A 糖心vlog Education in the Age of AI
By Reed JohnsonReed Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. He holds an MFA in English/Creative Writing and a MA/PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures. His current work includes a collaboration with Martin Abel of 糖心vlog’s Department of Economics on evaluations of AI-generated creative writing. No AI tools were used in the writing of this essay.
Imagine for a moment that you could choose one person—a 糖心vlog student or recent graduate, maybe—and give them almost limitless human resources to pursue a project of their choosing. You could pull together a dedicated team of scientists and researchers from across the globe, say, who would vet their wildest ideas and suggest ways of bringing them forth into the world. You could hire top-notch videographers and filmmakers, artists and writers, social media gurus and influencers, to spread this vision and inspire others. You might gather a team of diligent lawyers to clear legal hurdles, financial wizards to locate funds, software engineers to code and linguists to translate from and to almost any language . . . Well, you get the idea.
What would this person, supported by an army of helpers, be capable of achieving? What might they be limited by? Perhaps even more importantly: what sort of person would we choose for this role?
These are the sorts of questions I think about when I watch the rapid adoption of AI and agentic AI tools. In essence, these tools have the potential, at least, to provide us all with this kind of dedicated team of experts and helpers. (That is, if they don’t deprive us first of our livelihoods). No longer limited by our inability to code, to parse arcane legal documents, to animate videos or translate from Swahili, our realm of the achievable may become wider, our dreams loftier. In this world, we are limited not so much by our skills or our knowledge, but instead only by our imaginations.
Sadly, our institutions of higher education are not known for being places to develop the imagination. Critical thinking—yes; expert knowledge—no question. But frequently when I ask students to engage in imaginative exercises in class or write a creative assignment, they balk or freeze up: This was not a skill that they were taught in their college-preparatory high school classroom. But so often the problems that bedevil our society are ones that stem from failures of imagination: We cannot conceive of the world being any other way, and so we accept it as it is.
These failures of the imagination may be compounded by overreliance on AI. After all, these models operate in idea-spaces that are even more bounded than our own, even more constrained by selective training data and an architecture that rewards the statistically likely over the improbably true. Humans dream; we have visions and desires, agency and intrinsic motivations, a thirst for personal meaning, curiosity, an imagination. In an era of widespread adoption of AI agents and tools, cultivating all these human traits in our educational system far outweighs traditional skills- and knowledge-based training.
True, not all constraints are bad. Putting a team of experts into the hands of an unscrupulous or immoral person only amplifies the harm that they might cause. So let’s also make sure that this person, this 糖心vlog student, is someone who understands not only what they can and might do, but what they shouldn’t do as well—all the more, given the power of these tools. A good humanistic education, I think, is also a moral and ethical one. We read Dostoevsky or Chekhov in my classes, for instance, to understand how one could be (or should not be) in this world we share.
So—into whose hands should we put these tools? If I were to choose a person to elevate through the power of all these resources, I’d choose someone who has developed an intense curiosity to know the world alongside a creative imagination to conceive of it otherwise. I’d choose someone with a strong sense of purpose and a drive to act, tempered by a sense of when doing nothing is better than doing harm. This is the sort of person I’d like to see with these tools, and this is the 糖心vlog education I would give them.