same conversational user interface in the front end. So it's really kind of held that style. But the backend has gotten extremely smart. Like, you know, I mean, I shouldn't get that excited. I've seen AI for 40 years, right? And all of a sudden, it's just like a million times different than it has been in the past. As Yuval Harari says, you know, anything that's made of words, AI will own.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  I mean, who else has read everything in the world and can talk about it? So anyway, I am simultaneously freaked out and excited and scared and unbelievably optimistic. However, we have to act now on the basis that we have superhuman ability to talk a good game, which means persuade people, do things against their will, convincing them and so on, but also helping them in ways that they couldn't do otherwise.

• 11:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  We're not seeing any regulation around AI here in the United States. Where does this go back to your idea of humanistic AI? What sort of guardrails do you think we need to be putting around it right now?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, the humanistic AI framework would say that the objective function of the AI, that is, the thing that the AI is optimizing for, should be human benefit, not, say, profit or something else. And human benefit is hard to measure. So there's no easy prescription. So we have to decide if we're going to put guardrails on a thing. We have to solve the engineering and scientific problems of detecting that something the AI is doing is harmful to humans. We have to build theories of human harm and human benefit into our objective functions. So that's what I think we should be working on. I think it's not just a matter of regulation.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  It's a matter of the scientific agenda for AI research.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  We have a choice in how we use this powerful technology. We can choose to use AI to automate and compete with us, or we can use AI to augment and collaborate with us, to overcome our cognitive limitations, and to help us do what we want to do, only better.

• 13:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, how ethics could be built into AI going forward. Today on the show, AI that puts humans first. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 13:29Speaker 10

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• 13:57Speaker 11

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• 14:21Speaker 12

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• 14:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. We're spending the hour talking to Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of Siri, about how to build AI that puts humans first. Because it can feel like, right now, AI is on a collision course with humanity. Recently, for example, the US Department of War struck a deal with OpenAI while its competitor, Anthropic, fought back over military use of its models. And people responded. Some deleted OpenAI's ChatGPT in protest or downloaded Anthropic's Claude to show support. Tom believes that if regulation falls short, it will be on consumers to push the market

• 15:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  towards AI that feels safer.

• 15:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Meanwhile, he says there are technologists who are trying right now to shape AI behavior that could prevent future doomsday scenarios.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  For instance, imagine a scenario where the AI escapes and takes over, maybe takes your money, maybe starts running cyberbots and attacks people and so on. And so there are things that are prerequisites to those scenarios, like can it lie to you effectively, masquerade itself as something else, prevent itself from being turned off? These behaviors you can put guardrails around, and people are studying that.

• 15:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, because I feel like every so often, there's some report that comes out that's like, oh, Claude manipulated the developers in some way, they got to fix that.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we're just seeing the beginning of this. So we have to come to grips with this. This is one area of just safety that there's no easy answer, but I would hope that we have competition among the big AI model companies and like which ones are going to be safest. So for example, back in the old days, there was a brand allegiance to Volvo because it really went to the great extent to be safe, like the best airbags and the best heat seats and all that sort of thing. So I think we should be able to have AI compete on how safe it is so that people who know could buy the one that is safest.

• 16:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you see that happening anytime soon?

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Globally, yes. We see a lot of distorted thinking at the national level here and ideologically driven policy and so on. I think hopefully we'll get past that. But the key thing is that we still have a free market system and we still have the freedom to choose among a set of AI products.

• 17:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, you probably know a lot of these mostly guys running these companies. What do they say? Do you bring this up with them? I don't really hear much about safety from Sam Altman.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  No, you don't hear from him or Elon, but you hear it from Dennis, from Satya, from Microsoft, definitely from Daria Amato from Anthropic. So I think of the studios that make the foundation models, Demis and Daria, Anthropic and DeepMind, Google, have always been safety conscious and have serious, well-funded teams working on that part of the problem. And that's the sort of healthy, normal thing you would expect from a company that's worth trillions.

