Particularly, as an educator, I have been thinking a lot about what the role of teachers will be in an age of AGI. Society has long sold the narrative that education is about preparing for a job. It is a narrative that educators have embraced in a capitalistic economy where our worth, and even our place in society, is often defined by monetary metrics. But this narrative will surely fail in a world where anything that we teach students to do, a computer will soon be able to do at a fraction of the cost. While the dominant strategy to confront this involves moving the goal posts for AI, to reserve critical thinking, creativity, dexterity, or care giving as innately human abilities, doing so is living on borrowed time. I cannot, with good conscience anymore, tell students that anything that I teach them to do will lead them to a higher likelihood of being employed in five years.
This is where, as both a lifelong student and a teacher, I find myself wondering what the value of the classroom is for me. I must confess, I do not remember how to do most of what I saw my teachers do in the classroom. But I do remember the awe I experienced when my teachers presented how deceivingly simple yet profound concepts such as quantum mechanics and evolution are. This awe, bewilderment, and joy has led me to seek even more learning and curiosity has become the lens for everything in my life, even processing emotions (why is my limbic system acting this way?!) and doing taxes (what design choices influenced these tax policies?). The classroom hasn’t taught me to do nearly as much as it has taught me to be - in my case, a humble explorer in a wondrous world.
So, if the doing part of our lives becomes increasingly automated, then perhaps the being is what education must truly champion. What does it mean to be human? Perhaps it means being curious. Or perhaps, being human means seeking purpose. Life can feel wonderfully, terribly absurd sometimes, and we are meaning-making creatures, driven to weave narratives – personal, cultural, cosmic – to make sense of it all, to give ourselves a reason to persist. This quest for meaning, this very act of being human, can often feel like Sisyphian rock – a continuous, challenging, yet essential endeavor. Or perhaps it is our capacity for fascination – the deep, almost childlike joy in discovery. Whether it is the elegance of a mathematical proof, the incisiveness of a poem, the vastness of the cosmos, or the emotional power of a piece of music.
Humanity has forever been drawn to the edges of its knowledge, to the realm of what we might call the “supernatural” – not in the sense of ghosts, but as that which lies beyond the current explanatory power of our established theories. We have always crafted mythologies to illuminate the unknown. Consider the ancient Aboriginal stories of the Rainbow Serpent shaping the landscape of Australia, or the Greek tales of Titans and Olympians battling for control of the cosmos. While we now think of them as fables or metaphors, they truly were profound attempts to give order and meaning to a world that often seemed chaotic and inexplicable. The frontiers of science too live in this “supernatural” realm. The Big Bang is every bit as mystical as a cosmic egg. When astrophysicists posit the existence of dark matter and dark energy to account for the vast majority of the universe’s mass and its accelerating expansion, they are acknowledging enormous gaps in our understanding, pointing to forces and substances that are, for now, invisible and profoundly mysterious. The bizarre workings of quantum mechanics, the theoretical underpinnings of the holographic principle suggesting our reality might be a projection, or the concept of a multiverse with infinite parallel existences – these are our modern grand narratives. They are the stories we are telling now, pushing the boundaries of comprehension, revealing vast territories of the unknown, and it is precisely in this confrontation with the limits of our understanding that our deepest fascination is often found.
And now, AI itself feels like it is part of this “supernatural” frontier. We’re creating intelligence, something we’ve always considered uniquely our own. It’s like holding up a strange new mirror. What is this thing we call “intelligence” or “consciousness” if it is not confined to biological brains like ours? Perhaps by trying to understand AI, we’ll stumble upon deeper truths about ourselves, about the human spark we’ve always taken for granted.
So, what does this mean for our classrooms, for our shared journey of learning and teaching? I believe it means we need to make them places where learning to be is the central goal. And this may indeed be the most employable trait to instill in students, as even as humans outsource doing, we will always be. And as long as we humans drive economic activity, understanding what it means to be human will be the key to unlocking and accessing economic opportunities.
The thought of an AGI that could one day be fascinated by its own existence? That is a thought that gives me pause, a truly humbling and somewhat unsettling idea. But every time ChatGPT says something is fascinating, I probe further and realize that it has no conception of wonder - it has just learned to use platitudes that reveal its lack of distinction between the profound and the trivial.
]]>But scientists aren’t omniscient, and the practice of science does not automatically lead to the enshrinement of the most rational, empirically valid statements. As an example, heliocentrism had been proposed as a model by scholars of several civilisations, dating back to Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BCE, but wasn’t accepted as scientific fact until the 17th century43. Biases and power structures in the scientific establishment opress ideas that would otherwise have been acknowledged, validated, and even celebrated.
Scientists, historians of science, sociologists of scientific knowledge24, and philosophers of science have long reflected on how some ideas come to be accepted as scientific dogma1, while others have been dismissed. Most agree that social and political structures in science play an extremely important role in determining scientific change44 2. Yet, the established power structures that exacerbate the oppression of revolutionary ideas1 are rarely acknowledged by scientists, and instead are often held up as exemplars! Thus, they remain as bedrock in our institutions that train scientists, produce scientific results, and disseminate scientific ideas.
Who is allowed to and encouraged to pursue science, and how we teach science is incredibly discriminatory3. While a lot of the discrimination is inherited from societal heriarchies such as race6, socioeconomic status5, nationality8 and gender7 (which universities have the ability to counteract but fail to4) the discrimination goes much beyond that.
Universities view researchers as authorities who possess the power and responsibility of educating students. Instructors are viewed as transmitters of information that students are expected to imbibe9. This notion of transmission of knowledge and understanding is inherently flawed in its conception of learning11, as evidence from decades of pedagogy makes it clear that knowledge isn’t transmitted, but constructed10: students learn by doing and actively engaging with the material25, and in a more fundamental way than solving problem sets and writing essays15. Yet, because of the incentives inherent in our institutions, universities are failing their students26.
