Review of ROBOT PROOF
Perhaps higher ed should focus more on creativity and critical thinking
As our world becomes more tech-facilitated, jobs once done by people are now being done by machines. Walk in to nearly any fast-food restaurant today, for instance, and many will have kiosks for customers to order, eliminating the couple folks that used to man the cash registers and take your order. Imagine this at scale, and we have a bit of a problem.
The answer that is often proposed is advanced education. Folks need to get practical training, certificates, and degrees that will set them up for advancement and opportunity in today’s – and tomorrow’s – world. Coding, computer science, and health care are where to be. But Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Aoun, has a slightly different answer. He argues that people need to focus on developing skills that robots can’t perform: Creativity and critical thinking.
What? Shouldn’t everyone be coding? Maybe. Aoun’s argument is simple: If people are going to avoid having their careers taken over by AI, then they need to do things that robots can’t do. Robots can do a lot – and much of it better than humans – but they can’t think in the same way as a person. They can’t critically analyze context, systems, and relationships in the same way that humans can. We need to make sure our students can do that.
The problem is that higher education is currently in a professionalization phase meaning that we’re intensely focusing on the “hard skills”, practical degrees and certificates, and largely neglecting the “soft skills” that are sorely needed in today’s professional workplaces.
In one sense, what Aoun advocates for sounds an awful like the educational experience students would get at a small liberal arts college for their primary education – creative projects, experiential learning, character development, and mentorship – fused with the lifelong learning and development that more closely resembles mega universities like Western Governors University or Arizona State University.
In addition to the soft skills, Aoun argues students today still need technological and data literacy, so they know how to work effectively with machines. But we shouldn’t aim for our students to necessarily work like machines. If they can, then they can easily be replaced. Of course, this all sounds good, but the problem always comes down to scale: how do we scale this type of high touch learning? It’s something no one has yet solved in my opinion.
Overall, this is a quick single-sitting read. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would at first, and was pleasantly surprised by the advocacy of creativity and critical thinking. Something higher ed could use a healthy dose of currently.
Published: August 2018
Format: Paperback
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education by Justin Reich (2020)
Should Robots Replace Teachers?: AI and the Future of Education by Neil Selwyn (2019)
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