AI Assistants Will Revolutionize the Future of Work & Education

Every week as I comb through hundreds of articles on the future of work and education in this era of AI that we are emerging into, I look for trends. Sometimes they are obvious and take over the headlines en masse. Think of the weeks where “ChatGPT is helping students cheat on assignments” seems to be splattered across the airwaves everywhere you look. You can’t miss it. Sometimes, though, the signals are more subtle but still reveal momentum shifting around certain topics. 

A recent trend began to take shape as I read a Times Higher Education article about AI being used to level the playing field when it comes to college applications and AI support for students—a long overdue innovation! I followed that one up with diving into the new Code.org and Stanford AI teaching assistant that offers a promising tool to help bring computer science education to far more students, and relieve teachers of some of the administrative and student ratio burdens that are chasing them out of the field. Next I looked into a report about Seattle Public Schools piloting AI tools that help teachers with lesson planning, student feedback, IEP drafting, and also has features for students to use directly as well. All of those articles came out in the same one-week period, and those weren’t the only blogs, studies, or articles I skimmed or read deeply on the topic. It goes beyond education and workforce readiness, too.

Entire cities are creating their own AI agents for citizen interaction, broad fields (like legal and professional services) are discovering the power of AI assistants…and we’re just at the beginning, here.

So: “AI assistants” are here, and likely here to stay. Think about the jobs (and tasks!) in the education industry alone that can be automated to free up time for more essential business. Or expand equity by ensuring that scarce resources (such as college counselors) no longer means lack of access. And this carries over to almost every industry on earth. So while “No One Actually Knows How AI Will Affect Jobs” we can estimate with great certainty that every industry will be disrupted. The best way to navigate these changes (at least in my opinion) is to avail ourselves of tools like AI assistants and develop the AI fluency all of us will need in this brave (or terrifying) new world of artificially intelligent agents, assistants, bots, counselors, test administrators, truck drivers, and more.

Here’s a little more info about each of the articles I referenced at the top, if you are interested:

Each week I read 50+ articles on these topics. Here were my recent favs:

🎓 Learning in the News:

• Google Just Changed the Way the Internet Works, Forever (BBC)

  • Google’s search engine is now a “search AND AI-answer engine”

  • What does this (AI overviews, AI-generated answers to Google searches, etc) mean for teachers, students, and workers who have to help people navigate research, info retrieval, source attribution, etc.?

  • Could this actually contribute to worsened information and digital literacy (already at substandard levels in most countries)?

• As Connecticut public schools begin to embrace AI, lawmakers look to set rules and expand access (Greenwich Time)

• Should K12 leaders make AI in schools mandatory? Some education leaders believe not doing so will exacerbate inequality (EdTech Magazine)

• Innovations in AI and Higher Education (New York Academy of Sciences)

💼 Workforce RoundUp:

• Elon Musk: AI will take away ALL of our jobs, but it’s a good thing (CNN)

  • Umm…I feel like maybe his billionaire status insulates him a bit from the economic shocks of AI, until we get a UHI / UBI operational

    • Musk proposes a “UHI” (universal high income) vs UBI

• Genius Group Launches Genius City Singapore: 1st of 100 Sovereign Cities with AI Workforce Training & Education Ecosystem (Street Insider)

  The AI Skills Gap is putting Public Sector projects in jeopardy, says new research (Business Matters)

🍿 Other Articles and Videos Worth A Skim:

• It’s easier than ever to create your own AI assistant (The Verge)

• ChatGPT Desktop Version: 10 Use Cases (YouTube)

• BrainBridge is using AI to (one day) transplant human heads onto new, healthy bodies. Totally mind blowing!! [sorry, couldn’t resist] (NY Post)

  • They say they’ll be ready in 8 years 

  • Prediction: expect 8 years to be 20+, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility now, thanks to AI and computer vision to help make microscopic spinal and blood vessel connections, etc. 

• 3 things ChatGPT 4o can do for you RIGHT NOW (YouTube)

  • Great visual walkthrough for data analysis and other tasks

📖 Tools, Terms & Tips: 

🛠️ Tool of the Week: Perplexity + Make = personal AI research assistant. I love Perplexity, but adding a no-code tool like Make (or Zapier, etc) helps supercharge the already robust platform. Check out this tutorial video if you ever wanted to have a personal research assistant of your own.

📖 Term of the Week: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that helps computers understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a way that is both meaningful and useful. It powers many applications we use every day, from search engines that interpret our queries, to chatbots that provide customer service. Think of NLP as a translator that helps computers speak and understand human language, similar to how a bilingual person might help two people communicate.

🤖 GenAI Tip of the Week: Tell your AI assistant (ChatGPT, Bard, etc) to remember things about you. In ChatGPT you can add custom settings for the assistant to remember across chat threads, like your areas of expertise or writing style notes. For example: “When I ask you to suggest 10 alternative titles for a piece of writing, use catchy, SEO-friendly language and start each item with a relevant emoji. Remember this as my headline style for the future.” You’ll usually see something pop up like “memory updated” to let you know that your instructions will be saved for the future.

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