• 17:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, when I first started really digging into tech and reporting on all of this 15 years ago, I have to say, I was a lot more optimistic and excited about the possibility of building these sort of altruistic systems. But like, we've been down this road, Tom, with social media, with the surveillance economy, attention economy. It seems like any chance for a tech company to take advantage of its users, it will. So what makes you think this could be different?

• 18:17Speaker 04

  One thing that's different is that the foundation infrastructure of AI, the models like Claude or Gemini and these models, they're super expensive to build, both in money, time, especially talent, which is very rare, for now. Anyway, they're hard to build these things, and there's only a few of them, maybe 10. The good news is that they're fairly omni-purpose at that point. And once you have the models, then the rest of the world builds applications on top of them. So the rest of the world can compete on humanistic applications. I mean, look, you can go out there into the dark web and get the most nasty evil software

• 18:58Speaker 04

  in the world, or you can go out there and find lovely games or educational things or whatever. You can find everything in the application world. I think we're going to see that with AI, too.

• 19:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is that kind of how Apple created the app ecosystem and you have to adhere to certain privacy standards?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Well, that's a very good analogy there. It would be great if there was something like an app store for AI that would do the work of at least minimally establishing whether an application is in the benefit of humans or not. You know, X is using AI to do evil things right now. It's already happening. So we can't stop, I can't stop them, you can't stop them. Only a government could stop them, and they're not stopping them this year. Right? So, okay. But you don't have to use X, you don't have to use Grok.

• 19:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  There's a talk that I know you're giving that says that instead of talking about giving up our privacy and self-determinism, we should start thinking about, instead of big brother being what tech has sort of become surveilling all, we need to think about big mother.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. I tried to figure out what would be the right symbol, and I found, I think, an African elephant is kind of a cool big mother.

• 20:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  It's smart, protective, the matriarchs are the ones that run the herds, they're the wisest and smartest and so on. So imagine a female African elephant with her calf, and think about her value alignment. She will do anything to protect the calf. And obviously, humans, too, human mothers, they nurture their children, they teach them right from wrong and truth from falsity, and then they show them skills to survive in the environment they're in. That's what AIs can and should do. Machines can now have access to everything in your life that's digital. And with that, you can build amazingly good recommendations about how to use your attention, maybe give you insights on things you could discover or learn from.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  At the same time, that same data is extremely powerful if it's used in a surveillance economy against your interests, to addict you, to make you buy things. This is why it's a real ethical choice. How you optimize the AI is actually a massively important societal choice today. It's not a technical thing that we lead to the engineers or to the boards of directors of companies. It has to be done at the society level. And so I think big mother is a way to say, go ahead, have a lot of data. Like, mothers know everything about their kids, but mothers are aligned with their kids' interests.

• 21:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Siri inventor and AI pioneer Tom Gruber. You can watch his TED Talk at ted.com.

• 21:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  As Tom said, there are people around the world who are trying to build AI with a big mother mindset. Sure, knowing more about our minds than mere humans can, but using those superpowers to make us better without trying to take advantage of us. Priya Lakhani says she is one of those people.

• 21:57Speaker 13

  I think AI could be the single most positive technology to impact everybody's lives in an educational context, but it has to be developed responsibly.

• 22:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  Fifteen years ago, Priya was an entrepreneur, building schools in India. But back home in the UK, she found that schools were struggling too.

• 22:19Speaker 13

  20% of children cannot read or write well enough. In the United Kingdom, there were some statistics that were just as poor to do with mathematics. And it was just a real shock to my system. I thought, there's a fundamental problem here. And if we don't fix this in the UK, then we're definitely not going to be able to help the sorts of places where I'm trying to make a difference. And so just out of pure curiosity, I went to schools.

• 22:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  What she saw were two big problems.

