“We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” – Douglas Engelbart, 1962

I have been obsessed with helping humans construct better worlds, for ourselves and society in general, through the strategic use of technology throughout my career. This idea was at the core of Discovering Digital Humanity. It is also the core of my teaching philosophy.

Learning, as we have set it up, is hard and often unrewarding in any meaningful way to students. Like the bow made it easier to hunt and the fire made it possible for us to cook, computing technology should make it easier for us to think.

I have found this approach to be at odds with the way most others see technology. There are basically two camps here. One is the mechanics, those who see technology as an end to itself. This group forms the core of what we might call the IT community these days.

Then there is the camp that views technology largely with a level of fear. This is because the group that understands the technology has a vested interest in keeping its mysteries to itself. As a result, we divorce technology from humanity.

I have never liked this division. I have always straddled the divide and my approach to teaching is no different. However, until recently, much of the technology required a certain mindset (associated with the mechanics) to really harness. Most of my students felt harnessed to technology, and not in a good way.

AI changes that. It doesn’t require a technical bent to interact with. It doesn’t even require a desire to do that. It also threatens systems built with the older technological mindsets at their core.

Why read the old, often difficult to access, technology of the book, when you can just interrogate it? Why write using that same technology, when everyone’s expectations seem so unreachable? This is what keeps my students from engaging meaningfully with their own brains and learning.

This struggle has always formed the core of my pedagogical practice. Many of my students feel imprisoned by systems of all types: economic, educational, and technological.

All these things come together when we tell them they “need to get an education to get a job” and they “need to master this technology to get a job.” Unsurprisingly, this creates resistance.

No one talks about education as a liberating process anymore. It’s just fitting you for a new set of chains. This is at odds with what I’ve always thought about both education and technology.

In practice, this means teaching the students that they have real, not just performative, power. AI helps me humanize both technology and the learning process by lowering barriers to information and process.

Most students are not used to having an on-call assistant to use in their learning, This is my first set of lessons in the class: how to use AI tools and what their limits are. As José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson describe it:

AI is a new eager assistant capable of finding information, creating visualizations, writing drafts, offering feedback, and analyzing data. It will alter your workflow and allow you to do other things. (Teaching with AI, p. 84)

Students are not used to having this kind of on-call help and it doesn’t help that many of their teachers call this kind of assistance “cheating.” However, this is the future that they are facing. We must teach them how to make AI their partner, not their replacement.

Bowen and Watson also point out that AI can simulate situations and allow students to interact with them. This “red team” approach challenges certainty and forces students to test their thinking.

In my class, I use the AI to simulate opposition to the students’ ideas for solving their challenges. This can take the form of a politician or interest group arguing for alternative solutions.

I still challenge them live in class but often those lessons don’t stick. However, being able to do this asynchronously, they must respond in writing to get Gold points for that section. This is a good lesson in intellectual humility taught without shaming them.

This is where the medaling system in my class comes into play. Most students (and professionals) use AI to construct things. They’re writing papers with it (or letting the chatbot write for them) or creating images.

AI can do a pretty credible job of mimicking mediocre writing and graphic creation. However, most “creation” these days is mediocre product, from cheap graphics to emails and memos (and college essays).

This is not augmentation. It is replacement.

When most professors and professionals complain to me about AI, it’s usually because of the problems (“hallucinations”) these kinds of AI use produce. I tell them, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Many students are used to operating this way because this is all that school has ever demanded from them. Convincing them that this is a pathway to disaster is tall order.

That’s where the Gold assignments come into the picture. These assignments bring the human back in by forcing the students to connect what they’re working on for their challenges back to their own lives.

Gold assignments force the students to move beyond what the AI will ever be able to do. Sure, the AI can mimic a human but it’s never going to be one. I explain to them that if all they ever do is Silver level work (the construction part), they are replaceable by AI. Some of them get it. A lot of them don’t. I worry about those who don’t.

Gold points recenter the human into the equation. Their humanity may have become lost in the systems of education or buried under technological monstrosities. AI lets me tease it back out again.

In 1962, Douglas Engelbart wrote a proposal to “Augment Human Intellect.” Note that he didn’t say “replace.” That is because Engelbart saw computers as the ultimate tool to make humans better.

His struggles centered on making them accessible in an era of punchcards and flashing diodes that only a very few knew how to interact with it. His technological vision bore fruit in the 1980s with the mass adoption of computing systems that grew out of his work in the 1960s, but he never thought his work was done.

That is because he realized that to take full advantage of this augmentation, humans needed to change the systems that held them back. AI has made technological assistance more accessible than before. I don’t have to code to interact with it. I can just talk to it.

My course is explicitly designed to help students transcend the systems that hold them back. I don’t know what the AI future holds but I do know that it will be corrosive to those systems.

Those who are stuck in them will be dragged down with them. Those who can augment themselves and other humans will thrive. I want my students to thrive.