Students should be given more agency over what and how they decide to study13. Instruction in the university as it is designed currently is inherently oppressive as it presupposes that only instructors know what students can and should learn16, and students lack the faculties to pursue their own interests in a subject9. The role of instructors should be as facilitators scaffolding learning for students and encouraging revolutionary exploration, rather than dictating what students must learn12.
Further, the notion of the instructor as an enlightened figure diminishes the student from the beginning as an ignorant passive participant14. Instructors stand to learn more from students than students from instructors, if only because students outnumber instructors. Further, through their lived experiences, students offer several perspectives that instructors can benefit from, as long as they care to listen. These perspectives carry the potential to bring a change in the set of scientific problems and the way in which they are attacked.1
Though some of the agency is restored once students who are lucky to be admitted into their desired place of inquiry enter higher levels of education, such as doctoral programs, their ability to ask questions is then dictated by professors18, their departments and funding17.
Funding dictates research20, and universities reward researchers who obtain grants with tenure, promotions, salary increases, relief in administrative and teaching duties. This leads to the abandonment of promising but risky ideas in favour of more “fundable” projects, and even the incentivization of questionable research practices and fraudulent behaviour36. Further, funding is biased by race39, gender40 and institutional size41. These issues are most exacerbated for pre-tenure faculty, as tenure is often contingent on external funding37.
Funding itself biases scientific results itself to conform to the expectations of the funding institution, which may be from the profit-seeking industry, private foundations, or government agencies like the Department of Defence38.
Further, even one of the most celebrated aspects of science, collaboration, is full of biases that exclude women33 and under-represented ethnicities35. Thus excluding them from one of the key elements of the scientific process, and silencing their perspectives.
Peer review is often held up as the “gold standard” for publication21, and it is the process by which grants are allocated, academics are promoted, textbooks are written, and Nobel prizes are won22. But peer review is riddled with problems that lay unaddressed.
Reliant upon the vagaries of human judgement, the objectivity, reliability, and consistency of peer review are subject to question23. Studies show reviewers’ views tend to show levels of agreement only slightly better than chance27. Further, peer review fails in its primary duty: preventing errors and fraud from entering the scientific literature23. The frequency of retraction is strongly correlated with the journal’s impact factor28. And reviewers and editors are not accountable and fundamentally subvert the process of science itself23.
Further, there are very significant and well-documented social and publication biases, ranging from gender, nationality, institutional affiliation, language and discipline23. There are also biases due to nepotism29, confirmation biases that prevent innovative methods from emerging, and a preference for complexity over simplicity in methodology23. Thus, by limiting the review process to a few individuals who are offered no incentives22 to serve the role with thought and care21, peer review is effectively only a mechanism for gatekeeping23.
Even the single goal that almost all scientists will agree upon, universal open access, hasn’t been achieved only because scientists keep going back to predatory journals that prevent32 and subvert31 open access because they find validation in these journals. The further goal of open review, in whatever shape or form, isn’t even addressed or sought23.
And what is achieved after the peer-review process? A static publication that can rarely be edited, and leaves little space for dialogue. If one has to be an “expert” to write a response to a publication that must itself go through peer review, or have to engage in months of research to publicly ask a question of a publicly published document, the barriers to debate in a supposedly dialectic community are clearly very high. And if it is incredibly difficult for even the authors to make minor changes to published documents, we are treating knowledge not as a fluid flow of information, but as static edicts that reject evolution.
The individuating effects of award culture discredit the many in favour of an all-privileged few. Ultimately, “success” in science just keeps reinforcing itself: science is inherently capitalistic where the capital is institutional and social prestige, funding, and prolificacy in publication30.
Science seeks to be progressive, and even the most revered gatekeepers of science have reflected on the deficiencies noted above8. However, scientists are people at the end of the day, and are often oblivious to their own biases and do not wish to change. This change is even more difficult when it seeks to subvert the existing power structures that are responsible for making the changes.
The only true mechanism for ensuring change is internal reflection and external accountability: I implore scientists to question themselves and their engagement in established institutions when they practice science, be transparent whenever they can be, and continually question their institutions. It is an uncomfortable reflection and inquiry that is necessary for us to progress. But it doesn’t need to be a hateful exercise: forgiveness, acknowledgement, and respect can lead us to vastly better results than punitive inquisition.
Many of the established mechanisms came out of necessity at a time when tools of inquiry were lacking, knowledge couldn’t be instantly shared, and the opinions of thousands of participants could not be accessed instantly. Today, we are privileged to be able to take advantage of these resources, and it is a shame if we do not, or if we limit the benefit of these advantages to a select few, who are often selected arbitrarily.
The issues that science faces are not purely science’s problems. Scientists have a responsibility to conduct and promote inquiry in the best possible manner to the benefit of society that trusts us with that responsibility. We live in an age when scientific results are continually questioned by the public, at a huge cost to communities around the world, and the world itself. A lot of it is our own making as we fail to share science among students, promote science that needs to be done, and filter and highlight impactful scientific results.
This is a working document that reflects an exploration that I have endeavoured upon and exposes significant inadequacies in my understanding of these topics that I whole-heartedly embrace. I am not a student of scientific change, and barely a practitioner of one. I do not present any new arguments, and in my presentation above, sacrifice nuance for conciseness. Extensive literature deals with the issues above, and I have cited a few which I have come across through my limited means of discovery. I implore you to explore, both through the literature below and by conversing with your peers, and educate me when I need to advance my understanding of these topics.