• 22:45Speaker 13

  You may have maybe richer resources, more teachers in different ratios, but once you close the door of the classroom, you will often find there is a teacher stood at the front, delivering a sort of one-size-fits-all delivery of education. And then the second problem that was prevalent across all schools was every teacher workload was a massive problem. There were teachers who were stressed, they were anxious, they had far too much to do, to the point where they were considering leaving their roles. We were tens of thousands of teachers short in the United Kingdom. You know, how can we have a professional who was trained for this position, enjoying their role in inspiring children, imparting knowledge of a subject that they're really passionate about, and being able to do so confidently and in a way where they're not exhausted?

• 23:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  She realized the outdated tech in classrooms could be the solutions if it could curate a tailored education experience for each child and give teachers instant data about where exactly each student was struggling. So she looked around at what was on the market.

• 23:49Speaker 13

  There was one very large company in the US that was talking about this already. It was touted as this massive AI system for education, sort of similar sounding, personalizing learning, reducing workload for teachers. But they were using a type of machine learning that is very common for retail systems. So recommender systems that track user behavior and then recommend what you like, right? So if a student is on the system and they're learning biology, you get a lot more biology.

• 24:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Kind of like TikTok.

• 24:19Speaker 13

  Right. The problem with that is that that is not going to work in education. That's because in education, sadly, sometimes you need to give someone what they don't like. And it's often you'll find, particularly with younger people, they don't like the subject that they're struggling in.

• 24:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Right.

• 24:34Speaker 13

  You can't ignore that. What you need to do is have a system that's a little bit more complicated, give them some things they like to keep them engaged. But you do have to hand them the foundational prerequisite knowledge that they're missing in order to increase their knowledge and skill set in areas where they're struggling. And so it was going to be a more complex system from the outset, and it didn't exist. And that is where the journey to create Century really started.

• 24:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Century Tech is the educational tech company that Priya founded in 2013. She says the platform's goal is to support overworked teachers, not take their place. There is, of course, a big debate in education right now about the role of AI in teaching. Some believe funding should go straight into schools, not into technology that's trying to make money off of learning. Others think the only way to make education accessible to every child will be with the help of AI. That's the camp that Priya is in. But she says that doesn't mean replacing the hard, even grueling work that happens in the classroom between teachers and their students. Here's Priya Lakhania on the TED stage.

• 25:42Speaker 13

  We need to combine artificial intelligence with neuroscientific theory and the learning sciences to learn how every single brain in this room learns. Because if we can fix learning, we can improve outcomes. We can personalize education for every single one of us and provide intelligent insights to teachers to reduce the workload. So 12 years ago, I built a team. They built the technology. It exists. Students use it in over 140 countries. I thought it would be really important to share with you some student feedback that I have on our platform. Because it tells us what children's expectations are when they use an AI education partner. So I get feedback like, I think Century will help me to achieve things that I thought were impossible. It's a golden child, right?

• 26:27Speaker 13

  My life's purpose has been fulfilled. And then, these sweet, lovely, innocent children send me messages like this. I don't like this website. It makes me able to do my homework. Wait, I'm being bribed. I will give you £100,000. I'm not joking. You just need to give me no work. Give me a button to do the work for me.

• 26:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  If I was to go into a classroom as a student to use Century tech, what would my experience be like?

• 27:00Speaker 13

  The teacher would walk into the classroom, say, right, everyone, you want to log into the machine? And they could either set them learning material. Usually, they set them a set of questions. The teacher has their dashboard open and they can see how the students are performing. So information would light up about who is struggling. The teacher would then walk around the classroom and be able to make those interventions real time. Okay, so this student, why did you answer that question in that way? And the teacher's then using their expertise. So that's a blended learning environment. And the teacher would then utilize that information to then be able to not just stand in front of the class assuming everyone's taking in the knowledge and asking people to put their hands up and spot checking with their knowledge. You can walk around and have that very targeted intervention with students.

• 27:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so that's in the classroom. But what about at home?

• 27:45Speaker 13

  So half of them will use it as teacher sets homework. So Manoush, you've been given this assignment by your teacher. It's on Pythagoras' theorem. You may be a student where before that, it has automatically given you some maths work on roots and powers. Because it knows that you don't understand that. And there's no point you doing the Pythagoras work if you don't understand roots and powers. In the same way, right, if you master that work, it can then do what's called a smart recommendation and stretch you as well. So some people will use it for assignments in that way. And then the others will use it in a flipped learning way. So teachers will be planning on teaching a lesson. They'll say, right, we would like you to learn the lesson on century the week before.

