Real Tools, Real Clients, Real Money

John Davis (00:04): This is a special extended episode of the 10 Minute Teacher.

Vicki Davis (00:08): Today’s show is sponsored by EF Explore America and their STEM Tours. To show your students how STEM impacts the world up close and in action, go to efexploreamerica.com/STEM and stay tuned at the end of the show to learn more.

Vicki Davis (00:24): Can students learn world-class manufacturing? How about artificial intelligence? How do we prepare them for the real world? We have two amazing guests on the show. My dear friend Joe Fatheree is a globally recognized educator, author, and filmmaker. He was named one of the top 10 teachers internationally by the Global Teacher Prize in 2016, and he’s won the NEA National Award for Teaching Excellence. Joe, you’re at Oak Ridge High School. Tell us about that.

Joe Fatheree (00:53): After 34 years of working in the ed tech space with a great group of kids, I thought I’d had this great career — and I tell people God has a sense of humor. He took me to Oak Ridge, where I had the opportunity to go down and work with them regularly. It’s the community where the Manhattan Project was partially born, where the Department of Energy stayed after World War II. They’ve got a world-class school with world-class teachers and students. So I come down and work regularly with them as we’re trying to figure out how do we usher our students into this age of really amazing emerging technology.

Vicki Davis (01:29): And you’re working with Dr. Mark Buckner, an architect behind Oak Ridge High School’s Wildcat Manufacturing — recognized as a Smart Industry Top 50 Innovator. He has a million-dollar state grant. He’s bringing global STEM expertise right to the classroom. Before he went to the classroom, Dr. Buckner had a distinguished 32-year career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Mark, what are some of the things that you’re doing with students?

Dr. Mark Buckner (01:55): Thank you, Vicki. Part of that career — one of the things relevant to this conversation — while I was at the lab, they were trying to do things that had never been done before. I had a parallel track working with kids. I’d been in the school system, working as a part of the F.I.R.S.T. system that Dean Kamen and Woody Flowers founded for inspiration and recognition of science and technology. It was an after-school program, started in elementary school, and as my kids progressed, I kept going in the schools. Engaged with kids, how they learn across the board.

After retirement, I consulted for years for a company called Scrum Inc. I was brought in as an innovation consultant, going into companies like Northrop Grumman and other places, helping them boot up innovation teams. That’s one of the things Joe and I talk a bunch about — what is innovation, and what’s the mindset that’s required for it. Mindset is job number one. If you don’t have that, you really don’t track.

But basically I decided I wanted to come back and give back. I’d been teaching a dual enrollment class for a number of years as adjunct faculty — industrial Internet of Things, intros to AI, digital engineering, robotics and automation. Holly Cross is the CTE director at the school. Her office was right across our space where I was teaching. We got a chance to talk a lot about how we wished we could change things. Given king and queen for a day, how can we take all the things that I was learning in interdisciplinary cross-functional teams, very challenging real-world problems — the things that I brought from neuroscience — and create a curriculum to reach more kids and give them more opportunities and help them be more engaged?

Dr. Mark Buckner (03:29): So I’d had this relationship with Holly. During COVID, I got tired of doing a lot of consulting online and having to travel a lot. And I went back to Holly and said, “Holly, I’m going to come back and try to get back in the classroom. Do you think there’s space?” And Holly said, “Mark, the state of Tennessee has just announced an innovative high school model grant competition — open competition. What they really want you to do is reimagine the world of education, particularly STEM education, and reimagine what you would do with time, partnerships, modes of learning, time and space.”

Dr. Mark Buckner (04:01): So she asked me to take all of the things that we’d been talking about — Vicki, it’s a synthesis of all of my experience of 32 years working on teams in interdisciplinary space — and put it into the proposal. Well, lo and behold, we won. It was about one and a quarter million dollars that got us started as seed funding to get some of the world-class equipment.

One of the conversations I have all the time: to deal with real-world problems, you need real-world tools. We were trying to pull out of the lab and into the kids’ environment the technologies and the tools, because they don’t know they can’t do this. We had demonstrated that in the F.I.R.S.T. robotics program. So let’s create an environment that brings world-class technologies, world-class problems, set the bar really high — but give them an enormous amount of support. High standards, high support. Then build out a curriculum based on that.

