‘A’ and ‘I’ the mantra at this year’s ASU+GSV edtech summit

For a few days in April, 10,000 people gathered at a single hotel in southern California where the vowels ‘A’ and ‘I’ were chanted like a meditation mantra by academics and entrepreneurs, investors and educators, rap stars and pop icons.

The backdrop was a bay filled with steel grey aircraft carriers while above head every few minutes roared the sonic boom of supersonic fighter jets. San Diego presents with a laid-back surfer culture, but like so many Americans, it’s also armed to the teeth.

It has now been nearly a year-and-a-half since OpenAI, a start-up founded at the Silicon Valley end of California – hundreds of kilometres to the north – turned the world of education upside down with its release of ChatGPT.

A piece of software that was able to answer any question, summarise lecture notes, brainstorm ideas, outline an assignment, spit out a 1,500-word essay in 30 seconds, including references and bibliography, and even mimic the style and language of the greatest poets – from William Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson.

If ChatGPT were a student, it would surely be at the top of its class. Except in basic mathematics. Except for the hallucinations. Except for the plagiarism. And possibly (litigation pending) except for the copyright infringement.

The ASU+GSV digital learning conference

Eighteen months on from that watershed moment, the annual ASU+GSV Summit represented the world’s largest gathering of people interested in how this newest of technologies was going to transform American (and global) education to solve the perpetual problems of cost, quality, outcomes and employability.

To that end, and for the first time, the event included its own AIR (AI Revolution) Show, a trade show at the convention centre half a kilometre down the road, where at least 100 start-ups and their founders demonstrated their software in the din of what felt like an aircraft hangar.

If you have never attended ASU+GSV, it is important to know two things: its primary purpose is to bring together people with ideas, and people with money to bring those ideas to life. Arizona State University represents the education half of the partnership while Global Silicon Valley represents American financial might married with the purported smarts of venture capital thinking.

So, the ideas that are most likely to change education are not being discussed on panel stages in front of 500 attendees but rather in hushed tones around tables scattered through the hotel and the faux seaport village that surrounds it. (In fact, the ‘rooms where it’s happening’ are on the 32nd and 33rd floors of the hotel, where private conference venues with epic views of the city are secured by the largest technology companies and where entry is by invitation only.)

Shared views capture the moment

Nevertheless, and although there were at least 15 or 20 concurrent sessions at all times, there were speakers who shared views that captured the moment that we are living in.

Among them was Bill Nye – ‘The Science Guy’, to North Americans of a certain age – the presenter of a public television produced show for school kids going back decades. He took the stage at the AIR Show on Saturday afternoon and for 30 minutes silenced the room with a tour-de-force talk about the importance of science and the endless pursuit of truth.

Nye talked about AI in two ways. Optimistically, it will be an essential tool for humans to use enormously complex problems such as the climate crisis. Pessimistically, it is also amplifying misinformation, dishonesty and outright crimes against science, such as the bizarrely popular belief that the Earth is flat.

Nye’s optimistic mantra – or was it a cry of desperation? – was that what humans really need to successfully harness AI is a single skill: critical thinking.

The structure and setting of ASU+GSV are not supportive of too much critical thinking.

Even people who are paid to think deeply about technology in the cause of better educational outcomes don’t come to ASU+GSV to share their newest ideas or a pending major software release. But there were glimmers from some well-placed experts to flag where things may be heading.

At a panel discussing the major trends impacting higher education in the United States, AI came up after demographic shifts and the punishing financial climate facing thousands of US institutions. When asked to comment on it, the provost of ASU – ‘the world’s most innovative university’ – made it clear that AI underpinned lots of trials and experiments but that as yet there were no answers to how best to harness its powers and contain its dangers.

At a panel on edtech investing, venture capitalists were in furious agreement that it was important to solve the problem of hallucinations – that is, the tendency for large language models to make up answers that appear plausible but are, in fact, highly deceptive falsehoods.

Likewise, it was gratifying to hear many people actively discussing the idea of ‘AI in the service of learning’, augmenting the capabilities of students. This seems so obvious, but it appears to have been forgotten in the seven days it took for ChatGPT to gain its first million users.

The mission of marrying technology with education must be about helping deliver better learning outcomes for students. At the end of any engagement with any learning technology, it is the student – the human being – that needs to have more knowledge, deeper understanding, and be more capable to think critically and communicate clearly.

The challenge with AI is that it is so tempting to let the machine do the work and for the learner to claim the output. This is a shortcut that leads to a dead end, or worse. And while AI has enormous potential to revolutionise learning at scale for all of humanity, it will take lots of quiet, considered thought, reflection and discussion, to figure out how to do that. And those things were in notably short supply in San Diego.

Jack Goodman is the founder and non-executive chair of Studiosity, the leading provider of academic literacy and peer support services to universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Middle East, New Zealand and elsewhere.