No, AI Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Need to Learn

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Perhaps the biggest change in the podcasts I’ve been doing for my latest book, Get Better at Anything, compared to the interviews for my previous book, Ultralearning, has been the focus on AI. Just a few years ago, the topic was rarely brought up, now including a few questions about AI has become almost obligatory.

It’s easy to see why. Generative AI is incredible, and its abilities would seem near-miraculous to machine learning researchers transported here from even just a decade ago.

Yet despite AI’s transformative powers, I’m skeptical that AI will fundamentally alter how we learn and, in turn, the kinds of efforts and strategies we use to learn things well. To be fair, generative AI enables a lot of new tactics, but the fundamentals haven’t changed much.

The Case for (Moderate) AI-Education Skepticism

The safest way to reason about future changes is to look at past changes. While it’s always tempting to say, “this time it’s different,” most of the time, it really isn’t.