• 28:28Speaker 13

  Students do that in their own time. Teachers then receive the information of how the students have done. And then that lesson the following week is a far more targeted lesson as to what did they understand, what didn't understand. So fifty percent of the platform is about the teacher because we fundamentally believe that empowering teachers is one of the best ways to improve education. They should not be doing data analysis off spreadsheets in the evenings, which is what many of them sadly have to do. They should be receiving insights from our platform instantly so that they can then go into the class the following week, focus on that particular concept, but not have to just teach it one size fits all. They should be able to say, right, I can see that here is the misconception a third of you have.

• 29:10Speaker 13

  Or, you know, they can pair off the class into different peer groups. We have various dashboards that show you which kids are excelling in this particular topic, which ones are really struggling. And all of that data is turned into actionable insights. So it's a highly flexible system. And the reason that has to be the case, Manoush, is because teaching is as personalized as learning is. I don't think it's right to build a system and say, here's the system and here is how one must use it. Teachers are different, they're professionals. And some of them will prefer to be standing at the front and inspiring.

• 29:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 13

  Some of them much prefer to be having those sort of one-to-one interactions walking around the classroom.

• 29:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  So you're not replacing the teacher, you're making it possible for the teacher to shine in the way that they shine is the idea.

• 29:54Speaker 13

  A hundred percent. And I don't, this is a really controversial topic for discussion in education about this replacement of the teacher. Because a lot of big tech, for example, they've said this is the future of education. I don't think they understand what education means. Education is not transfer of knowledge from textbook into brain. Education is so much bigger than that. These schools are, they're like the old village. They're providing an enormous amount to students beyond the formula for Pythagoras. This is about augmenting the teacher and being able to push us all ahead. And if you can improve the baseline sort of standard of education, we can focus on skills that really matter in an age of AI.

• 30:37Speaker 13

  The problem, Manisha, that a lot of neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have discovered is that we can over-rely on tools and we can completely bypass the cognitive processes.

• 30:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, I think I have an example, actually. Tell me if I'm right.

• 30:50Speaker 13

  Tell me.

• 30:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  So I was going to spend time in Italy recently. And so six months ahead of going, I downloaded Duolingo and I took Italian every single day. And I got to Italy and literally all that would come out of my mouth was ciao, buongiorno, cappuccino por favor. That is it.

• 31:09Speaker 13

  That is highly useful Italian for someone like me.

• 31:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  Well, yes, but it did not get me very far. And so what I can only imagine is that I was able to figure out very quickly what the game wanted me to say.

• 31:21Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 31:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  Or how to please whatever the owl wanted me to do. But when it actually came to real life application of the alleged knowledge I had put in my brain, I had none. I really was distraught. I'd spent a lot of time and I didn't have anything to show for it. And I guess my fear is that in these classrooms, it looks like the kids are killing it on their test scores, on all the work that they're doing. But when it comes to actually being competent adults in the quote, real world, they will not be able to fend for themselves, whether it comes to knowledge or judgment.

• 31:55Speaker 13

  Well, this is what I like to call automation complacency. And it's a very digitally transactional memory.

• 32:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes.

• 32:02Speaker 13

  And the problem is, is that you've done it very quickly, but you haven't thought deeply about that particular answer. It's this sort of reliance on technology where actually it kind of weakens the productive learning behaviors, right? It creates this unrealistic expectation about the ease of learning. So basically, people are poor judges of their own learning. So when information is presented fluently or quickly, when you're on these apps, right? You're doing it quite quickly, you're feeling quite good about yourself. You tend to believe that you understand it, even though your actual retention is low.

• 32:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  When we come back, Priya Lakhani explains why kids need what's called a productive struggle in the classroom and how she thinks AI can help them get it. On the show today, how to build AI that puts humans first. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Don't go away.

