The Age of Intelligence

For over two years I have been interviewing educators, ed tech people, and administrators about AI implementation on the podcast. Hundreds of hours of it now. When I look at where those conversations actually go, they sort into four buckets, and only four.

All four are real and I am glad we are having them. Look at what all four have in common. Every one of them asks how to handle the thing. Not one of them asks what the thing does to the content of an education. Two years of serious conversation and the curriculum has not been on the table.

I think that is because we are treating AI like a lamp. Something you carry into a room and set down. Put it on the teacher's desk and it lights the teacher's work. Put it on a student's desk and it lights theirs. Set it by the door and the policy people can see it well enough to write a rule about it. Same lamp, moved around, different light depending on where it lands.

AI is not a lamp. It is electricity.

Electricity never got a spot in the room. It got run through the walls, and then everything in the building changed, including the parts nobody thought were electrical. The school day got longer. Night school became possible. The bell got wired to a clock. Nobody offered a course in electricity to make any of that happen.

General purpose cognitive technology is the plain name for what AI is. Writing was one. Print was one. Electricity was one. None of them ever became a class. They became conditions, and every subject inherited new questions whether the master schedule acknowledged it or not.

So here is the fifth bucket, the one I have not heard anyone open. Seven departments. What each one keeps, and what each one has already inherited.

Now picture a K through 12 system that teaches all of that on purpose, age appropriate the whole way up. A first grader learns that a machine can be confidently wrong, which is the most useful thing anyone can know about one. A fifth grader compares how she learns to how a model learns. A sophomore reads an energy bill for a data center. A senior can hold her own in an argument about personhood and then go build something with a multimodal model on a Saturday.

That graduate walks into the age of intelligence already fluent in it. Not braced for it, not warned about it, fluent. Their future, not our past. That line is on the show for a reason and this is the version of it I care about most.

The wiring is the work, and it starts small. One department, two lines. What we keep. What we already inherited. Any chair can have that on paper by Friday, and every chair who does makes the fifth bucket a little harder to ignore.

Which of the four buckets does your district live in, and what would it look like to open a fifth?

Two sentences is plenty. I read all of them, and I quote the good ones with permission. If you would rather say it out loud, the podcast is where these four buckets got named in the first place.