Dartmouth professor says he’s surprised just how scared his Gen Z students are of AI

In a recent interview, the former consultant at McKinsey and Innosite, a boutique firm co-founded by Clayton Christensen and Mark Johnson in 2000 and acquired by Huron in 2017, revealed that the mood among the next generation of business leaders is not just excitement, but fear.

“One of the things that always surprises me is how afraid our students are to use it,” Anthony said. He explained that this concern is not just about academic integrity or cheating. He explained that many of his students are excited about using artificial intelligence and pushing the boundaries of this new technological advancement, but a large portion approach it with “hesitation and fear.” They are “absolutely afraid.”

“There’s something about AI where I think people worry that they’ll lose their humanity if they rely on it too much,” Anthony explained. This differs from many of his fellow academics who have worked with him for a long time, who he said are usually eager to research the new tools available to them. New author Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern WorldAnthony spoke to luck About teaching a course about disruption while education and work itself are in the middle of disruption. “History teaches me very clearly that in the midst of change like this, it’s very messy.”

Fear of losing yourself

What he believes about studying imbalance and managing through it as a consultant, Anthony said, is that you look back later and the pattern becomes clear, but at this particular point, “there’s a lot of noise.” He said he understands and shares his students’ concerns about AI to some extent, as offloading too much cognitive work to AI will atrophy the critical thinking skills required for leadership.

An eye-catching MIT study published in June seemed to confirm Anthony’s point. It’s titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT”, with a subtitle mentioning “Accumulating Cognitive Debt”. It was widely covered by the media as supporting Anthony students’ concerns that AI tools could harm humanity in some way, and the study noted that “cognitive activity decreased in relation to the use of external tools.” In other words, this suggests that using AI makes you dumber.

Vitomir Kovanovic and Rebecca Marrone, from the University of South Australia, argued Conversation At the same time, the “brain-only group” repeated the task in question three times, a phenomenon known as the familiarity effect. They noted that the AI ​​control group was only able to “use their brains” once, and thus achieved only slightly better engagement than the brain-only group’s first attempt. They argued that AI works like a calculator, and that tasks have not become advanced enough to put students on alert, even with AI tools. said Anthony, who would not comment on the specific MIT study luck He has rolled up his sleeves on AI evaluations.

“I taught a class on how to lead disruptive change,” Anthony said, adding that he wanted to find someone who needed to learn a specific topic and use artificial intelligence to address that. That doesn’t mean he wants something like an AI-driven song that requires a single prompt to create. “I want you to actually go and reveal the gist of the work I did so that I can then go and see whether or not you learned anything.” Sometimes, he said, neat outputs are the result of students who haven’t learned anything, but he also gets “rough outputs when you see what they’re actually doing.”

When asked for the example of someone like Gore Leskovec, a computer science professor at Stanford University who took Blue Book exams several years ago, he said: luck It was reported in September, and Anthony said he respected that, but it wasn’t for him. “I’ve never taken a Blue Book test,” he said, noting that he only has a few years left in his career as a consultant and might try, but he’s not there yet. And some of his colleagues are still very strict: not only does one colleague take Blue Book exams, but “he doesn’t let people go to the bathroom during the exam. You just, you can’t leave the room.”

He agreed with Leskovits that some changes were indeed irreversible: “The writing is all good now. The bad writing has been eliminated.” This can be “dangerous,” he added, saying he really pushes his students to resist temptation.

“The thing I was really pushing, whether it was the students or the executives I was working with, was very tempting and easy to say, ‘Let me unload,’” he said. He explained that the reason had to do with what he learned about Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Child while researching his book.

What Jerry Seinfeld believes about hard work

To paraphrase Seinfeld, Anthony said he tells his students that “the right way is the hard way.” He referred to an interview Seinfeld did with Harvard Business Review In 2017, the famous comedian, who has a reputation as a micro-manager, was asked if he wanted McKinsey to help him with the process. “Who is Mackenzie?” he asked. When told it was a consulting company, he replied: “Is it funny?”

Seinfeld was making that point, Alexander said luckThat the hard way to be funny is the right way, at least for him. He said he wants students to do the “hard work” to develop the wisdom needed to manage AI effectively.

“We just have to separate people from technology when we evaluate learning otherwise we will get AI regurgitation,” he warned. That can be useful for some things, “but if you’re trying to find out whether people are learning something or not, it’s useless.”

Anthony also relied on a fitness analogy: “You go to the gym, you want to lift any amount of weight, and you bring a forklift with you. You can lift the weight, but that’s not the goal.”

Julia ChildA long record of failure before success

Anthony said his research, teaching at the Tuck School of Business, and writing show that people are getting bogged down in AI when they should be focusing on the hard work Seinfeld noted. Take famous cookery author Julia Child, which Anthony said was his favorite chapter of the book because it was the most surprising. The lesson I take away from this is that you may not be able to be the next Steve Jobs, but you can be the next Julia Child. “If life goes the right way, I can imagine that happening to me, you know?”

The professor explained that Child’s example shows that the disorder “is not about being a superhero,” but is more about ordinary people following certain behaviors and showing curiosity.

“It’s a reminder that there is no straight line to success,” he said. She began working on her masterpiece, Master the art of French cookingnearly 10 years – and a change of publishers – before succeeding. She also failed her first Cordon Bleu exam in Paris, and persevered to become the woman who brought French cuisine to the American mainstream. “It’s kind of a classic hero’s journey,” he said.

Consider the first French meal Childe cooked for her husband, Anthony said: brains, boiled in red wine. “Everyone agreed it was a disaster.” But again, he said, hard work was the goal.