Education is Failing our Students in this AI-Driven World

Schools and universities are failing to adapt to our modern world, in which AI is becoming increasingly pervasive in all aspects of life and work. In fact, AI may be changing what should be considered foundational knowledge that all students must learn. In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the role of AI in education and the future of learning. They note the bureaucratic inhibitors to educational reform, and the fact that classroom teachers don’t have the authority to innovate and personalize the learning process for their students, and discuss how AI tools can support personalized learning while preserving critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Featuring: Daniel Whitenack – Website https://www.datadan.io/, GitHub https://github.com/dwhitena, X https://x.com/dwhitenaChris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/chrisbenson.bsky.social, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonSponsors: SerpAPI: A Web Search API that gives developers real-time, structured access to search engine results. Visit serpapi.com/practicalai https://serpapi.com/?utm_source=spotsnowpodcast&utm_campaign=practicalai to get started for free and get 250 searches every month. Resources and Events: Register for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars! Prior Webinars from our partner Prediction Guard https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRpRdFmBfdF6boDgAD3nNaLm8Yx4KN2VtMidwest AI Summit 2026 https://midwestaisummit.com/Chris’s new book The Art of Swarming will be published soon, written to be the seminal foundational book for the fledgling swarming industry, defining the principles and architecture that enable autonomous agentic UxS swarms with emergent unified embodied intelligence.

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, onto the show.

• 0:41Daniel Whitenack?

  Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. In this episode, it's just Chris and I. My co-host in these episodes, where we don't have a guest, it's a lot of fun to just dive into some of the topics that are of interest to us and that are in the news or at the top of our minds or guests or listeners' minds as they've expressed them to us. So excited to dig in with my co-host, Chris Benson, today, who is a Principal AI and Autonomy Research Engineer. I'm Daniel Whitenack. I'm CEO at Prediction Guard. How you doing, Chris?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm doing great today. How is it going?

• 1:20Daniel Whitenack?

  It's going wonderful. It's a very exciting time in my life, both business-wise, lots of cool stuff going on, but I know you and I talking before and even about some of the things that we'll maybe talk about today, thinking a lot about kids recently. So for our listeners that don't know, I am expecting my first child in a couple of months here and or less than a couple of months.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's coming up.

• 1:53Daniel Whitenack?

  Coming up rapidly.

• 1:57Daniel Whitenack?

  And I've been saying a couple of months, but it's past that time.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01Daniel Whitenack?

  So, yeah, very rapidly. And so I'm, for listeners that don't know, I'm about 40 years old. So it's been, my wife and I, it's been a little while. We, you know, been married quite a while. And so I'm going to be an older dad. And I've been thinking about things like, oh, man, I'm going to be an older dad going into these like parent-teacher meetings or school meetings. All of these teachers are going to be, you know, 20, 24 years old or 25 years old. And I wonder what my perspectives will be as I come into these situations. And not only that, but there's a lot of things changing technology-wise, which I know

• 2:45Daniel Whitenack?

  has been at the top of your mind, Chris.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you're not too, so like, to talk about my background and, you know, after coming through school myself, and then I had a previous marriage where I raised, contributed to raising two stepkids that I love and I'm still very close to, as we were talking about a little while ago, who are now grown and out in the world doing their stuff. And kind of went through the educational process with them as a stepdad and showing up at those meetings. And then in a second marriage, I have my current daughter. I know I mention her periodically on the show. She's now a freshman in high school, 14. And so I'm doing all that over again. And so have, you know,

• 3:32Speaker 02

  kind of went through two series of public school all the way up through. In addition, just as I know you do, I work with a couple of universities in an advisory role and stuff, the different roles with different universities. But I get to see up close and personal the education at that level well and get to contribute a little bit to the thinking around what should be done and stuff. And, you know, since we always kind of tend to start the show with a pun, we have all this beautiful fall weather. I took a walk with my dogs a little while ago, and I was thinking about how education is falling short right now in terms of all the changes, you know.

• 4:15Daniel Whitenack?

  It is the season of.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  It's a dad pun, right there.

