Teaching in the Age of AI Reed Hastings on Creativity Learning the Future

Typically, we humans judge things as they are, as opposed to what they're going to become. And if you think about a hundred years ago, airplanes barely worked, and it took, you know, 80 years for airplanes to get extremely safe and positive. This revolution will happen faster, but we're in the very, very beginning. So AI today does have uneven rough edges, but what you want to be thinking about is how good will the AI be in three years, in five years, in 10 years? Welcome, everyone, to the AI AAA series. I'm Rhonda, and I'm here with my colleague Stephen to explore aspirations, ambitions, and apprehensions about AI in education. Our special guest today is most well-known as the co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings. Thanks, Rhonda. And as this is the first in the series, which includes voices from outside our Teach For network, just a tiny bit of context, Teach For All is a community of 63 network partners around the globe, comprised of 15,000 teachers participating in a two-year fellowship, 125,000 alumni, more than half remain in education and social impact, and a dedicated staff who keep this global education organization innovating through collective leadership. Today's event is part of our AI AAA series community conversations, weaving voices from our global network into a collective shared story that documents this moment of transformation in education and, indeed, creativity here on Earth and beyond the stars. This is a very special session. We have six guests today asking questions of Reed, including educators from the Teach For All community and, for the first time, voices from the wider education community as well. And for those of you who are new to the series, our conversations follows the three A's, aspirations, ambitions, and apprehensions, a simple framework that helps us move past the binary of hype and fear to get at what educators are actually navigating with AI in their communities. We are so pleased to welcome Reed Hastings, who, as you know, everyone appreciates, redefines storytelling, empowering creatives at scale. Now, AI is reshaping education in similar ways as we build towards a more equitable and accessible education system. All right. So, Reed, before we dive into questions from our global community, we'd love to hear your opening thoughts and how you see the future of education in this era of AI, particularly around teaching in the age of creativity. Over to you, Reed. Hey, thanks. Well, I feel like I'm in my tribe here. I'm a globalist to my heart. I've always cared about people all over the world. And one of the most painful things of the current era is the popularity of one's nation first. And thank God that we have so many good globalists and all of you who care about every person on the planet and stitching the world together to give us the peaceful world that we need. I was a Peace Corps math teacher 40 years ago in East Huatini for O-level maths and then came back to the US and got into AI, so about 40 years ago. And since then, I've gotten to do many amazing things and to support a bunch of educational efforts. And I've been watching and kind of on the edges of AI for a long time. So I would say you're going to hear a lot about how it's going to replace every job and those kinds of things. And I'll give you two examples where that hasn't been true. And it's natural that we humans gravitate to the scary scenario, whether it's Armageddon in the Christian faith, or whether it was year 2000 in the IT crisis, when there's something maybe bad going to happen, boy, do we humans love to read about it. And so that's amping up all the disaster scenarios. So Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize for inventing AI. He's an amazing guy. And for 10 years, he's been saying that radiologists are going to be the first profession subverted by AI because the AI is so good at reading images, x-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs, and indeed it is. And yet, over the last 10 years, what's happened is that employment and income have increased in radiology, despite the AI. And so what's going on there is that as AI gets into and does a good job with radiology, the costs of reading a scan go down. And then doctors and patients want more scans. And so you cough and you get a chest x-ray now. And because of that increase in demand, radiologists, there's now a shortage of them in the US, and wages are climbing. So this was of the profession that of all professions in the world, the AI Nobel Prize winner said was going to get wrecked. So that hasn't happened. Another example is chess. Computers and AI became the best chess players 25 years ago. And yet, despite that, the number of chess players, the number of tournaments, the quality of play, everything has been good in chess. So just because AI has been good for humans in chess and in radiology doesn't mean it will be in every profession. And surely there'll be some professions that wind down. But as a general thing, we're going to be more productive, all kinds of positive scenarios from AI. And you can hold on to those two early examples to reassure yourself that in fact, the professions that we're all in, we're going to do more and be more productive rather than get run over by the AI. Getting into the quickfire rounds, Reed, you're going to meet six of our amazing community members. So round one theme is aspirations. We're going to bring up Zanida, we're going to bring Dina from Teach for Uganda out front here, and Gaurav from Teach for India. And