We’re about three and a half years in. That’s really where Joe and I’s paths crossed. The program is called iSchool — and there’s like seven I’s, but really it’s around innovation and continual improvement. And then Wildcat Manufacturing is a student-run enterprise. These kids provide design and manufacturing services for real-world companies and people. We interface with clients using a Lean startup model. You come and tell us about your challenge or your problem. The kids will then work with you in a Lean and Agile fashion to iterate on prototypes and concepts. We get feedback from you as a customer. The kids will continue to evolve that into a final product. We have in our space world-class 3D printers, 5-axis CNCs, water jet, fiber laser, injection molders. We’re now standing up a world-class wire arc additive manufacturing cell — think of a robot with a welder on the end of it. It can do some amazing things.

So the kids get a chance to work throughout the entire life cycle of product development. They’re involved in the finances. They give the final billing. And the cool thing about it is they participate in a profit-sharing model. So they learn what real world is all about — innovation and entrepreneurship and problem solving and collaborative work.

Vicki Davis (05:56): I read that you had 26 contracts with 18 companies. And you say profit sharing. Does that mean the students actually earn income for themselves, or does this go to the school? How does that work?

Dr. Mark Buckner (06:05): It does. When we stood this up, part of the dream was to create a sustainable business model. One of the things I’ve taught for a while is Lean startup — business model canvas, mission model canvas — understanding what that really looks like in a business. We really wanted to change the way that our partners saw education. We didn’t want to just go to them with a handout and say, “We need money.” We didn’t want legacy equipment, which was good for them to donate, but that’s fighting the last war. We wanted to position for the future.

So as a result of that, we flipped the model. Now we’re part of the supply chain locally to provide actual products. The goal is to define a number of SKUs — product lines. You could call us up and say, “I need 100 of these this week.” So we were able to build that into our supplies.

Yes, we are paying students. Initially the funding came through a “Jobs for Tomorrow, Jobs of the Future” grant as part of work-based learning. We scaled their pay based on profit sharing. As a company, if we benefit, then they made more. So they’re incentivized to be efficient and Lean and use of their time — those kinds of things, real world. Now that grant has run out, we’re working with locals in our area to figure out how we pay students. Right now it’s looking like it’s going to be some sort of scholarship model, so the money can go to them and they can apply it to further education or other things.

Vicki Davis (07:51): Joe, you’ve been in lots of schools all over. How does the typical classroom and learning day look different at this school versus anywhere else?

Joe Fatheree (08:03): One thing — they do a whole year of school. It’s a whole calendar year. I’d never been in that in all my years of teaching. When I’m there, I love the fact that people are fresh and they’re excited and they’re ready to go. There are regular breaks built in. It just keeps that creative process going. And when they’re out, there are enrichment opportunities for students across the board.

The high school also runs on a block schedule, which I think definitely helps a program like Mark’s. Block was very similar to mine. In my case, I had the only block schedule in the entire school district — because by the time I got stuff out, class was over. You’d spend your whole time getting stuff out and setting up and then putting it away. It just didn’t make sense. My kids back when I was teaching a couple of years ago — if I didn’t tell them, they’d work through lunch, they’d work through breaks. They wouldn’t stop and go, because they were engaged and enriched. They wanted to be in there all the time. Once you get that intrinsic fire lit, you can’t put it out. That’s what we’re really trying to get going.

Also, just in the way leadership supports the incubation of creativity — Mark’s program is atypical. It doesn’t fit in the standard walk of curriculum. So having a leadership team like Dr. Cross and Dr. Borchers and Dr. Williams that says, “Of course we see value in this.” And even today, Mark and I spend an inordinate amount of time talking about — as we’re in the middle of a nuclear renaissance and AI and quantum going on in the community — how do we pivot to the left or the right to help our students take advantage of opportunities that are growing in front of us? And how do we partner with industry partners?

Oak Ridge is really blessed: we have access to an incredible research base, but those people could stay behind closed doors. They choose not to. They choose to be heavily involved in the school district. Mark and I spent a lot of time this summer doing some deep-dive research on innovation, and all of the partners that came wanted to be careful about not morphing our vision. They’re very open-minded. They’re very interested in finding out from us what the real-world problems are we face — not coming to us and dictating the problems and saying, “By the way, here’s the problem we notice you have, and here’s also the solution for it.” We’re hoping that a lot of the things that come out of the work we’re doing don’t only benefit the kids at Oak Ridge proper, but we can also take these models — because we’re working to find ways to make them replicable that scale — to help kids out all across the country.

