AI Friday: The Real Risk of AI Isn't Skynet, It's the Education Gap

I recently learned of Mackenzie Price. Price is co-founder of Alpha School, an AI-powered private school which teaches kids in two hours what other schools take 8 to teach. The rest of the day the students spend working on various real-world skills projects.

Their results, at least as they publish them, sound amazing. Their students score in the top 2 percent of standardized tests and are often grade levels ahead of their peers.

2 hours a day. Grade levels ahead. Top 2 percent of the population. Sounds great! So, what’s the catch?

These AI-powered Alpha schools cost parents 40 grand a year per kid.

I also read an article the other day on literacy. Apparently, the average American can't read past a 6th-grade reading level and 1 in 5 is functionally illiterate.

And of course, this disproportionately affects Black and Brown students.

I'm not afraid of us getting AI wrong. I'm not afraid of AI cracking our nuclear codes or enslaving humanity and using us as batteries.

I'm afraid of what happens if we get AI right. What happens in a world where rich kids have access to AI-powered schools and supercharged education while poor kids get the same old state-sponsored education, which stalls out at 6th grade?

Of course, many will say that this wouldn't happen if we designed a more fair system. If we paid teachers more or gave them better training or if we gave teachers more power and agency.

What these critiques miss is that we've already done that. Many states do pay teachers more, schools are loaded with professional development training, and teacher unions are a powerful force in this country.

Education reform has failed not because we haven't tried. Education reform has failed because scaling education across 300 million Americans is very difficult. It's probably too difficult to do and, therefore, is the wrong problem to solve. As long as we keep attempting to solve the education problem at scale, we will continue to provide an education that is failing most people.

But education reform is not the point of this article. The point of this article is I can very easily see a world where AI, at least in the short term, leads to greater disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

If you’d like to read more about where I see AI heading, you should read my article about what’s how AI’s going to impact counseling over the next 16 months.

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Jordan Harris Jordan Harris, Ph.D., LMFT-S, LPC-S, received his Doctor of Philosophy in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Louisiana Monroe. He is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist in the state of Arkansas, USA. In his clinical work, he enjoys working with couples. He also runs a blog on deliberate practice for therapists and counselors at Jordanthecounselor.com