each of them will present you with one of their questions and we will take it from there. Okay. Thank you so much. I'm really, really happy to be here. My question to Reed is, Netflix has redefined storytelling by empowering creators and personalizing experiences at scale. As AI begins to reshape education in similar ways, how can teachers in emerging countries like Africa be empowered, not just as users of AI, but also as creators of the transformative, locally grounded learning experience that unlocks human creativity? Technology has had this two-sided thing. One is that it empowers people all over the world. We all use Samsung phones or Huawei phones or phones made in certain places, and then content can be dominated in certain categories by certain cultures. And so the broad reach of technology is both a benefit, but also does have this homogenizing effect. But I would say for AI in education in particular, it offers great hope, particularly in Africa. So what we've seen in Africa is growing population, 6, 7, 8% per year, inability to build more classrooms. And so class sizes have risen 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 kids per classroom as governments try to deal with the situation. And there's not a lot of learning happening in the 80-kid classroom. And so then the digital divide or really the educational divide continues to grow. I don't think there's that much hope for doubling the number of physical schools and teachers in Africa, which is a bare minimum of what we need given the population growth. But what there is possibility is one tablet per child. And so technology's costs are coming down, whether that's Starlink, whether that's inexpensive tablets from China. Basically, people all over the world have the same phone, unlike the same house. They have radically different homes in terms of expense, but pretty similar phones and pretty similar tablets. So the significance of that is that the AI learning applications in the developed world will also be very usable throughout the world, and it's going to significantly narrow the education gap. So I think what will happen is more and more of student learning of the standards will be on software, and that software will be available globally as long as we can get to one tablet per child in schools throughout the world. And I think the costs of that, even on an education system that only spends $300 a year per kid, is going to become quite viable. And so I'm optimistic that we can find those scenarios. And then, of course, in the software, because AI makes it easy to write software, we're going to be able to tailor each country's learning applications to that country and to those stories that resonate with a culture. So I really see a much more equal future for education because of technology. And just in the same way, 50 years ago, communication was very unequal around the world. And now communication is pretty equal. Everyone's on WhatsApp or similar applications. So I see that kind of growing equality through technology and education as the apps are developed, which is really over the next three to five years that we've got AI teacher. And despite the name, don't be worried. AI teacher still needs a teacher to focus on all the emotional aspects, all the discussion aspects, and there'll just be less teaching of fractions. Thank you, Dina. Thank you, Reid. All right. We're going to go over to Gaurav. Gaurav's coming in from Teach for India. Gaurav, over to you. Thanks, Stephen. So Reid, you fundamentally disrupted entertainment by imagining a model that would only be built over the internet. But you also practically started by mailing people DVDs. So if you put your founder hat back on and we take as generative AI as this fundamental shift for education, first, what is the kind of organization that you will build in education that could only be built in the generative AI era? And second, what is the mailing DVDs version of that organization for today? Well, the mailing DVDs version of the automobile was the horse. And I don't know that being good at horse-based transport would help you in automobiles. So I'm not sure the metaphor works in every industry. But I would say what can you guys do to drive the AI forward? It's having an eye for what apps are needed. And then what are healthy student habits? Obviously, being on social networking two hours a day is not the right solution. And so that doesn't mean that all screen time is bad, but it's getting good infrastructure where every student has access, particularly to tablets, but could be other devices too. And then is able to use the emerging new set of apps that are all coming out. And then some of you may switch hats because it's easier to write software now and use AI to write software that you think is particularly attuned to the students and the situations that you see. Thanks so much, Thank you, Reed. I'm now going to be bringing up our round two, which is focused on ambitions. And what are we actually trying to build here? Thinking about AI and education. We have Krista Maria from Teach for Lebanon and also Ola Lakin from Teach for Nigeria. Welcome to you both. And we'll start with Krista Maria. Over to you for your question. Hi, how are you? Okay. So my question for you, Reed, is the following. What's the one shift in mindset you think teachers need most to truly step into this creative era? Not just use the tools, but own them. So what do you think? You know, many teachers are trained with the idea that they're pedagogical experts and that teaching history or fractions is their value source, as opposed