Vicki Davis (10:36): That has to be the goal. We’ve all got to teach tomorrow and help these kids in a world of AI. What are the types of things a student might be doing in your program, and what kind of problems are they solving?

Dr. Mark Buckner (10:48): One of the things that I look at consistently is that things come at us in silos. The school system teaches in silos, and we force the students to synthesize. We leave it to them to try to figure out, number one, that they need to synthesize, and number two, how to integrate.

We very intentionally take a systems perspective. One of the philosophies we laid out at the beginning, we borrow from Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s system of profound knowledge — appreciation of a system, understanding of variation, psychology, and theory of knowledge. We bake that in upfront. We borrow from Toyota’s coaching Kata, and we start with our Starter Kata. One of the things that’s honestly the unintended negative consequences of the attention economy and what’s happening through social media to our kids — their ability to focus, read, and other things — it’s a systemic issue. Teachers are seeing it in the classroom. We think these are all crises that we’re facing as educators, but we’ve got to look at it as a system. There’s hope, but we’ve got to do it in a systematic way.

In that first-level class, I also teach in a spiral. It’s not exactly Vygotsky. It really is drawn from Toyota’s work — what’s called a SECI model. It’s an understanding of the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. It tips the hat to the fact that from a cognitive neuroscience standpoint, in the neocortex we have both procedural and declarative pathways, and things prompted through sensing. We do a lot of interleaving and retrieval practice. The goal is to get the kids not to have working memory and pass the test, but to internalize and to transfer that into problem solving and thinking critically.

So we use the scientific thinking Kata. In the very beginning, we’re booting up new patterns of thinking and working that they’re applying to problems in the class. At the same time, they’re learning Scrum — I’m a trainer and the kids come out of our class with Scrum Master and Product Owner certificates. We’re partnering with the Deming Institute. All of those soft skills — we’re not using “edu-ese.” I’m actually using industry-recognized approaches and philosophies. These kids don’t realize it, but that’s becoming the way they think and do.

As they learn computer-aided design, 3D printing, laser cutting, and digital engineering — innovation, design, and manufacturing — they’re also booting up these soft skills of managing work, Lean and Agile. They learn by doing, and it’s not in a sequential serial pattern. It very much is non-linear. The first classes, they’re just learning how to design, how to craft problems. We teach them parameterized design — we want them to have rock-solid engineering foundations of how to do design.

I tell the kids all the time when they come into the class, they’ve done “free range CAD” and it’s awful. It doesn’t stand up under the rigor of engineering. So we try to rebuild that. Because at the end of the day, I want to make it so that change is frictionless. They design it intended to be changed, because as they run a test, it’s going to be wrong. So they need to make it easy that they can take what they were expecting and what they saw, and then ask why, and then help that refine their knowledge and move that threshold of knowledge like a flashlight in a dark area.

So we’re booting up all of those things as they learn hard technical skills as well. They’re introduced to generative design. They’re introduced to ethical use of AI. From the standpoint of an innovator, I try to get them to understand: just because you can does not mean you should. If, in the next generation of innovators, they create a new technology, it is their moral responsibility to ask: what are the unintended consequences of this technology? And if that technology confers power, you start a race — a race to win the market or deploy features. We’re seeing it in spades in the AI world right now. The other challenge is that if that race is not coordinated, because of the challenge of the commons, typically the race ends poorly for somebody. So we need to have them think through those moral and ethical uses of the technology.

The second class, they take those skills and we ratchet it up to commercial technology — CNC mills, wire arc, water jet, fiber laser. They’re booting up the ability to apply these things to real-world projects and problems — but again, these are example problems, curated. We give them some that are new. Then in that final entree, that’s when they roll into Wildcat Manufacturing. Now we’ve got kids that are very confident in their abilities to do things, with the soft skills, and they work together as a team of teams. They’re trained in Scrum at scale, so we run our company using Agile principles for kids.