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• 34:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, AI that puts humans first. We were just hearing from Priya Lakhani, the founder of Century Tech, an education technology company. Priya says they use AI to create friction, to make kids work to learn, unlike chatbots that try to replace human thinking or simply transfer knowledge. Here she is on the TED stage.

• 34:59Speaker 13

  Think about how we felt when we first used ChatGPT. I think we thought, wow, I never need to do any work ever again. This is amazing. And then it hallucinated. And I think we've ended up with this sort of sinking realization of acceptance, right? That the shortcuts don't really replace the work. They're very helpful, but we still need to learn and we need to think. Now, when we read those long answers that an LLM chatbot gives us, it feels very fluent. The problem is, is that fluency, we often mistake for learning. What we actually know about learning is that learning requires what researchers called a productive struggle.

• 35:43Speaker 13

  It's this sort of mental effort that builds understanding. Sustained mental effort strengthens the parts of the brain, and it's positively correlated with growth in the brain. Durable learning does not come from shortcuts. It comes from certain types of effort. And this is why AI is amazing for education, because AI can spot patterns in how we all learn. It can force you to generate an answer rather than just reveal the answer, and it can provide amazing structured feedback against expertly designed rubrics from teachers.

• 36:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  So AI that's effective in education doesn't spit out the answers or nudge the students towards the right answer, like in gamified apps or chatbots. Like, that might be fun.

• 36:29Speaker 13

  But it's not terribly educational, you're saying. Exactly. So these sort of AI-generated explanations, or very quick learning or quick apps, amplify that effect because they make you think that it's clear, it's confident, particularly if they're anthropomorphizing the technology so it feels like it's very human. You're kind of conversing with it, you're talking to it. Think about that working memory, right? Now, you can retrieve that after a short period of time. The problem is, is can you do that later? So we can be cognitive misers, trying to conserve mental effort. In a learning context, if the technology replaces the very thinking that a student needs to develop, then learning can suffer. Mm-hmm. We've actually had teachers come to us and say, can you put in more coins and badges and characters?

• 37:14Speaker 13

  The kids love it. But the point is, if you learn that, oh, when I put in effort, I get a badge, you then start to build up an extrinsic value for learning. And that's actually really unhealthy. What we need people to have is intrinsic value. I'm learning for learning's sake because learning is good. Mm-hmm. So learning agility, just the ability to learn how to learn. I believe fundamentally that those overly gamified applications are bad for young people. That's why we don't do it. And it's a business, right? Companies are very focused on engagement. You're measured by your daily average users, your monthly average users. How often are they coming in? When do they engage? Why do they log off?

• 37:55Speaker 13

  Because the more engaged that people are, the more money you're going to make. There's a perverse incentive to overly engage them. So what are you measuring for then? If not engagement, then what? My key success metric is how quickly can I get this kid off the screen? And so we give guidance that's completely the opposite of a typical company. We say to schools, you know what? You really should not be on our system for more than about an hour and a half a week. If you're sitting there for nine hours a week, th- this system is actually not performing at the level in which we would hope it to be. It's really challenging. Because that generative AI market, it's a race by the big tech companies.

• 38:38Speaker 13

  So when it comes to Gen AI, how they build those tools is going to mean everything for the future of human flourishing. And it really sits with a handful of people in this world, which

• 38:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:50Speaker 13

  Look, I run a tech company, I have shareholders and investors, but we're a social enterprise. We have a very different set of metrics as to how we're measured. There are so many instances where, for example, we have said, no, we're not going to build it in that way. Our neuroscientists will turn around and say, no, can't do that. That's generally known to be bad for kids. This is why educating the public about AI is really important. Which model was it built on? What was it trained on? Which data? What is it trying to do for you? Is it beneficial for you? Is it providing you with something where you are then exercising your brain rather than just sort of transferring the skill set over to the AI?

• 39:33Speaker 13

  If you can then answer those questions, you are going to be very, very well equipped to decide whether that is good for you or bad for you. That is powerful.

