A third of college teaching should be about how to use AI and understand its limits, a leading economist has told Business Insider.
Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, previously warned that universities were “producing a generation of students who will go out on the labor market and be quite unprepared for what they’re expected to do” as AI reshapes the world of work.
Asked what colleges should do instead, Cowen told Business Insider there should be a “huge change.”
“I think we should devote up to one-third of the curriculum to teaching students how to use, interact with, and spot the limitations of AIs,” he said.
In higher education, students “are taught many things that the AI does very well, such as answering routine questions about routine areas of knowledge,” he said.
That’s a problem, he said, because “this is in fact quite a large part of the curriculum. We teach things that are easy to test for. That is exactly what the AIs tend to excel at.”
“Some of that education still may be needed so that people can interact with the AI appropriately, but there is no point in teaching skills where the machine outcompetes the human,” Cowen added.
Cowen said that colleges need to rethink what and how they teach to prepare students for the future job market.
Cowen said there were already categories of work that AI is disrupting, such as routine service jobs, especially those done behind a computer, like customer service, processing work, and IT work.
Cowen said, whatever human oversight is still needed, the “amount of human labor required in these areas will, over time, fall dramatically.”
Cowen previously said he wasn’t confident institutions were ready to shift teaching toward mentorship and critical thinking.
“Our ability to reshuffle the personnel, the procedures, we just seem to me really quite frozen,” he told podcaster Azeem Azhar in July.
Cowen previously warned of a ‘psychological’ cost of students being unprepared for AI
In his conversation with Azhar, Cowen said students were often taught in “counterproductive” ways and that “many of the highest costs” of being unprepared for the AI world will be psychological.
He added that people will feel “they do not fit into this world, and they’ll be somewhat correct.”
In a May essay co-authored with Avital Balwit, chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Cowen wrote in The Free Press: “We stand at the threshold of perhaps the most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced.”
As AI systems exceed human cognitive abilities, they said: “Our children and grandchildren will face a profound challenge: how to live meaningful lives in a world where they are no longer the smartest and most capable entities in it.”
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