• 4:18Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  You got to get the dad joke in. So, you know, it's been on my mind a lot. I've been in parent-teacher conferences. We're looking at college once again. And I'm thinking of all the things that, you know, we talk about on this show all the time, how fast things are changing. People are worried about jobs. They're worried about the future. What are they going to do? And as I have mentioned, I spend a lot of time thinking about this, partly because I'm actively working on a book about what life for humans will be like going forward as agentic are pervasive in all parts of life. It's a very, for a general audience, it's a very future-forward book. But that gets me thinking about,

• 5:05Speaker 02

  you know, what is my, when my 14-year-old is now 40 and she's trying to deal with life at that point, what does that look like? How, you know, what can we predict? Or what can we only speculate a little bit less? And so I'm going through that thinking process. And as I do that and show up at today's, you know, school events and all that, I'm just constantly going, oh, my God, this is a disaster. So I'm not trying to pick on our school system, which I'll leave unnamed, or the universities that, but I'm recognizing that education, just as the job market, needs to kind of level up with AI, as we talk about quite a lot. Education does too. And I was proposing that we have a conversation about that.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  And I know you were willing to jump in as a new dad here. And wanted to just kind of talk about where things are at and what those gaps are, and maybe bring some insights as two people who think a lot about these topics on where the future of education might be able to navigate to.

• 6:09Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, I think, I was trying to think of some other transitions that, you know, where I could draw parallels. And it's a little bit hard to, like, maybe you could say, you know, computing in general or personal computers or that sort of thing. And maybe those, you could draw parallels there. I was thinking even with social media. I think a lot of what we've learned about social media is that maybe those of us that were in that first generation to adopt social media, we really had no idea what we were getting into. And in some sense, it's like the introduction of opioids or something where everybody is like, you know, or some substance where it's like, oh, we're going to put this in everything.

• 6:54Daniel Whitenack?

  And now we realize, looking back, maybe that was not the best way to handle things. But even with social media, obviously, social media affects all of our lives. But it's not as connected, maybe to the way each of us individually work and our roles in our work as AI is, right? Unless you're doing digital marketing or something like that, or maybe if you're in HR, trying to look up people's social media to see if there's problematic things coming your direction. But yeah, I think generally, like, if you were a mechanical engineer before or after social media, like, maybe you have a LinkedIn now

• 7:39Daniel Whitenack?

  and there's some level of professional side of that, but it didn't really, it didn't really necessarily change the way that you did your day-to-day work. But AI has come on both more rapidly than social media, and it actually is affecting the way we all do our jobs, the way we all do our work, and the way that we learn, right, in our educational system. So in a sense, it's both more impactful and happening faster than other things.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  It is. And I think, you know, we hear a lot about educational institutions at all levels struggling with that, you know, and then kind of the initial guidance was kind of, you're not allowed to use AI. And, you know, you got to do the work yourself. And that was largely, I think, because there was no concept of how to integrate AI, the reality of that, into that work stream that students are producing for their education. I think that's starting to change a little bit, at least in some places, because at this point, you know, it's very clear this is not going away. So I think some forward-leaning people are starting to try to identify, how do we integrate, you know, for the rest of these kids' lives

• 8:54Speaker 02

  as they grow up and they're in the workplace all the way? They're going to have these tools, and the tools are going to progress and get better and better. And so I think that's a big part of it is, is how do we, you have that happening with individuals, but how do we start getting that institutionalized so that school districts approve curriculums and states that have requirements that all schools have to meet, you know, get on board with that? And that way, the teachers have the flexibility moving forward to actually kind of move the ball to where the reality is. Because right now, it's lacking.

• 9:30Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. Maybe, I'm curious if you see this distinction or if it's a distinction that even matters. But there's, in my mind, there's one piece of it, which is, AI is going to be a part of the way we all do our work. We need to educate people on how to use AI and how AI is integrated into our work. So that's one side of things. The other side of things is potentially, and I think different people have different opinions about this, right? There are certain things that we need to ideally learn as humans to function well in the world, like as part of our educational system.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 10:11Daniel Whitenack?