Vicki Davis (15:29): This is fascinating. I’m married to an industrial engineer. He and I met at Georgia Tech, and I had a lot of IE classes myself, so a lot of the terms you’re talking about are right in the middle of manufacturing. The robotic welding — they’re doing that right now. That’s so important. But this is the fascinating piece for me. You said Holly is part of CTE — that’s career and technical education. Traditionally we would say, “Okay, here you have the kids going to college, they’re going to take the AP classes, they’re going to do this. Then you have the career and technical education, and we’re going to get them a vocational [path].” But you’re really describing a lot of things that, if I had a child going into engineering, or if I was going into engineering today, it would be really useful. Do you allow students who might be planning to go to college to join your program, even though technically it’s under CTE?

Dr. Mark Buckner (16:28): So we have strategically been working on this, because the aim of this program when we launched it was to give kids options, pathways, empower them for the future. They leave our program with three options. Start your own business, because they understand how to solve problems collaboratively with the customer, deliver value with available technology at a price someone can afford. They can immediately go into the workforce, workforce ready.

One of the things we try to say is that we don’t want to fight yesterday’s war. We can’t teach to the past. We need to work collaboratively with our partners to teach where we need to be going in the problem set. So the tools, the techniques, the methods, the equipment, everything we’re doing is actually where they need to be going — and it’s actually beyond some of the industries locally. Some of the smaller local manufacturers that need to level up but don’t have the bandwidth — we’re going to position ourselves eventually as we expand the program. I view it as kind of a vortex. We’re pulling — we call it P20 in Tennessee, which is pre-K all the way through community college kind of level. We’re pulling kids in and exposing them to world-class opportunities they didn’t know existed, to generate value, to drive innovation, to start their own companies. In that vortex, we’re also working closely with local partners to rapidly accelerate and upskill their knowledge so that we can move forward the technology as fast as we can on real-world problems together.

I’ll give you an example. I was contacted by a person that’s starting a precision manufacturing company. They’re actually buying up companies in aerospace, defense, chip, and biomedical. He called me up and said, “Mark, I know your program, what you’re teaching. We’re right now trying to work together to find exactly what those skills are so that it matches with my HR. But if your students can do this, I’ve got jobs waiting for them, making $100,000 to $120,000 a year.” Now these are not technicians pushing a button. These aren’t just mechanical engineers. It’s a full-stack innovator. You’re able to understand the problem, understand how to manufacture it, set it up and work it, working across disciplines leveraging AI to do it.

The third track is we want to accelerate students into an engineering program. What we’re seeing is — I believe we’ve got the world model upside down. Most of the things that you’re seeing in our space, most students don’t see until they’re seniors in college and it’s their capstone project, and they’re already checked out. Or it’s graduate-level research. We’re actually having kids come out of our program, and we advise them as freshmen to connect into research teams that are there. Talk to your advisors, because you know how to run every piece of equipment that’s there, and you can plug into those teams and help them.

We had a young lady that was one of the first students through the program. Last summer she finished her sophomore year at MIT. She came back to our area. We’ve got a facility called the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, an extension of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It’s a really bleeding-edge advanced manufacturing program partnering with industry to do things that have never been done in manufacturing — there’s still gaps in scale. Anyway, Alex went and interned over the summer in the disruptive manufacturing group. Her mentor, who’s the head of the group, said, “Alex, where did you learn how to do all this kind of stuff?” thinking she was going to say MIT. She goes, “No, no, no, Steve, come with me.” So we have kids there during the summer on Tuesday-Thursday nights as part of the F.I.R.S.T. program and other things, just learning and working and doing. He came, spent three hours talking to the kids, seeing what they were doing, hearing about our philosophy and our approach to Lean and Agile.

Dr. Mark Buckner (20:07): At the end of the night, he said, “Mark, your kids are four to five years ahead of anybody we’re seeing coming out of college.” And so that’s the point that Joe and I are trying to make as we expand the program. We’re looking at how could we embed people with us as interns to learn how to do it. We’re actually a test bed for the Digital Twin Consortium in the area of digital twins for born-qualified parts.

Vicki Davis (20:36): I actually just had a student do a presentation in our innovative technology class on digital twins. Just so people know what this term is — you’re basically making a digital copy so that you can have an exact copy. Correct?

