Nathaniel Whittemore

of AI to a wider audience.

Frankly, this also strikes me as an opportunity for perhaps a different class of business that has different incentives.

I think there are very clear profit-motivated business opportunities in AI-ifying how municipalities work, but I think that trying to find a new generation of entrepreneurs, maybe some of whom have backgrounds in that type of municipal service,

who are designing leaner, more capital-efficient providers, who are going to be able to offer municipalities contracts and services that provide that transitional support without gouging them, it just strikes me that this could be a great moment for a new class of civic-minded entrepreneur to really do some damage in the best possible way.

When it comes to educators and education, goodness gracious, where to even begin?

This is something we've talked about a lot on this show, although not for a little while, believe it or not.

But by and large, education is stuck being concerned that students can now cheat on the test, when the real problem is that in the future that we're moving into, the test doesn't matter.

We need nothing short of a radical re-evaluation of everything that we teach.

To be wildly oversimplified and reductive in a way that the educators among you are going to be cringing your faces off, I apologize in advance, let's start by separating everything into three buckets.

The skills that are definitely still relevant, which, by the way, there are many.

Critical thinking, ethical judgment, creative problem solving, human interaction and empathy.

Relevant, relevant, relevant, relevant, in fact, more so.

Also, interestingly enough, a set of skills which we've often pejoratively called soft skills that we haven't had nearly enough emphasis on in our education system for a very long time.

So we've got that one bucket of definitely still relevant.

Then we have the things that are definitely changing in relevance.

Subjects that are absolutely and undeniably being transformed by AI tools.

Writing and composition, research and information synthesis.

programming.

We don't have to fully throw out the baby with the bathwater to recognize that we're talking about a lot more than going from adding with an abacus to adding with a calculator when it comes to how dramatically this set of skills is changing in terms of how humans are going to interact with them.

And then, of course, there's perhaps the biggest category, which we will generously call who the hell knows.