  And if AI is interfering with the way that we learn those topics, then that could be problematic. Or there's also a need to maybe adjust our educational system so we ensure the learning of those topics. So I'm thinking of, you know, whatever it is, let's say, basic math skills, right? I think it's reasonable that a younger person, I don't know, this shows how ignorant I am and how, I don't know, I don't know anything about, anything about a lot of what I'll be experiencing over the coming years. But I don't know typically at what level,

• 10:55Daniel Whitenack?

  you know, certain levels of math are introduced currently in curriculum. But I imagine that.

• 11:03Daniel Whitenack?

  A child could interact with an AI chat interface and get math answers

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:11Daniel Whitenack?

  way before they're even introduced to the subjects where they're expected to know and learn that intuition. And so if I'm only getting those answers from the chat engine and not, you know, learning actually how to do at least a basic level of math, many would see that as problematic. I could also see just for a hot take on the other side, right? If you take the example of like spelling or, you know, cursive or so, you know, there's probably a lot of examples where you could say, well, spelling now, if all I'm doing is putting text into Word documents and spell check is integrated, or maybe even AI is just generating those for me. Well, spelling is no longer a relevant skill for anyone to learn. So

• 11:56Daniel Whitenack?

  why, so, so I think there's, but I guess what I'm saying is there's one side of this, which is we need to educate on how to use AI. There's another side of this, which is what are those fundamental things that we need to learn as humans outside of AI that are fundamentally or could be interfered with if we don't apply AI correctly in the educational system? Does that distinction make sense to you, Chris?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think it does. I think if you to draw out, I agree with everything you said. I think to draw that out a little bit more, um, there are, there are some skills that such as the ability to do critical thinking across a number of domains, the ability to be creative across a number of domains, and then to have the content, like whatever, whatever discrete skills that you might be taught in school, as you pointed out, and those may change and some things that we think of as foundational foundational may be changing. But having enough context in your learning around your ability to do critical thinking and to be creative together, um, so that you can collaborate

• 13:06Speaker 02

  with the technologies going forward and arrive. So without the context, and that's kind of what you're getting at there, you know, having the, the math skills that you need to be able to follow along, maybe with harder math that you might be working with an AI, but you, there's a certain level you gotta get to. And so

• 13:22Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  I think, I think being able to find that mix of educational context mixed with those creative and critical thinking abilities to solve problems collaboratively going forward with AI, because that's going to be the reality we're all facing.

• 13:38Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, maybe another way to put it is I, I, I, well, again, people have different opinions, probably, but at least from my point of view or worldview, or however you would frame it, I don't think you really advance in your character and development as a human without discomfort and struggle, right?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  I agree with that.

• 14:02Daniel Whitenack?

  And so, and so a part of whether that's, you know, advancing in your marriage, advancing in your ability as a worker, advancing in your, you know, uh, uh, character as a, as a human being and the values that that you want to hold to, you, the, the, the struggle of life is actually how, how that is stressed and how those things are, are built up, right? And so I would view a part of the educational system as, or maybe the counter example I'm trying to draw out is, well, maybe it doesn't really matter if basic math or spelling is

• 14:44Daniel Whitenack?

  a part, is like a fundamental skill now, if it's stressing the right sort of thinking and allowing you to experience discomfort that advances your mindset, advances your problem solving, advances your decision making, advances your resilience, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um, like, like you were saying, Chris.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:07Daniel Whitenack?

  We've talked a lot on the show about how an AI agent needs an underlying harness that has connections into the real world, into MCP servers and real systems and data sources. That's the only way that it can work towards a useful goal. And that's why I'm so happy that we're partnering with SERP API, which is a web search API that gives developers real time structured access to search engine results. This is an amazing tool that you can plug directly into AI agents to power their actions and get them to the proper outcomes. This is very simple integration, and this includes access to over 100 APIs within SERP API to

• 15:51Daniel Whitenack?

  access things like Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, and many other sources. So I would really encourage you to check out SERP API, integrate it into your AI agents. Visit serpapi.com/practicalai to get started with SERP API for free and get 250 searches every month. Visit serpapi.com/practicalai to get started with SERP API for free and get 250 searches every month.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  The points you were making there in that last segment, I think, were, were spot on. I think, um, I think right now, we're at a moment where we, we need to start looking at things that, that have been foundational for generations, uh, in terms of what you need and figure out how does this apply? You know, you mentioned spell checking and how that does. And, and spelling is still important at some level, even though we have spell check, because, uh, it contributes to accurate communication that we have. And so, but the question of whether or not a word, you know, like there's a, there's a certain amount of, uh, of,