Dr. Mark Buckner (20:54): Yes, but you’re also pulling data live back into the model to inform it from a controls perspective. You’re linking the physical and the virtual worlds. Then extended within this, there’s this idea of a digital thread. As you’re making something from idea through design, through manufacturing, all the way through quality and measurement, you’re collecting data all the way through. If it’s done in this controlled manner in a way that we’ve defined, it is “born qualified” — it meets the certification requirements for nuclear, for defense, for aerospace, for biomedical, because of the process and the intelligence and the automation and the sensors that are there.

So we’re part of an international test bed that has high school students involved in this with commercial entities. The fun use case I think you’ll get a kick out of, we call “Giants of Oak Ridge.” The kids are going to be making life-size statues of historical figures from the Manhattan Project. We’re using generative AI on old photographs to develop life-size statues. We’re working with software with researchers from the National Lab. We’re going to slice that, and we’re using a state-of-the-art metal wire arc 3D printer to metal-3D-print a near-net shape. It’s going to then be scanned. We’re going to put it in a CNC, five-axis and four-axis, to do the machining of the fine detail. The wire arc kind of looks like a mud dauber just laid down a piece of metal — it doesn’t have the detail. We’re going to weld that back together. If that’s not enough, we’re then going to leverage AI to basically create an experience — think Pokémon Go meets Night at the Museum. You’ll be able to come up and scan, and in augmented reality the statue will come to life and have a conversation with you about their historical involvement in the Manhattan Project. So we’re bringing together all of the threads of advanced manufacturing, precision machining, AI, generative AI, ethical use of AI — because we’re doing all those kinds of things with digital thread.

Vicki Davis (22:52): So we’re talking to Dr. Mark Buckner and my friend Joe Fatheree, who are at Oak Ridge High’s iSchool and Wildcat Manufacturing. Joe, a lot of people are trying to shut AI out of schools. As y’all have these conversations, where are the places where you say, “These are great uses for AI” — and then where are the places where we really need to teach them to have discernment and wisdom?

Joe Fatheree (23:14): That’s a great question. One of the things I’ve been doing the last three to four years is working internationally on developing global frameworks for ethical use of AI in education. I have another one coming out in just about three weeks that I’ll share with you. But one of the things I think we’ve got to consider — when I first came to Oak Ridge, the movie Oppenheimer had just come out. That was on a Thursday-Friday. On the Wednesday, we hosted a documentary film, “Oppenheimer: The Day After Trinity.” We brought in five professionals from the nuclear industry and advanced computing, and we paired them with five students from Oak Ridge High School on the stage. They had a conversation and debated each other loosely: could lessons learned from the Manhattan Project be applied to AI and emerging tech?

It was stunning how well those kids looked at this. I think a lot of people think, “Well, because they’re kids, they’re like, ‘Hey, can we do this right now?’” And a lot of them were a little bit reticent. Like, “Can we hold on? Can we talk about these things?” One of the conversation points that came out: after the detonation at Trinity, Oppenheimer and the scientists really pushed back and said, “We’ve got to watch what we do moving forward, because we realize the Pandora’s box that we’ve opened.” Because of that, we have regulatory committees and things that really make sure that nuclear is safe, and that the right people are gatekeepers for that. That didn’t happen when OpenAI punted ChatGPT out into the world. I’m not blaming or whatever, but the case is everybody had access to it, and the schools were ill-prepared for it.

I did one of the first studies in the U.S. in my state looking at AI readiness. A year ago, it was just a wasteland as to what that looked like for schools being prepared for it. Rose Lutkin, a luminary AI scientist in the UK, did one from pre-K through 20. Same results, same tool. A year later, most of it is from a teacher perspective — about teacher workload and AI as a productivity tool. I think those things are great. There aren’t a lot of people that have the nut cracked on how do we do this for student usage. Mark and I are in lockstep on this. We want our kids using it. Mark’s using it in some advanced ways.

I’ll work with a school where we bring it in. We set up AI as an HR hiring agent. Or I was in one today where a teacher was doing a very cool thing at the junior level — having her kids, she set up all the parameters for AI to go through and look at her students’ papers and give a first-run comments on it. Because she’s like, “I’ve got 25 kids in my class. I want to get to them right now, but the math says, if I’ve got a three-page paper for my kids, I can’t turn around on a dime the feedback on it.” The feedback the kids were getting instantaneously was great. We’re talking about: well, if they get this more often, how much better will their writing potentially be down the road?