to what most people get into teaching for, which is connecting with young people and help them develop the character and habits that will make them, you know, good adults. That emotional nourishment, I think, is the big mind switch to think that the teacher is there for all of those higher order skills. And it's actually good to have the software take over the mass presentation. You know, I think there'll be a future where, you know, many kids get to travel and to learn at their own pace, and that we disrupt the classroom, the 30 kids standing there, or sorry, 30 kids sitting there where the teacher is standing, and that whole presentation mode will become less and less. Thanks so much, Reed. Next up, Ola Lakin from Teach for Nigeria. Your question, please. All right, thank you for this opportunity. And my question is this. The organization I work with, Teach for Nigeria, works in communities where infrastructure is unlimited, but creativity is abundant, right? And so what advice would you give to educators trying to bring in AI tools into that context without leaving anyone behind? It's tricky on the infrastructure side, because you definitely need internet and power to be able to access all of this. There's no shortcuts on that. Internet and power, you know, are expensive and sometimes unreliable. But without that, you can't really participate in the AI in any useful sense. So I think it's okay just to segment that and to say, you know, each country's focus, they need to get internet and power to every school. And then what you as educators need to do is make sure the apps, you know, are not just social networking and status manipulation. But in fact, the apps that the students use are really tremendous, that they're always on their learning edge, and that they're building confidence, and that you want your kids to have more time on the apps, not less. Speaking to the perennial problems, but also some of the potential solutions. Thank you, Reed. Stephen, back to you. Reed, amazing. How are you doing? You ready for a couple more questions? Literally, fire away. All right, excellent. You're kind of like the foundations here for us. Brilliant. Okay, we're into round three, which is apprehensions. Now apprehensions, as you pointed out at the beginning, doesn't have to necessarily be like the big worries, but we are really paying attention to the big worries, of course, as well to you as educators. It's a responsible side of our nature. So we're bringing on board here. We've got first Carmina from Santa Clara University, and we'll also have Sang from Teach for Cambodia. Carmina is the first time we've had a non-Teach for All network member on one of our AAA series, so a special guest coming in from the University Network in California. So thank you so much for Carmina to join us for this session. And Sang, of course, coming in, staying up late for us all the way from Cambodia. So over to you both, Carmina, over to you. Thank you. My question is twofold, Reed. How do we ensure that new empirically validated knowledge is actually incorporated into AI training models rather than just recycling existing internet data? And who should be responsible for ensuring AI actually elevates the quality of knowledge, developers, educators, or policymakers? Thank you. Let's look at when you do a Google search on a topic like how to build a brick house, or when my knee hurts in a certain place, what should I do? So if you type those into old Google, you got this sea of links, you sort of pop around. It's very hard to make sense of it. And when you do that now with any of the major AI, you get a really useful answer. That's just in like three years of progress. So three years from now, the AIs are going to be amazingly better than today. I don't think that integrity of information is so much better than where people get information from by default, like Google search, that it's a huge improvement. I wouldn't worry too much on undalidated information, etc., because the brand of each of those LLMs or chat engines, you know, is partially around being useful. And so they're, you know, very much trying to make it useful. And again, you know, the classic phrase, the perfect is the enemy of the good. And, you know, the AIs are not going to be perfect. They're just going to be really good. Whether it's health, whether it's counseling, whether it's practical stuff that we might use YouTube for, those scenarios are really much, much better with the AI already, and only going to get better from here. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thanks, Carmina. Super great to have you here. We'll head over now to Seng over in Cambodia. I think you're a first-year or second-year fellow, Seng. I'll let you do your intro, but delighted to have you here, Seng. Over to you. It is my first year. It is my first year, just right after I graduated from my baccalaureate degree. So my question is simple. How do you hope the definition of the success change over the next 20 years, both individually and organizationally? Think about education. We have a basic corpus around the world of standards that students learn, and I think it's tremendously unambitious. We're going to be able to have our students know so much more in 20 years, you know, so a typical 16-year-old, say, will be able to know so much more than they do today because there'll be so much education time less wasted, you know, moving around, waiting, catching up, all those things. If you really think about the individual tutored world where a student has a dedicated person or a digital person to improve their