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I think, analysis that needs to occur on, uh, if we take our foundational skills and look at what the world's going to be like a few years down the road, um, is that something that we're already, are we already offloading some of those skills to AI? And how are we collaborating to solve really tough problems? To your point about the struggle, um, I know that in my own, uh, life, as I'm working with AI every day, I know both you and I are collaborating with, with AI models all the time. And, um, and that has changed the workflows on how I engage a lot of problems. And in a lot of ways, it's supercharged what I can do, the productivity. I know I've mentioned that before, in terms of what I can generate. So my output is

• 17:50Speaker 02

  way above what it, what it was possible a year ago. And so I'm starting to really look at how am I doing that? But I am noticing that that struggle still exists. Um, it's just being placed in different places. Um, you know, I can, I can turn out, for instance, uh, if we're, if I'm working, I'm just making up an example. If I'm working on a website that I need for some function, uh, I can turn out a bunch of code pretty quickly. Uh, and depending on what it's, you know, what it's necessary for, there's a certain amount of rigor that goes around that. Um, but in a lot of cases, I'm able to offload a certain amount of that and focus on the creative process that's driving it.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  And, and I think that's one example of, um, how good I am at Rust, which is what I usually use these days, uh, is mattering less now than it was a year ago, right now. And so, um, and so, you know, that's just one of many, many examples. I'm, I'm doing a lot of authoring, like I said, and in that authoring, a lot of the research, uh, uses tools, to go out and, and qualify things that I'm about to, to suggest or put forward and stuff. And so I think the, the thing that we need to do is to establish kind of what does this look like now? What does this look like over the next few years? And how do we want to start making adjustments? Because if we lag too far in education, the kids

• 19:17Speaker 02

  of today are going to have a really hard time. And, you know, I'll finish by saying, in the workplace, I end up mentoring quite a few, uh, younger people that come in out of, out of, uh, university and they'll be in their, uh, early or mid twenties or even late twenties. And, um, and the ones that are at university are struggling a little bit to, to adjust to, uh, the new realities of workforce to some degree. And so I think, um, we need to speed up the self-reflection process is what I'm getting at.

• 19:46Daniel Whitenack?

  So I think that that, so I agree with everything you're saying. Maybe I'll be a little bit divisive here or something like that. And with basically say, okay, well, in light of all of that, if I'm an, if I'm a high school teacher, should I let students use AI on their assignments? In what, in in what ways is that question, I guess, useful or maybe not useful? Maybe that's a good way to frame it.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  I think, uh, I'm, I'm going to pivot you a little bit because I got, I got smacked down a while back. Um, uh, about a, I don't know, a year or two ago, we were actually having an episode and I was talking about teaching and stuff like that. And I had multiple teachers reach out to me, uh, after that episode and say, we don't have, like, you just put something in our lap that we don't have the authority to do.

• 20:35Daniel Whitenack?

  Control of.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  We don't have control of, uh, you know, that comes down from, from on high and we're within those boundaries.

• 20:41Daniel Whitenack?

  And they implement.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's correct. So for all of you teachers out there.

• 20:45Daniel Whitenack?

  Understood. Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:47Daniel Whitenack?

  So good recommendation for when I go into parent teacher conferences.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:53Daniel Whitenack?