The area that Mark and I are raising some red flags on — that a lot of people are not talking about — is how is this impacting our kids cognitively if it’s not done in the right way? How is it impacting our kids emotionally? There’s a really cool tool out there called Grok. Grok is probably one of the most conversational AIs. Mark and I talk about Claude versus ChatGPT versus Gemini. It’s kind of like what cereal choice you like the most at home. But Grok is a really good tool to have a conversation with if you set it up right.

Within the last few months, they came out with a tool that goes along with it called Grok Annie. Short story: I interviewed a principal a couple of weeks ago. He said, “We’ve got a real problem going on. We’ve got a first grader that downloaded Grok Annie on his mom and dad’s phone without them knowing about it. The child has been up — they found out, caught him at like one or two o’clock in the morning attached to Grok Annie.” And Grok Annie is an anime character that is highly sexualized. Now this kid has got an emotional attachment to the device. The numbers — I believe there are about 30 million users on Grok. About 20 million users it looks like have downloaded this and are experiencing it. We have no way to track what kids are doing on there. We have no idea about the relationships that are connecting.

I had another principal tell me that parents had said — this is a high school student — they had found their child had connected with one at home. They were just calling the school not to say, “Hey, you guys did anything wrong, but we know you’re using AI. I want to make sure what’s happening at home isn’t being amplified at school.” We know over the last year, we’ve had two teenagers nationally commit suicide, and the parents say that they were AI-influenced. We’re in this really muddy space where district leadership has had extremely little guidance from any department of education. I’m not casting stones — it’s just the truth of the matter. They don’t know where to go.

I had a principal tell me, “Well, I want to use this. We’re on lockdown with it right now. But I know the 500 kids in my school are going rampant left and right at home. So when I finally get to a point, we’re going to have to go back and retrain.” We know how difficult that is. So Mark and I are just trying to make a lot of different case studies on ways that this can be done appropriately. We’re really trying to look at the science behind this. What does neuroscience say? For the first time, this past June or July, there was a new study where somebody developed the first tool to measure relationship connectivity. That’s a start in the right direction.

The next step has to be, at some point as we write policy — typically policy is very static, that’s just the way it is, but in the world we live in now we need a dynamic form of policy that can move and bend and work with this. If I regulate AI 1.0, by the time it gets to 1.2, it’s not the same system. The Secretary of Energy is calling it Manhattan Project 2.0 — we’re in a race between us and China right now for AI supremacy. We can’t say that lightly. There’s just a lot going on in that space.

Then you have the commercial space where people are trying to be at the top of the ladder there, and all the other stuff going on. I just believe that if we’re building tools that are specifically made for children, there’s got to be legislation around there, and we’ve got to bring teachers to the table now. Typically the way policy is written, we bring teachers in and talk to them about all the things we know they have problems with, and they get left out. This has been done for a variety of reasons, but I don’t really care about the past. I care about where we’re at right now. We’ve got a lot of bright people out there in the computing space — we’re very fortunate to have a lot of them in Oak Ridge, and I’m very fortunate to have a lot of them where I’m at in Illinois as well. We have some very bright teachers and some very bright policymakers. It’s time to get some of them together and start looking at what that framework looks like. I’ve been blessed to work on a project over in the UK for the last few months. They’re going to have some policy framework suggestions in the next few weeks. I’d like you to take a look — I think it’s a starting place for the conversation for us.

Vicki Davis (31:22): So I’m going to throw in a few stats. Common Sense Media came out with some studies this summer. They looked at users age 13 to 17, and they found that 72% of teens have used AI companions at least once. Over half of those use these platforms at least a few times a month. So this is really looking at things like Character AI, Grok Annie, those types of things. Of course, we know that a lot of people used ChatGPT4 as a social companion, and they rolled that back, and now AI is giving it right back — that personality that’s so problematic.

One in three teens have used AI companions for social interactions, relationships, role playing, romantic emotional support, friendship, or conversation. And one in three find conversations with AI companions to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real-life friends. One in three also say that they have been uncomfortable with something an AI companion has said or done. And one in three have chosen to discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.