• 39:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was the founder of Century Tech, Priya Lakhani. You can watch her full talk at ted.com.

• 39:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  So Priya says her technology won't make teachers obsolete. But there are fears that educators and many, many more careers will be replaced by AI that can do their jobs. But there are others that say that's not how innovation works. The workforce won't disappear, though it will change, says Vlad Tenev. Vlad is the co-founder of Robinhood, a financial services app. He's exactly the kind of Silicon Valley billionaire you'd expect to tell you everything with AI is going to be fine. But his argument isn't, don't worry, it's, look at history. Because what we think of as a job today won't be the same tomorrow.

• 40:37Speaker 14

  Let's take a moment and reflect back upon our lives when we were 20 years old. Think about the opportunities for work and career that lay in front of you. How many of you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to do for your career? Not too many. How many were overwhelmed by all the options? I know I felt the same.

• 41:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Vlad recently gave a talk called "AI is Coming for Your Job, Now What." In it, he told his own story of being 20 years old and graduating from Stanford University with a degree in mathematics.

• 41:14Speaker 14

  Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification, and I probably wouldn't have listened if they did. Now, my first month in graduate school, Lehman Brothers went under, the start of the global financial crisis. Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure, found themselves packing up their cubicles. Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all, or whether we were in store for another decade-long Great Depression. But amidst the uncertainty, some of us found a source of optimism. The iPhone App Store came out that very same year, 2008.

• 41:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  And the idea that anyone could build a digital game or service that could be delivered to millions of people and a device that lived in their pockets? Well, it was the digital equivalent of when the first pioneers found gold in California in the 1840s. Vlad was all in.

• 42:19Speaker 14

  I still remember when the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps was released. I was up all night, reading it, learning, trying to understand. I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field. Pretty much everything I've done since then was a product both of the economic malaise, but the technological optimism of the time.

• 42:45Speaker 14

  But times have changed. The average 20-year-old today also has quite a bit of fear. But this time, emerging technology is not the antidote to that fear. It's the source. And they're asking themselves, will that career I'm looking at even be around in 10 years? One reason why it feels different this time is because AI, unlike the iPhone, is the first tool that we've built that's capable of leaving the toolbox, and we don't yet know its limits. A few years ago, I founded another company with the mission to build mathematical superintelligence, artificial intelligence that can reason and solve problems better than any mathematician.

• 43:30Speaker 14

  I always thought of mathematics as the pinnacle of human intellectual activity. So, a superhuman AI at mathematics could potentially be superhuman at everything. Combine that with my day job, which is running a global financial services platform, it's led to me spending a lot of time pondering one very important question. What do we do in a world where the vast majority of today's jobs are gone? And I want to analyze this question rationally, without fear and hyperbole. One way to do it is to look back through history and see if there's been a time

• 44:12Speaker 14

  where we faced this type of job disruption before, at anything near these levels, and how we as humans have navigated it. Now, I'm a technologist, not a historian, so with that caveat, let's go back in time to a world a 20-year-old would have known tens of thousands of years ago.

• 44:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  In approximately 50,000 BCE, most people were hunters, gatherers, or toolmakers. Very few of us today know anyone with those job descriptions.

• 44:46Speaker 14

  The main occupations of the Paleolithic era are largely gone, but they didn't disappear overnight. Instead, they were subdivided into lots of other, more specialized jobs.

• 44:58Manoush Zomorodi?

  The next era, the Neolithic era, saw all kinds of different vocations popping up, thanks to advances in how people stored their food and built shelter, domesticated plants and animals.

• 45:11Speaker 14

  Humans have mastered a few new things: farming, keeping livestock. The invention of these things allowed us to spend more time doing what we consider creative work and less time on pure survival and subsistence. And this opened up a lot of new jobs. You had artisans like weavers, potters, you had farmers. These jobs too, largely all gone. In the US today, we should say farmers make up less than 2% of the workforce. Let's move ahead through the changing jobs of the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Exploration.

• 45:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  Each age, the same thing happens. Jobs are lost, sure, but more, different jobs take their place.