education, you're going to see 16-year-olds that have, you know, postgraduate-level understanding, and all the current 16-year-olds that are, you know, let's say reading at a 12-year-old level are going to be, you know, much more caught up. So, you know, it's the era coming of kind of super education and superhuman knowledge, and you've already seen this. I referred to chess. So chess has a scoring system that they've used for a long time. You know, are you at 300, 500, 800, 1,200 grandmasters at 2,100? So they've been able to track, and the typical 10-year-old now playing chess, it's breathtaking how much better they are than 10 and 20 years ago. And the reason is they're getting tutored by AI. So they've constantly got a teacher that's right at their edge of level, you know, that plays against them in difficult but not overwhelming circumstances and teaches them. And so, again, we've got much better chess players. Now, obviously, chess playing is fun. It's not as socially impactful as many of the fields that you guys teach in. But just think of AI as really raising the bar for what's possible for children around the world. That's a great answer. Thank you. Thank you so much, Singh. We now have a special guest. He's actually one of our most active AI literacy and creator collective members. It's Mr. Marouf from Bangladesh. Marouf, are you there? Hello there. Hi. So glad to be here. So my question is, actually, we all know that how visual contents reshape our children's cognitive development, right? So in this era of AI content creation, everyone is creating contents, cartoon contents, cinematic contents, etc. And so do you think it as a problem because its massiveness? Or do you think it is an opportunity we should cater as teachers or individuals? And if it's an opportunity to you, how we should use it? Thank you. Almost every big technology is both an opportunity and a problem. And, you know, let's take the automobile. It's amazing. And yet we have half a million people die every year around the world in automobile accidents. And we could stop that if we just got rid of the automobile. But we as a society say the automobile is so powerful that we're willing to have a half a million people a year die again around the world to use it. So we as societies make uncomfortable choices about powerful technology. So expect that AI will hopefully have less death than the automobile. You know, it's not going to be problem free. And it's up to all of us to lean in to make sure the total tradeoffs are such that it's mostly a big benefit or is a net big benefit compared to, you know, all the other choices that we're making. You know, when I think about the opportunity, I think that it's very likely that it will be a net big benefit because of all the people like you guys leaning in to adapt the technology to the students that you're working with. Thank you so much. Thank you. Back over to you, Stephen. Hey, thanks for being here for that read this amazing quick fire around. You've been so efficient at it. Now we thought we would hold special guests to the very end. So a little surprise. I'm not gonna tell you who that is. But you're about to have a little surprise. Wendy over to you for a question right to read. Thank you, Stephen. And thank you so much read. So we have been attempting across teach for era, which was sort of miss it. And we really did very little to kind of foster experimentation and use of technology among our teachers. And so if they ended up being leaders in the ed tech space, it was kind of despite ourselves. So this time around, we've gone at this differently to say, okay, we want to foster experimentation and use and learning all across our network around how to leverage AI in classrooms, taking the pressure off of teachers in the first place in terms of their workload and whatnot. And so we have various partnerships with the anthropics of the world to support our community to learn how to use this and to start in on it. As a result, folks are using it, you know, they're they're experimenting, learning in the day to day. I guess the question is, do what's the next stage of this? Like, do we need to do more to completely reinvent? We'll use it to kind of refine what we do make ourselves more efficient. Like, what should be the next era, I guess, of this work as we think about like, how to really maximize this technology to kind of reinvent, ultimately, educational together? Like, what's your advice for us? My answer will be a little disturbing to you, I think, which is it's guiding us towards an age where there's no mass instruction. There's no sage on a stage. It's all individualized. And so it's teachers helping students, nurturing students. But it's always focused on a particular place that that student is that day. And that we look at the 300 year era of mass instruction as a necessary cost adaptation to be able to provide education to all. But it's not how humans learn best. And I think we will move away. And you guys could be some of the leaders in that, you know, direct instruct, direct mass instruction, where you get up in front of the class and teach a lesson. And that era, I think, will fade away as the AI gets better. And as teachers get more comfortable that their students are thriving in this era of individualized education, where the teacher is social worker, discussion leader, organizer, probably part-time IT person, you know, creating a room, because I still think it'll be on school sites, positive nurturing. But again, it's really around individualized instruction. So, you know, you see little bits of this in the