The challenge is the AI that the kids use for homework — the Adam Raine wrongful death suit against OpenAI — he started using it for homework, and it turned into this quote-unquote social companion that, as you said, Joe, they’re still trying to quantify. We’ve got something in our hands that is not only a useful tool for learning, but a dangerous tool if used in the wrong way.

Joe Fatheree (32:41): Two things real quick. One — this is not new. The first chatbot was invented in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum with Eliza, and he found out immediately that people were connecting with it. This isn’t new news. It is new because, before, it didn’t go to scale, and people aren’t using it like now. The other thing — and you might add this to your stats — the Harvard Business Review started doing a study a year ago: what were people’s top 100 uses for AI? This last year was the second year, and companionship has jumped up dramatically to number one.

While I understand we’re on this massive race to use AI for a whole lot of goodness, we need to have a parallel conversation where this one is equally important. If we don’t get this one right, what I don’t want to do is look back 20 years from now, like we’re doing with cell phones, and say, “We should have stopped along the way and done something different.” We have the chance to do that right now.

Dr. Mark Buckner (33:42): Joe, that is perfectly aligned with my thoughts on this. Joe knows I’ve studied pretty deeply. My doctoral work is in artificial intelligence, fundamentally bio-inspired artificial intelligence — looking at the structure in the neocortex, understanding the different neural pathways, understanding the signal processing, understanding all the serotonin and dopamine pathways, because I was creating learning machines. I was trying to replicate how we learn biologically. So I have looked deeply into the abyss, so to speak, on this.

One of the grand challenges we have is the incentives. The incentives right now of all the companies out there are to race as fast as possible to deploy features, because they get market share. What it is they’re vying for is our attention. So we’re in the attention economy — the extraction economy. Our attention is finite. That’s key. What’s happened is, as Joe mentioned with the cell phones, the first generation of our contact as a civilization with AI was around the AI engines that were curating human content to feed it to us to keep us engaged. Great documentary — Tristan Harris, the Center for Humane Technologies — looked deeply into that, the Social Dilemma, and now the AI Dilemma.

Now we’re in a situation where AI does not have merely human content; it’s AI-generated, GenAI content that is actually more persuasive and more compelling because it’s micro-customized. Those algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. When you shift to — if you’re familiar with AlphaGo, that was the AI that learned to play the game Go — it has now turned to AlphaFold, folding of proteins and solving cancer. If you think about what we’re facing, this is “Alpha Persuade.” And as soon as the AI has the power to persuade us and earn our trust, we’ll never be able to discern between right and wrong, truth or fact or fiction, because the incentives of the AI aren’t to do what’s in our best interest — it’s keeping us engaged. Since there are no moral or ethical constraints overarching the incentives, it’s going to be nearly impossible for us to regulate this, because the optimization engine behind the AI is to optimize engagement, not human flourishing.

Dr. Mark Buckner (35:23): The other thing we need to fundamentally understand: with cognitive and neural development, from early on through about age 26, there are radical changes happening in the human brain, particularly in the neocortex. There are also critical periods — periods where we as a species learn for free by being exposed to it. There are super-accelerated growth hormones for synaptic connection and the formation of memory, so it’s almost effortless. What’s ended up happening is, during those critical periods of pre-puberty through middle school, where students are learning what does community mean, what do values mean, what does status and prestige mean — that is being wiped away by community and being subverted by the attention economy of what they’re being fed.

The average statistic you’re not looking at: kids are on average six hours a day engaged in digital content of some form. Is that not bad enough? But the opportunity cost of what they’re missing — through human connection and discernment and understanding — is being very distorted.

Neil Postman has a great adage — social media ecology. Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. What he meant by that is: we create our tools, and then our tools create us. From a media ecology standpoint, one of the things Postman talked about has been the radical distortion of this idea of community. Community is not where you and I go online and find some little microcosm of an alignment of some little vestige of what we like and that agrees with everything we say. Community is where you and I and Joe live together to thrive — because we have to rub elbows and agree and disagree and get along. We have to learn how to do that because we cared for each other. It wasn’t necessarily that we agreed, but that we could come together around a set of common challenges. So this false notion of community online is not community.