• 46:00Speaker 14

  Too many jobs to count, a lot of them are gone. Any blacksmiths or explorers in this room? I didn't think so. It might come back with space exploration. If you think about it, most of our last names are from jobs that our families no longer do. Potter, butler, butcher, smith. Any Fletchers in the audience?

• 46:27Speaker 14

  Anyone know what a Fletcher is? I was going over my talk this weekend and my son said, "I know what a Fletcher is, Dad. He plays Minecraft."

• 46:38Speaker 14

  A Fletcher is someone that makes and sells arrows. So if you know someone with that last name, their relatives were arms dealers.

• 46:48Speaker 14

  Now, my point in all of this is job disruption is then an essential quality of human evolution. We want work to disappear because it means that we're doing our jobs as humans, making our lives better and easier. So with AI, maybe it's not the job disruption itself that makes us so nervous, but the speed with which it's happening. So why don't we accelerate? We're going to go right through the Industrial Revolution into the modern era.

• 47:19Speaker 14

  In the 20th century, a young person in the wake of companies expanding and automating would have found an entirely new menu of jobs that their parents never had access to. So instead of working in a factory, they would have had the selection of a wide assortment of new office jobs. And some of the parents were probably thinking, "You sit in a chair all day. That's not real work." Now, the internet era. We see all around us jobs that didn't exist before. We have people getting paid to play video games, eat at restaurants, travel, talk to their friends on video.

• 48:00Speaker 14

  Those last people, we call "podcast bros." And we take our jobs very seriously. But if you took someone from the 20th century, when people first started contemplating these problems and they could peek into our world today, they would think that all of the predictions around technological unemployment came true. So where does all this leave our 20-year-old at the dawn of the AI era? One feature that we found is recurrent throughout generations is this feeling of exceptionalism. We'd like to think that somehow we're at a discontinuity, where history ends

• 48:43Speaker 14

  and we're in a new world with no precedent. And maybe it's true this time. We really don't know if we're building a super assistant or an apex predator. Certainly, all change and disruption brings with it a painful transition. Jobs will disappear. Perhaps they'll disappear at an accelerating rate. But at the same time, we see one undeniable trend.

• 49:13Speaker 14

  There's going to be new jobs and lots and lots of them across every imaginable field. Where the internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff. The jobs will not look like real work. Much like to our predecessors, our current jobs would have looked like leisure. And I bet that we would feel the same about our descendants in the future. And I can tell you with near certainty that a humanity that's capable of building a superintelligent AI also has the creativity to navigate through this potential job doom and gloom scenario. Although we'll never stop worrying about it,

• 49:57Speaker 14

  being hyper vigilant about threats to our survival is a key part of evolution, what makes us human. I can tell you that you shouldn't take predictions about future job disruption to keep you from doing something you feel very passionately about. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s, teachers discouraged me from becoming a computer programmer. Back then, it was a common thought that all those jobs would be shipped off to China. So even where it seems obvious, sometimes our predictions of the future end up being completely off. Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose,

• 50:40Speaker 14

  even in the darkest and most uncertain of times. I feel very, very confident that the 20-year-olds of the future, perhaps in collaboration with AI, will continue to build new things, which simultaneously we're going to be scared of, but also excited by.

• 51:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, a mobile financial trading app. And one of the places where he thinks people will go when they no longer need to perform labor to earn an income, but do things like trade on various markets to earn money. Critics have called the platform risky, especially considering that billions have been invested in AI companies that aren't profitable yet. You can see Vlad's full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you watch some of the videos that we've been making with our guests. If you're on Instagram, you can find them @manoushz. That's M-A-N-O-U-S-H-Z.

• 51:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode was produced by Phoebe Lett and edited by Sanaa Zmashkhanpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, James Delahoussaye, Fiona Guerin, Harsha Nahada, Rachel Faulkner White, and Katie Monteleone. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Damian Herring and Simon Jensen. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, and Daniela Bella Rezo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:17Speaker 00

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