  I might be grumpy about other things, but I should keep that in mind.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  You probably will at times have, you'll be frustrated because you'll walk from your world, which is very modern into it. It'll feel like you're going into your child's world, which is a little bit archaic. And that's frustrating as a parent to say, why is it still this way? And yes, uh, you know, the, the, the academic handcuffs are on to some degree. Uh, so I try to keep that in mind as I'm having parent teacher discussions. Uh, but I do think that, um, school systems, I would say the one that I'm in, uh, you folks know who you are, uh, a few of you listen to the show. Um, you might be thinking about that. It might be if, if you are finding that you're using tools to learn yourself

• 21:41Speaker 02

  in life, bring that down for the kids, you know, figure out how can I do that? I know for me, using these tools, and I suspect it's the same for you. I rarely go and just get an answer unless it's a trivial thing, unless it's a completely trivial thing. I usually go and explore the nature of a problem so that by the time I get to an answer, I've used these tools to ensure that I've done a certain amount of that struggle myself. Uh, and it's a self-imposed struggle, uh, so that I've learned. And I found that by doing that, uh, these tools are catering to me. I've helped them. I've kind of given their profiles about me and they're able to present information that's really optimal

• 22:21Speaker 02

  for me. And so even at 56, my current age, I am learning rapidly, uh, certainly as fast as I have done, uh, over the last few decades or faster, uh, because I have these tools to do that. What I'm suggesting is we need to push that down into more of a systematic uh, approach in the school system and let these tools help kids at an individual level learn. Um, I'll give you one example before I shut up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be radical here. Um, but I did suggest this to a set of teachers recently and they, I think their face just dropped. Uh, and that is, I think school systems, most of the curriculum is well set long before and the teachers know what they're teaching, uh, far before they

• 23:03Speaker 02

  actually get to a given day when they're teaching it. Put that curriculum out there so that, so it, I'm not talking about the tests. I'm not talking about quizzes, but on the first day of school, have the whole year's curriculum out there so that you have the ability, uh, the, the kids are going to use these tools anyway, to some degree. Uh, and, and rather than call that cheating, let them learn the material and find, uh, find ways of determining how deep they're getting. Are they just getting, you know, shallow answers? Are they diving into it? But you can actually, as a parent, I can smooth out, uh, in certain areas where I know my daughter might struggle in certain areas and I can smooth that out, introduce things earlier, expand the, the period of

• 23:45Speaker 02

  time she's exposed to it and get her learning because I already do that as a parent. Um, and so when I suggested, let everybody, let everybody do that. They, they just, their faces kind of fell. Um, but I think that you could be a lot more efficient about getting individual students learning in specific ways that are specific to their learning styles and let the teachers become through school policy, uh, through district policy, become, um, kind of facilitators of that customization process. And I think teachers as humans would become much more useful in years ahead if they adjust their role to do that. I think we'll find that the, that the need for human teachers stays very high

• 24:30Speaker 02

  rather than just saying, well, they're going to get replaced by AI. So there's, there's my radical suggestion.

• 24:34Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. Uh, coming soon to a newly established Benson Academy for

• 24:41Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 24:42Daniel Whitenack?

  For youth. Yeah. Um, uh, see if you get funding for, for that one.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  I think I have a challenge in front of me there. There's a struggle there.

• 24:50Daniel Whitenack?

  I, I like, maybe a way to extrapolate a principle out of what you're saying there, Chris, is I do think that, or a piece of this is some sort of way in which both the um, elementary, high school and universities systems can allow for experimentation with this technology in ways that they aren't now. Because to your point, teachers are very much, uh, their, their hands are tied in a lot of cases in terms of what they can or can't allow, or even in some cases like, hey, you are going to use this tool to determine

• 25:31Daniel Whitenack?

  if this essay is written by AI or, or something like that, or it's integrated into those, those things. Um, and so they, they may or may not have a choice to do that, but somehow there needs to be the chance for experimentation. I know some of the things that I've heard is a bit of reprioritization and tie-in of AI. So less of focus on memorization and repeating facts, right? And maybe a way for you to look at the output of AI and find what is maybe not, not accurate, right? So one, one, uh, thing that I've heard certain

• 26:12Daniel Whitenack?

  teachers doing is saying, all right, here's, here's our topic that we're all gonna write an essay around. You are going to put this and ask for this essay into AI. And then what I want is your critical analysis of how that essay could be improved, um, in the output, or maybe where, what is not accurate in that essay, or what is framed incorrectly? And just assume that there are things framed incorrectly, or there, there is something to be improved, right? And I guess you could argue, well, that could be done with AI too, but it is teaching a different sort of mechanism with, with AI, right? Which

• 26:53Daniel Whitenack?

  is this, well, it is really a, you're looking at the output of this and not treating it as a gold standard, right? But you're building intuition that this needs to be checked and you're working back and forth on improving. And there's still critical thinking where you have to determine what, what is, uh, what is best, what is not, what is better, what is worse, et cetera. So, um, I'm not saying that's the perfect way to do it. I think I more mean, teachers and professors likely need the freedom to be able to try some of these things. And I don't know, I'm not familiar enough, um, obviously familiar enough with the educational system to know the mechanism through which that could happen.