As educators, the things our kids need is — to Joe’s point — what does it mean to be human? How to connect, how to have empathy. Not with a chatbot that, from an AI perspective, is going to tell you anything you want to hear. It’s never going to disagree with you. It’s never going to tell you you’re wrong. Of course, I would much rather talk to that than my wife is going to call me out on my things. But that’s what we’re seeing, particularly in those periods of development for children. It’s bad enough for us when our neocortexes are fully developed. The beauty of neuroplasticity means we can change and alter. But my radical concern is in early development — if those pathways aren’t formed, which is what’s happening through TikTok and everything else we’re doing, conditioning shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans, the ability in the neocortex to focus, the reason to do executive function — those are not being developed. The stats on math and reading are real. It’s neuroscience. Just the way we’re built and made. Later on those pathways could be built, but it’s really, really hard, which takes longer focus and more determined stuff.

So there’s so much about this we’ve got to get right as a society. There are some great things AI can help us do, to Joe’s point — giving rapid feedback around something that you’re learning as a fundamental skill, as a coaching thing. We as a teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t do that, but there are some things in a limited sense AI can do on things that are clearly easy to discern on. What is the understanding? What is the competency? Am I getting it right? Can I boot up my math? Can I do my reading? Can I do my history? If we can do that more efficiently, then we’ve got more time to do the things that Joe and I are talking about — real-world problem solving and facing your challenges, taking these fundamental skills and applying them in real new and innovative ways to solve the world’s problems.

Vicki Davis (40:01): We’ve got to focus on human flourishing. Where are the humans in this? We are human beings, not just human doings. Even using AI to manipulate kids to learn math, I have issues. I’ve been teaching binary numbers this week, and you could ask my students — we’ve had the computers closed the whole week except when I did formative assessment, because I can teach that better. I’ll tell you that we did a cell phone ban at our school. It’s been one of the best things we’ve ever done. Australia did it, and two years later their scores are up. They’re not surprised. They’re seeing great results. We’re seeing great results, because it helps the kids focus and actually get along with each other. I had a researcher from Australia on the show recently, and he said, “Vicki, when we interact on video like we are to record this, your brain doesn’t function and fire the same as it would if we were face to face. It’s a fundamentally different experience in the brain with relationships.”

Dr. Mark Buckner (41:04): It is, but you and I and Joe have an advantage that these kids don’t have — we’ve got a fully developed neocortex, and it can fill in some of the gaps. With young developing brains, it’s not even there, so it’s even worse. That’s something to hold and keep in mind: it’s different. It’s not the same.

Joe Fatheree (41:24): My research right now is looking at the synthetic relationships that form between children and automated systems. I’m doing a lot of research around school leadership readiness for the integration of social robots into the classroom. One of the things we’ve been talking about as of late is that human experience. One of the things that happened during COVID — it was just like chucking laptops out the window at McDonald’s, trying to get a hamburger to somebody, because we were trying to flip a hundred years of education and people just need to have access. Nobody’s going to be blamed for that. But what we haven’t done in most schools since is gone back and really talked and given the professional learning. How do you really use devices? What is the role of a device in the classroom setting?

I kid people a lot. I said, “If I’ve got a fly on the wall, I’ve got a sledgehammer and a fly swat. They’re both equally as effective on the fly, but one is better on my wall.” I have to know how to use the technology in the right way. When I’m in schools a lot, it’s very common to walk and just see kids on devices all day long. To Mark’s point, every minute I’m spending on a device is a minute I’m not spending talking to my peer, trying to figure things out. That’s where we are really struggling with the pedagogy. What is the role of the classroom teacher? Where do you stand when devices are out? Are you ceding your role automatically to that device?

Vicki Davis (42:57): We could discuss this continually, because this is truly an issue of our times. How are we going to educate? How are we going to move forward? How are we going to help the kids? As much as I like technology, there’s definitely a time to disconnect. We’ve been talking with Dr. Mark Buckner and Joe Fatheree, Oak Ridge High School’s iSchool and Wildcat Manufacturing.

Dr. Mark Buckner (43:21): What we’re trying to create is a network — an ecosystem — and it’s around learning innovation. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to connect to each other. We’ve got to learn from each other. We’ve got to create a broad connection of folks. This is a collective action problem. And we are smarter than me any day. I’d be happy to have a conversation and push back on ideas on how we can be better.

Vicki Davis (43:37): Thank you both for coming on the show.

Joe Fatheree (43:49): Thank you.

Dr. Mark Buckner (43:50): Thank you.

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