SAIL: Jobs. Beingness.
May 30, 2025
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL). I explore AI’s impact on higher education.
The future of work will be substantively and dramatically impacted by AI. The implications of this for society and humanity are significant and potentially catastrophic.
Since I started in the educational technology space in the late 1990’s, my focus has been on systems change. From the lens of today, we have technology (AI) that competes with humanity in many discrete knowledge tasks:
Traditional learning is much less relevant than what it was even a few years ago - see this EDUCAUSE article from 2020 on post-learning era.
This means that universities need to change both what they teach and how they teach. A message to university leadership.
Ultimately, AI may ultimately return us to our humanity - to a focus on community, connection (to self, others, and nature), and human flourishing. Or dare I say, beingness.
We don’t have a big window to re-conceptualize how higher education should function and what types of experiences learners should have. Or even clarity on the daunting prospect of a future without work. It sounds great on one level, but confidence is low that government can enable a path that makes a job-less future a good one where we can attend to our more nuanced holistic selves.
AI and Education
LLM providers are offering free learning: OpenAI has their Academy. Anthropic just launched AI Fluency (this is good - Anthropic is generally more focused and thoughtful in what they release). Cohere has their LLM University. Cohere has somewhat faded in prominence. Not sure why. Canada should be touting them.
Duolingo CEO walks back claims - he still needs and wants humans
Jobs impact
First, sign up for Paul Fain’s The Job. An excellent regular analysis of labor market and education trends.
The great job displacement is closer than you think. A series of short comments/snippets of how work is going to change. Not much optimism here.
A white collar bloodbath. “AI companies and government need to stop "sugar-coating" what's coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs”
Fei Fei Li wants humanity at the center of AI advancement.
College graduates aren’t finding jobs.
Hyundai is rolling out thousands of robots. BMW has been as well.
Speaking of robots - up to a third of the USA military could be automated.
In less than 30 years, 3 billion humanoid robots could co-inhabit the world with humans (this feels really low to me)
Waymo use is way up - direct impact on human work (Uber/Lyft)
According to ai2027, big job losses start late 2026.
All of that is against the backdrop of AI chatbots having had roughly zero impact on the economics of work.
Software, however, is experiencing significant impact from AI.
Shockingly, humanity isn’t ready for robots.
But it’s broader than that. Bill Gates feels humanity isn’t suitable for most work in the future.
Knowledge work is dying. What comes next? The author makes a similar “cognitive escalation” point that I’ve made in the past: as AI takes over certain cognitive functions, we will need to abstract up to the next level. Eventually ending in sensemaking, wayfinding, and meaningmaking work.
The real impact of AI might not be through LLMs but instead, industrial transformation.
General AI
CopyMind. Not sure I like this. But I’m curious to see the points at which I have an internal “nope, this is too far for me”.
The patron saint of vibe coding has an art-ish exhibit: The way of code.
DeepSeek dropped R1-0528 performance is at 03 and Gemini 2.5 levels. China might not be leading in AI, but they aren’t following either. The best open models are currently coming from China.
This could be fun: open source humanoid robots.
ElevenLabs launches conversational AI 2.0. Voice is at the level of “time to take this seriously” stage for product developers.
Hume launches the third version of their Empathic Voice Interface.
A glimpse of the future of AI companions. Broad summary of AI agents for companionship and to combat loneliness. I’m not liking the future.
The AI browser war is just beginning: “It could function as a research assistant, exploring topics on your behalf and keeping tabs on new developments automatically. It could take your to-do list and attempt to complete tasks for you while you're away. It could serve as a companion for you while you browse, identifying factual errors and suggesting further reading.”