A.I. is a Copernican Revolution in Education

What happens when an unstoppable force slams into an immovable object?

Higher education is, if nothing else, an incredibly conservative and stable institution; in fact, no institution (except for the Catholic Church) has been around longer. The problem is that artificial intelligence is changing anything and everything in its path.

So who’s going to come out of this collision alive? Dear reader, before you decide, let me provide a metaphor.

AI is not like one of those highway road rollers, slowly paving over everything in its path. That’s what organizational theorists call incremental change; it’s something we see coming and can plan for. I want to suggest that AI is a transformational change – a paradigm shift – much like when a particle accelerator shoots electrons at incredibly high speeds into a proton, creating completely brand-new and unexpected particles from the impact.

Three years ago, my students wrote their papers and submitted them to be graded. Those papers signified students’ grasp of the content I taught. I therefore simply gave students an “A” if they “got it” or a “C” if they didn’t really get it but had given it the “old college try.” The grade, in other words, served as an overarching proxy (a signal) for students’ effort and intelligence.

Yet today, AI can immediately, effortlessly, and almost perfectly ace any and all questions on any and all subjects in any and all academic disciplines. This is what insiders call “PhD-level intelligence,” and why just about everyone is cheating their way through college. Students are getting A’s not for their effort or intelligence, but for simply cutting and pasting any and every assignment into AI. 

I have talked about this as a “crisis of purpose” for higher education, but by now I think it is even more: a paradigm shift literally happening before our eyes. Thomas Kuhn popularized the idea of a paradigm shift as he studied the “Copernican Revolution”: when astronomers moved from a “geocentric” to a “heliocentric” vision of the universe, realizing that the Earth was just another planet circling the sun rather than at the center.

Yet before this paradigm shift, for over fifteen hundred years, ancient astronomers created ever-more convoluted and complex explanations in order to explain Aristotle and Ptolemy’s original theorizing. Kuhn called this “normal science” (because it was incremental), and it became known as “saving the phenomenon”; i.e., justifying and defending a worldview of man as the centerpiece of God’s creation.

The problem, of course, was that such theories did not match reality. It was only once Copernicus rethought Earth’s position that the astronomical observations made sense. But to be clear: this was not an incremental reworking of errant formulas. The “Copernican Revolution” fundamentally decentered humans – scientifically and metaphorically – from the center of the universe. Even more importantly, Copernicus’s insight allowed Isaac Newton to spell out the universal laws of motion and gravitation, leading to future revolutions in everything from optics to electricity.

These completely brand-new and unexpected discoveries are what happens when one paradigm closes, and another one opens, and what I believe is about to happen in higher education.

The key to understanding this shift is to realize that our traditional model of education was never about learning; it’s actually always been about teaching (what scholars call the “credentialing function” of higher education). In fact, professors have never been trained to teach or rewarded for doing it, which is why one historian of education has called teaching “an amateur enterprise”; yet what we all knew how to do was “profess” our knowledge and then grade students’ papers to see how much of it they got.

This is what AI has destroyed. So when you hear professors talk wistfully about those pre-AI days and advocate for policing cheaters with better AI detectors, stronger honor codes, more sophisticated surveillance, or proctored exams and blue books, you now know what they’re actually doing is a last-gasp defensive attempt at “saving the phenomenon” of an outdated and broken model.

A paradigm shift is upon us as AI has decentered the college classroom, which, I suggest, will bring forth multiple educational revolutions. Let me, therefore, try to sketch them out.

The first revolution will be in learning. I’ve spent three long years rethinking and revising every part of my teaching practices in order to make AI my co-instructor; my students are, I have to admit, smarter because of it. That is because learning isn’t linear or passive or segmented into 90-minute lecture blocks. Rather, learning is about dialogue and process and metacognition and failure and aha moments. And when I prompt AI correctly, it can be the perfect Socratic tutor to my students on any and every subject I teach, as it is adaptive, personalized, on-demand, ever-patient, and fully aligned to whatever goals and objectives I want.

That is why the second revolution will be in access. Researchers used to believe – in what they called the “iron triangle” of higher education – that we could only ever have two out of three key outcomes: low costs, high access, and a quality education. Yet the reality of high-quality, personalized, and free AI tutors for each and every student in higher education is no longer just a pipe dream of techno-futurists. It’s literally happening every day in college classrooms around the country as faculty figure out how to make this vision a reality.

Finally, and most problematically, comes the revolution in what counts as a university. Remember, colleges give out diplomas only because professors give out grades. But, ahem, AI has broken this. So what happens when we acknowledge that we’ve been giving out diplomas for the wrong reasons (i.e., professors teaching rather than students learning)? What happens when students can show legitimate learning in ways that have nothing to do with what happens within classroom walls and textbook covers?

Paradigm shifts aren’t smooth or easy. Think back to those collisions between electrons and protons, which are so raw and powerful and cataclysmic that they actually reveal brand-new and unexpected particles.

That’s where we are today in higher education. So what happens when an unstoppable force slams into an immovable object? Your guess is as good as mine.