A.I. School Is in Session: Two Takes on the Future of Education

This week, we check in on the state of artificial intelligence in education. We talk with a co-founder of Alpha Schools, MacKenzie Price, about how her private K-12 schools are using A.I. to generate personalized lesson plans and enabling teachers to spend their time motivating rather than teaching students. Then, the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett joins us to discuss the existential threat that A.I. poses to the traditional humanities degree and why he believes we’ll see thousands of new schools emerge outside the university system to carry on the exploration of what it means to be a person in the world. And finally, we hear directly from students who are on the front line of technological change.

Guests:

• MacKenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha Schools
• D. Graham Burnett, historian of science and technology at Princeton University

Additional Reading:

• A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You
• Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
• OpenAI and Microsoft Bankroll New A.I. Training for Teachers
• Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.