End of Year Report: 2024-2025 School and AI

Teachers must embrace the technological tools at hand.

There’s an opportunity out there for instructors—human instructors—in the age of AI: artificial intelligence.

Let’s start with an example from the world of chess, courtesy of the finance Substack Doomberg. Today, no human stands a chance against even a mid-tier chess engine. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top player, could face off against a modest AI a thousand times and never once get a draw. It’s over. The last human who could compete was Garry Kasparov, and that was decades ago.

But here’s where teachers should pay attention: Chess has never been more popular.

That might sound counterintuitive, but people love watching human players lock horns—especially when there’s rivalry, blunders, and the raw drama of competition. As Bobby Fischer once put it, audiences “like to watch them squirm.” Look at the view counts on the following videos - using the search term “Magnus Carlsen Chess”:

View counts of PEOPLE playing chess.

This is the road ahead for education. In an AI-dominated world, human qualities will command a premium. Just like in chess, the most valuable teachers will be those who combine their innate skill for explanation with a mastery of AI tools.

Think about it: You, as an instructor, bring not just your ability to connect with students but also the technical savvy to harness AI’s power. And that’s thrilling, because AI is still in its infancy. Open-source AI—the kind free from corporate or government control—is advancing at breakneck speed.

AI Central has just come out with an article that maps out the road ahead for various AI Platforms:

“Of course, the most powerful and useful AIs are, eventually, going to be the independent AI systems, or iAI, as they will not only be free of both democratic and authoritarian restrictions, but will have the luxury of working from curated data sets that are task-focused and therefore unpolluted by the greater part of the data garbage that is one of the more significant challenges faced by those attempting to produce useful AI applications.”

This is high octane intellectual fuel for a teacher / mentor / parent or instructor. You can curate not only the subject matter you want to teach and share, but internally, within your own network and data, unleash AI to curate the most successful teaching techniques as well as learning which areas of subject matter are resonating.

You can instructionally fix what’s broken - and do it quickly.

The big names (Google, OpenAI, Perplexity) are walled gardens, but the open-source style AI genie is out of the bottle. Regulators can’t rein it in. Independent AI, as it is explained above, will be unshackled.

For teachers, this means something profound. You can now pair your expertise with AI’s brute-force capabilities, guiding students like never before. Imagine this dynamic: You teach the human element—the nuance, the wisdom—then unleash your students’ curiosity with AI’s near-infinite resources. "Here’s what I know; now go further."

This mirrors how people still crave live music or in-person chess matches. The human experience—flaws, spontaneity, connection—can’t be replicated. AI won’t replace teachers; it’ll elevate the best ones.

Between Doom and Gold Paved Streets

The AI debate swings between two extremes:

1. Doom: AI will crush humanity, turning us into worker drones for some digital overlord.

2. Utopia: AI will shower us with riches, leaving us to lounge on beaches while machines do the work.

Reality? Somewhere in between.

Our job as educators is to help students navigate this new labyrinth. Take programming: Learning basics still matters, but AI will handle the bulk of coding. Future programmers will focus on debugging, editing, and directing AI—not writing lines from scratch.

I’m no programmer, but I remember when HTML was a must-learn skill. Today? Pointless. The same shift is coming for other fields. The key isn’t blindly worshipping AI or fearing it—it’s teaching students to leverage it while valuing their human edge: creativity, judgment, and adaptability.

The Premium on Human Connection

No one pays a cover charge to watch a laptop play Spotify at a bar. But they’ll pack a restaurant to hear a live singer—someone who greets the crowd, feeds off their energy, makes the moment real.

There’s a local latin spot near me that’s usually quiet. Their busiest night ever? When a locally popular Spanish singer performed live. People didn’t line up to watch her YouTube channel on a screen. They came for her—the voice, the presence, the shared experience.

That’s the future of teaching. AI is the tool; humanity is the draw.

Our Responsibility

We owe it to students to honor the human potential that created AI—and to use this tool wisely. When I started teaching, the tools were chalkboards, Delaney Cards, gradebooks, card catalogs and library shelves. Those things still have value, but we’d fail students if we pretended nothing has changed.

You wouldn’t say, "Ignore AI—just memorize the Dewey Decimal System." Nor would you panic: "AI will end learning!" Instead, you’d say: "Here’s how we use these tools to go further, faster—without losing what makes us human."

In my next piece, I’ll dive into how AI is already forcing universities to cut the fat. Students are cheating at unprecedented rates, and schools are scrambling. The result? A reckoning for overpriced, low-value degrees. Why pay $90,000 for a credential when AI can ace the work—and administrators turn a blind eye to cheating?

But that’s a topic for next time. For now, remember: AI isn’t the end of teaching. It’s the next chapter—and the best teachers will write it.

Picture created courtesy of Leonardo AI