virtualelena@virtualelena2h ago

in 1882, thomas edison's pearl street power station (the first commercial power plant in the us) began serving 59 customers in lower manhattan. that same fall, mit introduced the country's first electrical engineering curriculum. this co-evolution of enterprise on one side, and pedagogy on the other is one of the many forces that brought america firmly into the industrial era in the late 1800s/early 1900s. i think this is useful context for the conversation between @eriktorenberg @bhorowitz @gaganbiyani about what education for the ai era should look like. the institutions we now treat as permanent fixtures had to make decisions about emerging technologies and whether it was worth teaching a field whose applications were still being discovered. in this pod announcing horowitz andreessen academy (@theacademysf), ben makes the case that a technological change on the scale of ai should prompt a similarly ambitious rethinking of education. one of my favorite details is ben recounting a conversation with stanford's dan boneh about making problems hard enough that students *need* ai to solve them. that seems like a much more interesting educational ambition than spending the next decade trying to establish whether someone used a chatbot on their homework. there's something very regressive about knowing young people have access to tools that can help them do unprecedented things, and then evaluating them entirely on what they can do without them. we should all be excited to see what happens when a school like haa takes the opposite approach, and prepares students for the machine age.