• 27:37Daniel Whitenack?

  And, you know, maybe our listeners, if they're aware of some of, I'm sure that there's innovative programs going on, you know, in our country and other countries. If, if our listeners are aware of some of those things and maybe want to point us to some of those things, we would love maybe to have, have some of those experts on the show to highlight, highlight some of the more positive side of what's going on there, which I'm sure there are people experimenting.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  I'm sure. I, I would actually like to follow up and, and, uh, kind of put a challenge out there to viewers and listeners on this. And, you know, if we're looking at a future, going into the classroom a few years down the road, and we have, we still have our human teacher facilitating this process. And, um, you know, not a new idea right here. Uh, I know, I'm sure everyone's heard of it, but the notion of every student has a personal AI in the classroom with them, um, that's designed to help educate them along these things that we're talking about. Um, and maybe the AI, you know, may, I'm, I'm just gonna throw, maybe there's an earpiece in that the kid has, he can hear, uh, or she can hear the teacher clearly, but there's also an AI talking and saying,

• 28:47Speaker 02

  well, you know, how would you think about this? And as the teacher is working on that and the AI is observing the kids' struggle through the process, and they can cue them in ways that are customized for that particular student. Um, so the AI that the next student over may be cueing them a little bit differently, but it keeps them on track, keeps them focused on the work and keeps them on a learning curve. I'd love to hear, that's not a new idea. You know, we've heard about those things in the past. I'd love to hear how people are thinking about that, whether that's on track, whether there needs to be something different, uh, and how you would use that kind of capability.

• 29:24Daniel Whitenack?

  So Chris, just to highlight a couple of things, which you, you had sent me prior to this conversation, which I think are interesting, just a couple of data points here. Um, there was a 2025, uh, study field experiment with nearly a thousand high school mathematics students in Turkey, um, that found that a general chatbot improved assisted practice but reduced subsequent unassisted exam performance by 17% relative to a control. Um, then another study, uh, that was from Harvard undergraduate physics program, this was with around 200 students, found stronger immediate learning gains with a carefully

• 30:09Daniel Whitenack?

  structured AI tutor across two lessons than with its active learning classroom comparison. I know actually even when I was a teaching assistant at Purdue, this sort of active learning, uh, stuff was very, very much the thing that everyone was experimenting with. I, I don't know that, that field in its entirety, but I, I know that was a big thing back then. So it is encouraging that people are doing some of these experiments. I know that, uh, Purdue, which is in the town where I live, for those that, that don't, um, that don't know, um, local here to me, uh, I, you know, there's all sorts of mixed things. Different

• 30:51Daniel Whitenack?

  departments are handling things differently, but I know the sys, to your point, Chris, the system is doing certain things. So, um, Purdue, and I know this, they're not the only ones doing this, but they have now a, an actual requirement in the undergraduate, like across all undergraduate degrees, that there's an AI competency requirement. Um, and they say, uh, it's AI-focused coursework designed to build critical thinking, responsible AI use and workforce-ready skills. So, um, yeah, I think to your point, Chris, you were mentioning mentoring people coming in out of university. I, you know, I, I struggle

• 31:33Daniel Whitenack?

  to believe that, well, or maybe the way to put it is a lot of those students coming out of university, at least if they're working in my company. So maybe I just speak to my own experience. If they're not comfortable with wanting and digging into AI assistance in their day-to-day work, then that's going to be a problem for, for, for them at, at our company. That is an expectation. However, that's not necessarily what they're learning in their. In their university program where maybe they're, they have very much this, even if they like using it personally, they might have a negative association with AI in their day-to-day work because their day-to-day work has been university work and their university