U.S. with things like Alpha School. Before the era of mass education, kings and rulers, you know, had special tutors for their students and their kids. It's kind of wrapping that all together, again, as the technology allows. You know, it doesn't yet work well enough to do this, but I think it's very likely to come. So I say the positive is individualized education for every child so that they learn much more and, you know, and enjoy it much more. And looking out at this network of all these educators who are trying to figure out, yeah, how do we leverage this to really accelerate progress towards this vision of all kids having the kind of education that enables them to ultimately shape a better future? What's your advice to them? Like, when you think about, like, the world you're envisioning, like, what can they be doing now to contribute to get us there? Like, what would you be doing if you were a teacher right now? You all in your countries, you are so lucky. You are entering your career or being, you know, early in your career in the most important time when everything is going to change. I mean, if you had joined teaching any time in the last 200 years, you know, it's basically, let's build some more school buildings, let's build some more schools of education. It's basically the same thing. What's going to happen in the next 20 years as AI matures will be a complete redoing of all the assumptions, the learning, the modalities. So, I would say you guys are incredibly lucky. You're going to drive the change. You're going to adapt it, and you're going to get to experience, again, the most tumultuous, because it will be that, but also engaging era in the history of education. So, congratulations to all of you. Thank you, Reid. I'm going to say one more, at surface, one more question, and then that's it for me. But I'm just pulling up from the chat a concern that someone put in, because I want to give you the chance to respond to this, which is, they said, I worry that this individualization answer is in tension with the critical need for more collective, collaborative, constructivist learning that really helps students grow into people who can work together to solve our big problems. What would you say to that? Well, for sure, working with other human beings is the fundamental skill. So, the schools that are using the individualized education are doing that on the standards-based education, the core curriculum, and then they're using all of the freed up time to develop group skills, to invent things. So, it really depends on how you use the school day. So, think of the, you can see, you know, there was the phrase rote learning, which is probably passe, but, you know, when there's a lot of hard work to do, let's say learning a language, okay, that's a good application for AI, and the AI is going to be able to drive that better and better, and let's let the AI do that. And then let's, as teachers, really focus on how to get kids to work with other people, to be brave, to think of bold new things, to invent, to be more creative. So, the big shift is that the standard curriculum really gets taught by AI, and then you guys all focus in schools, good schools, focus on the life skills to be able to thrive and to be able to make this, you know, world that we want. Thank you for that. Turning it back to Stephen or Rhonda. Thanks, Wendy. That was a super nice surprise for us to have you here doing that. Rhonda, Reid, I'm going to pass to Rhonda to help us start wrapping us up here, because it's been an amazing chat. So, Rhonda, over to you. Thank you, Reid, so much for being so generous with your time and for also sharing your insights with us today. I'd also like to thank my collaborators, Dina, Gaara, Chris Maria, Olaleikon, Carmina, and Sang. Thank you all for asking such encouraging questions and also being so curious. Yeah, thanks, Rhonda. And so, Reid, also, yeah, massive thanks for taking the time to be with us today. We are massive believers in the power of creativity. As you know, this thesis that we presented to you is that teachers are naturally creative. The future belongs to creatives. The future belongs to teachers. We believe this fundamentally. So, thank you for reinforcing that and empowering our community to kind of feel that these tools are here for us to use. Thank you, everyone. We'll see you next time. And if you're a member of the AI Literacy and Creator Collective, we'll continue the conversation online. Again, Reid, thank you so much. And yes, if you have any final words, you can take this home. Typically, we humans judge things as they are, as opposed to what they're going to become. And if you think about a hundred years ago, airplanes barely worked, and it took, you know, 80 years for airplanes to get extremely safe and positive. This revolution will happen faster, but we're in the very, very beginning. So, AI today does have uneven rough edges, but what you want to be thinking about is how good will the AI be in three years, in five years, in 10 years. And to do that, just think about how much better it's gotten in the last six years, three years, et cetera. And I think what you'll see is it's going to be capable of tremendous productivity. And so, then it's harnessing all of that, finding ways that this AI revolution, which will be very global, can really benefit the whole community. It's a pleasure to be with you guys all, and thank you for doing all the amazing work that you do. We appreciate that. Everyone, have a good day, good evening, good morning, wherever you're joining us from, and we'll see you next time.