I turned in grades Friday and thus wrapped up the 2024-25 school year. I have a few miscellaneous things I’ll have to do in the next few months, but I’m not planning on doing too much work stuff (other than posts like this) until late July/early August when I’ll have to get busy prepping for the fall. Of course, it’s difficult for me to just turn off the work part of my brain, and I’ve been reflecting on teaching the last couple of days: what I’ll do differently next time, what worked well, which assignments/readings need to be altered or retired, and also what I learned from my students. That was especially true with my sections of first-year writing this year.
This past year, the topic in my first-year writing courses was “Your Future Career and AI.” It was part of a lot of “leaning in” to AI for me this year. As I wrote back in December, we read and talked about how AI might be useful in some parts of the writing process, but also about AI’s limitations, especially when it comes to the key goals of the class. AI is not good at researching (especially researching anything academic/behind a library’s firewall), it cannot effectively or correctly quote/paraphrase/cite that research in an essay in MLA style, and AI cannot tell students what to think.
In other words, by paying attention to AI (rather than resisting, refusing, or wishing AI away), I think my students learned that ChatGPT is more than just a cheating device, and I think I learned a lot about how to tweak/redesign my first year writing class to make AI cheating less of a problem. Again, more details in my post “Six Things I Learned After a Semester of Lots of AI,” but I think what it boils down to is teach writing as a process.
But I also learned a lot from my students’ research about the impact of AI on all sorts of careers and industries beyond my own. So the other day, when I read this fuzzy little article by Jack Kelly on the Forbes website, “The Jobs That Will Fall First as AI Takes Over The Workplace,” I thought that seems about right, at least based on what my students were telling me with their research.
Now, two caveats on what I’ve learned from my freshmen: first, they’re freshmen (mostly– I had a few stray sophomores and juniors in there too), and thus these are inexperienced and incomplete researchers. Second, one of the many interesting (and stressful and fun) things about short and long-term projections of the future of Artificial Intelligence (both generative AI, which is basically where we are now, and artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence, which is where the AI is as “smart” or “smarter” than humans) is no one knows.
That said, I learned a lot. In a nutshell: while it’s likely that everything will eventually be impacted by AI (just as everything was affected by one of the more recent general-purpose technologies, the internet), I don’t think AI will transform education as much as a lot of educators fear. Though like I just said, every prediction about the future of AI has about the same chance of being right as being wrong.
For starters, all of my students were able to find plenty of research about “x” career and AI. No one came up empty. Predictably, my students interested in fields like engineering, accounting, finance, business, law, logistics, computer science, and so on had no problems finding articles in both MSM and academic publications. But I was surprised to see the success everyone had, including students with career ambitions in nursing, physical therapy, sports training, interior design, criminology, gaming, graphics, aviation, elementary school teaching, fine art, music, social work. I worried about the students who wanted to research AI and careers in hotel and restaurant management, theatre, dance, and dermatology; they all found plenty of resources. The one student who came closest to stumping the topic was a young man researching AI and professional baseball pitching. But yeah, there were some articles about that too.
Second, the fields/careers that will probably be impacted by AI the most (and this is already happening) involve working and dealing with A LOT of complex data, and ones that involve a lot of repetitive tasks which nonetheless take expertise. Think of something like accounting, finance, basic data analysis. None of my students researched this, but as that Forbes article mentioned, AI is also already reshaping careers like customer service, data processing, and simple bookkeeping.
None of my students wrote much about how AI will replace humans in “X” careers, though some of them did include some research on that for careers like nursing and hospitality. Perhaps my students were researching too selectively or too optimistically; after all, they were projecting their futures with their research and none of them wanted AI to put them out of a career before they even finished college. But most of what my students wrote about was how AI will assist but not replace professionals in careers like engineering and aviation. And as one of my aviation students pointed out, AI in various forms has been a part of being a pilot for a long time now. (I was tempted to include here a link to the autopilot scene from the movie Airplane!). Something similar was true in a lot of fields, including graphic design and journalism.
For a lot of careers, AI’s impact is likely to be more indirect. I heard this analogy while listening to this six-part podcast from The Atlantic: AI is probably not going to have a lot of impact on how a toothpaste factory makes and puts toothpaste into tubes, but it will change the way that company handles accounting, human resources, maybe distribution and advertising, and so forth. I think there are a lot of careers like that.
I only had a few students researching careers in education– which is surprising because EMU comes out of the Normal School tradition, and we certainly used to have a lot more K -12 education majors than we do now. The two students who come to mind right now were researching elementary education and art education, and both of those students argued AI can help but not replace teachers or the curriculum for lots of different reasons. This squares with what I’ve read elsewhere and in this short Forbes article as well: jobs in “teaching, especially in nuanced fields like philosophy or early education” and other jobs that “rely on emotional intelligence and adaptability, which AI struggles to replicate,” are less likely to be replaced by AI anytime too soon.
Don’t get me wrong: besides the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with AI in the next few years (that’s what makes predicting the future of AI so much fun because quite literally anything might be true!), AI already has impacted and altered how we teach and learn things. As I discussed in my CCCCs talk, the introduction of personal computers and the internet also changed how we practice and teach writing. As I’ve written about a lot here lately, if the goal of a writing class is to have students to use AI as an aid (or not at all) in their learning and process, then teachers need to teach differently than they did before the rise of AI. And of course teachers (and everyone else) are going to have to keep adapting as AI keeps evolving.
But when I wonder about the current and near future threats to my career of choice, higher education, I think about falling enrollments, declining funding from the state, the insane Trump/Musk cuts to research institutions, deporting international students, axing DEI initiatives and other programs meant to help at risk students, and the growing distrust of expertise and science. I don’t think about professors being replaced or made irrelevant because of AI.