• 32:18Daniel Whitenack?

  professors are up in arms about, oh, I'm guessing that you're using AI on this, or I'm trying to prevent you from using AI on this, or I'm using AI detection to prevent you from gaming this, this thing, right? Which, again, I, I feel for the professors because a lot of times their hands are tied there, maybe they don't know what to do. So I definitely see that side of things. But certainly those students, if they form that association, that's not what is present a lot of, at least, and, and I know certain companies are not as far along in their AI adoption, right? But the reality is we're going that direction, whether anyone likes it or not. And for you to have a job and a role, you're going to use AI in that role.

• 33:03Daniel Whitenack?

  So that is going to be an expectation.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, when you tell me this, you know, when you talk about the professor, you know, trying to say, don't do this and trying to detect it, I don't have the answer to that. But what I do have is, is my reaction to that is maybe, maybe we're measuring the wrong thing. Maybe we need to find, how do we get the student where the student needs to go without telling them that the tools that are going to be embedded in their lives for the rest of their lives are not fair, you know, that that is cheating, that kind of perspective? I think that needs to change. We need to find a way of getting those critical skills to those students, acknowledging that

• 33:50Speaker 02

  this, you know, we, we all go and drive cars and do things that are just completely part of our life. This is also now part of that life. And so we need to acknowledge that education is never going to be without this again. And so that's kind of what, that's kind of the, the little parental mission that I'm on right here is trying to do. Don't claim to have all the answers, but it's, it's a process, I think, that we need to engage in, in the large. It's a societal problem that's only going to get worse as we go forward unless we, we actively do that. I love hearing about Purdue's efforts in, in trying to, to start moving things incrementally forward on that. I'd like to ask Hugh a question. What are your thoughts?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  You know, I'm talking to my daughter a lot about college. I'm talking to her about higher education. You know, what does it look like to go through graduate school? What is a PhD in? You know, what kinds of passions that she has? Given the fact that the world is changing rapidly and none of us really know, you know, what kinds of changes in our career will be required because the world is changing? What are your thoughts on higher education and the utility of the PhD? Or how that utility may need to evolve to keep it, to keep it relevant? What are your thoughts there?

• 35:09Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, I would say maybe just in reflecting on my own journey, which is, is mostly what I can do, I guess.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 35:19Daniel Whitenack?

  What's interesting is I would say that in, I grew more as an individual and my abilities as an individual in terms of confidence, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity in my PhD program, like by many, many orders of magnitude than undergraduate or, or high school sort of environment. And I think that, one, that's because obviously it was a lot harder. And so again, that fits maybe my, my leaning towards that side of the, the utility of, of struggle in terms of your, your growth.

• 36:02Daniel Whitenack?

  But I think also the PhD, if you're thinking about PhD specifically, it is different from other educational endeavors in that it is necessarily, like you can't get a PhD without publishing novel research, right? And so regardless of how well AI systems can help you parse through the state of the art, they, at the end of the day, know the state of the art. And I know that people are working on AI systems that can kind of autonomously make maybe discoveries of their own, right? And so I do think that AI systems could assist in that exploration of what is novel.

• 36:45Daniel Whitenack?

  But to some degree, the PhD does force you to say, well, here are the fundamentals. I have a mental model of the fundamentals. Now where can I draw outside of the lines? Knowing also that others who deeply know the fundamentals are going to be skeptical of me and question me around this, where I'm drawing outside of the lines, right? So I, I very much appreciate and love, you know, looking back, and I still love this to this day, the idea of the poster session, right? I, I drew outside of the lines. I was creative and I'm saying that this is new territory and I think I'm making this

• 37:24Daniel Whitenack?

  progress in this area and I'm putting it on a poster in a room with 50, you know, very experienced experts and physicists and professors and researchers in this room. And they're all going to come up and ask me on the fly, you know, to, they're all skeptical about, you know, my, my work, right? And, and I love that. And I think that that, it's not for everybody. I, and I'm not saying that everyone should do a PhD, but I think it is unique within that, you know, educational paradigm. And it produces some of that unique outcome where I think a lot of, a lot of my confidence

• 38:08Daniel Whitenack?

  in operating in ambiguity came out of that process. So it, maybe it's less so the individual discoveries that I think are still valuable in that graduate school PhD program. Because I think you could argue, well, AI systems, if they're good enough, they could help us explore these topics and make new discoveries. And it's more, more that comfort level in working with ambiguity through the struggle towards a defensible position that you're confident in. That, that's actually a very creative process. And I think that that's a value. I think it's not the only way you can do that, right? Entrepreneurs that create ventures, right? Have a very similar type of process, right?

