When Scott Anthony (Dartmouth College, Class of 1996) left behind a 20-year career in high-stakes consulting to join the faculty at his alma mater in July 2022, he was thinking of moving away from the “heavy day-to-day battles” of the corporate world for a quieter teaching career. instead (as Anthony mentioned earlier in the commentary) luck), he arrived on campus months before ChatGPT was released and found himself squarely at the center of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that left many students paralyzed with anxiety.
In a recent interview, the former consultant at McKinsey and Innosite, the boutique firm co-founded by Clayton Christensen and Mark Johnson in 2000 and acquired by Huron in 2017, revealed that the prevailing mood among the next generation of business leaders is not just excitement, but fear.
“One of the things that always amazes me is how scared students are of using it,” Anthony said. He made it clear that this anxiety was not just about academic integrity or cheating. He revealed that while many students are excited about leveraging AI and stepping into the forefront of this new technological advancement, a significant proportion approach it with “hesitancy and fear.” They are “totally scary.”
“There's something about AI that I worry about that if people lean too much towards it, they'll lose their humanity,” Anthony explained. This differs from many of his long-time research colleagues. They are usually eager to dig into new tools at their disposal, he said. newly minted author Epic disruption: 11 innovations that shaped the modern worldAnthony spoke luck About teaching a course on disruption at a time when education and work itself is being disrupted. “History clearly tells us that during such changes it is very troubling.”
fear of losing yourself
Anthony said his belief about studying disruption and navigating it as a consultant is that patterns emerge in retrospect, but at this particular stage, “there's just a lot of noise.” He said he understands students' concerns about AI and shares them to some extent. Leaving too much cognitive work to AI will atrophy the critical thinking skills needed for instruction.
A remarkable MIT study published in June appears to vindicate Anthony's claims. The title is “ChatGPT Your Brain” and the subtitle mentions “Accumulating Cognitive Debt.” Widely cited in the media as confirming Anthony's students' fears that AI tools could somehow harm humanity, the study suggests “a reduction in cognitive activity associated with the use of external tools.” In other words, it suggests that using AI will make humans dumber.
Vitomir Kobanovic and Rebecca Marrone from the University of South Australia argued that: conversation The brain-only group then repeated the task three times. This is a phenomenon known as the learning effect. They noted that because the AI control group only “used their brains” once to perform the task, they achieved only slightly better engagement than the brain-only group's first attempt. They argued that AI functions like a calculator and that even with AI tools, the task is not sophisticated enough to ring a student. Anthony wouldn't comment on that specific MIT study, but said: luck He is fully committed to AI evaluation.
“I teach classes on how to lead disruptive change,” Anthony said, adding that he hopes to find people who need to learn a particular topic and use AI to address it. This doesn't mean he wants something like, say, an AI-driven song that requires a single prompt. “I want you to go and expose the essence of the work that you've done, so I can go and see if you learned anything.” Sometimes there's elegant output from students who haven't learned anything, he said, but he also gets “a rough output when you look at what they're actually doing.”
When asked about examples of people like Jure Leskovec, a Stanford University computer science professor who went all out on the Blue Book exam a few years ago, he replied: luck It was reported in September that Anthony respected that, but said it wasn't for him. “I've never taken the Blue Book exam,” he said, adding that he's only a few years removed from his consulting career and might give it a try, but he's not quite there yet. Some of his colleagues are still very strict. Not only is one colleague still only taking the blue book exam, but “he doesn't allow people to go to the bathroom during the exam. They just don't leave the room.”
He agreed with Leskovec, saying some changes were already irreversible and that “the writing is all good now. The bad writing has been removed.” He added that this could be “dangerous” and urged students to resist the temptation.
“What I'm really pushing now, whether it's students or executives I've worked with, it's so seductive that it's easy to say, 'Give me the job,'” he said. The reason, he explained, had to do with what he learned about Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Child while researching his book.
What Jerry Seinfeld believes about hard work
In Seinfeld's words, Anthony said he teaches his students that “the right way is the hard way.” He recalled an interview Seinfeld did. harvard business review In 2017, when this famous comedian with a reputation as something of a micromanager was asked if he'd ever wanted McKinsey to help him with his process. “Who is McKinsey?” he asked. When I was told that it was a consulting company, I retorted, “Isn't that interesting?''
Seinfeld was making a point, Alexander said. luckthat the hard way to be funny is the right way, at least for him. He said he wants students to do the “hard work” to acquire the wisdom needed to effectively manage AI.
“We just need to separate humans from technology when assessing learning. Otherwise we will see an AI backlash,” he warned. That's useful for some things, but “it doesn't help when you're trying to figure out whether people learned something.”
Anthony also used a fitness analogy, saying, “If you go to the gym and you want to lift any weight, you take your forklift. You can lift weights, but that's not the point.”
julia childA long record of failures before success
Anthony said it shows that people are being bogged down by AI when they should be focusing on their research and writings, which they teach at the Tuck School of Business, or the hard work that Seinfeld mentioned. Consider the example of famous food writer Julia Child. Anthony said this was his favorite chapter of the book because it was the most surprising. The lesson he took away from that was that you might not be the next Steve Jobs, but you might be the next Julia Child. “If life goes well, you can imagine it happening to me, right?”
The professor explained that Child's example shows that destruction “is not about becoming a superhero,” but rather about ordinary people following certain behaviors and showing curiosity.
“It's a reminder that there is no straight line to success,” he says. She began working on her masterpiece. Master the art of French cookingwhich took about a decade and changed publishers twice before becoming a success. Although she failed her first attempt at Cordon Bleu in Paris, she persevered to become the woman who brought French cuisine to the American mainstream. “This is like a classic hero's journey,” he said.
Consider the first French meal Childe made for her husband, Anthony said. It's brains boiled in red wine. “Everyone agreed this was a disaster.” But again, he said, it's the hard work that counts.