• 38:51Daniel Whitenack?

  And you could have an AI generate your business idea, but at the end of the day, that doesn't mean it has product market fit. And even if it does have product market fit, you can still sabotage your own business to make it not succeed. It, it's a very creative and difficult and, you know, struggle-filled endeavor. And so that produces that level of working in ambiguity, creativity, et cetera. And, you know, you could probably come up with other examples. So there's the PhD, there's entrepreneurship and venture building, there's creative pursuits, right? Whether it's, you mentioned writing, writing a new piece, you know, writing a, a book

• 39:29Daniel Whitenack?

  or, or art or whatever those things are that are pushing those boundaries where human creativity is still, is still what's needed. I, I, I think I strayed quite a bit from your initial question, but those are some of what, what it makes me think of. Those are, maybe it's a definition of where is, where are we finding value in our creative endeavors as humans? And how do we promote more of that? Which could be through a PhD program. I, I think they're still relevant. It could be through these other pursuits. But yeah, there's a real creative element at its core.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I know that you were saying that you had deviated a bit from the question, but you, you definitely inspired some thinking as we're winding up here on our, on our discussion. One of the things I think I'll take away and that maybe others might want to consider as well, is with you talking about the value of ambiguity, creativity and the struggle itself, and how that really, you know, enabled you to grow as a person. You know, you said orders of magnitude. And as I'm looking at, what if you were to take that process a little bit earlier in the educational process, down to where you are addressing fundamentals?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  How might introducing ambiguity, creativity and struggle, you know, and then allowing for some tooling to be part of that process, introduce fundamentals in a way that creates that critical thinking, enhances that creativity, allows kids to, to do it, though it may be a different path on how they're achieving that from what we're doing today. You know, a little bit less memorization and, and that kind of stuff and, and a little bit more driving them forward and relying on the rote stuff to the tool. So that's, that's where you've taken me, Daniel. And I appreciate that. So it's given me something to think about. Any, any final thoughts from you in terms of, you know, new dad about to hit the world

• 41:34Speaker 02

  with this?

• 41:35Daniel Whitenack?

  All, all is with the caveat of, I have no idea what I'm talking about. But I, I think that's like, maybe it ties back to the, maybe it ties back to the PhD thing. It's like, I'm perfectly fine operating in this space where I don't, I don't know everything and still having opinions and creativity. And I think, you know, I recognize that caveat that I am no educational expert. But I think it is an evidence of the fact that you can, we can, I hope, into this future, still develop people that have confidence and problem-solving skills and creativity.

• 42:19Daniel Whitenack?

  But I definitely think it's going to be, going to be different moving forward. And I guess maybe there's a follow-up show here in the future to maybe dive in with some educators specifically around, around how that's developing. I certainly know from even my experience with other technologies, that the educational systems are often behind, you know, even before AI, that was true. And that's problematic, right? The same with legislation, right? Legislation is always behind what we're doing with technology and that creates its own problems as well. But it doesn't mean that we can't catch up and make changes. And so would, would love to get any connections to educational experts out there from our audience. If you have them, please send them our way.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Good way to wind up. Thanks for, thanks for the conversation today.

• 43:07Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, same here. Talk to you soon, Chris.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  All right. That's our show for this week. If you haven't checked out our website, head to practicalai.fm and be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X or Blue Sky. You'll see us posting insights related to the latest AI developments and we would love for you to join the conversation. Thanks to our partner, Prediction Guard, for providing operational support for the show. Check them out at predictionguard.com. Also, thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder for the beats and to you for listening. That's all for now, but you'll hear from us again next week.