0:17[clears throat] Good evening.
0:22Happy Monday, everybody. Good to see you all. I'm Joe Williams, the director of Greenwich Library, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the Berkeley Theatre. So, let me start by asking you a very straightforward question.
0:37Why did the AI cross the road?
0:41Think about that for a minute. Maybe you have a suggestion. So, I took that prompt and I typed it into Microsoft Copilot today. And it gave me several responses, several possible punchlines. Here are some of them. One, to get to the other side after validating 10,000 possible outcomes. Two, it didn't. It deployed an agent to do it for itself. Three, to reduce latency between itself and the chicken. Four, it wasn't told not to.
1:18And Copilot's self-proclaimed favorite, why did the AI cross the road? Because the prompt said think step by step. So, tonight's event is presented in partnership with Dartmouth College's Dartmouth Dialogues Initiative, which brings together expert speakers to discuss different sides of an issue. We are grateful to Lisa and Scott Stewart for providing funding for this important event, which advances the educational, cultural, and civic mission of Greenwich Library.
1:56I would also like to thank our hard working staff including Kate Petroff, Kathy Sechi, Jeff Callahan, and Jessica Reed for bringing together another stellar event at the Greenwich Library which hosts over 2,000 educational and cultural programs per year. I Okay, that's very well deserved. I'd also like to thank our friends volunteers who have given their time back to their community by assisting the library with our check-in and seating process. So, thank you.
2:32A few housekeeping items before we begin. Please silence your cell phone and refrain from taking any photos during the event. If you would like to ask a question of the presenter, please wait for the microphone. We have microphone runners. Stand, introduce yourself, and ask, and this is important, a brief and concise question. In the event of an emergency, please exit the theater in an orderly manner as marked by the exit signs on the door.
3:06So, tonight, we are thrilled to welcome Sal Khan and Jacob Ward for a discussion about the opportunities and challenges of the rapidly evolving technology of artificial intelligence. This conversation will be moderated by Dartmouth senior Roger Friedlander. Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a global nonprofit that provides free education to more than 200 million people worldwide.
3:35He's also vision steward and a board member of TED, a nonprofit conference and media organization with a mission to discover and spread ideas. Khan Academy began as a way to tutor his cousins online and has has into a platform reaching learners in more than 190 countries and more than 50 languages. Khan Academy partners with hundreds of US school districts and school systems in eight countries reaching 7 million students in classrooms.
4:05He is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School nonprofits that explore new models of learning and teaching. In the spring of 2026, he announced the Khan TED Institute in partnership with TED and ETS. Jacob Ward is a journalist, science correspondent, and technology commentator whose work explores how artificial intelligence, automation, and modern media are reshaping human behavior and decision-making.
4:35Formerly an NBC News technology correspondent and host for PBS and CNN, he has spent years reporting on the intersection of technology, psychology, and society. Jacob is the author of The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, and has written for the New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications.
4:58His weekly podcast, The Rip Current, covers the big hidden forces at work in our lives and regularly hosts uh co-hosts This Week in Tech. And Roger Friedlander is a senior at Dartmouth College from Rochester, New York studying politics, philosophy, and economics. He is the president of the nonpartisan Dartmouth Political Union and has most recently interned at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. After graduation, he hopes to attend law school.
5:26So, now, please join me in welcoming our panel: Sal Khan, Jacob Ward, and Roger Friedlander.
5:46What's up, everybody?
5:56Well, thank you very much for that introduction. Um it's a great privilege to be here and I'm looking forward to a great conversation um with Sal and Jake.
6:05Without further ado, let's jump right in. Um I want to quickly explain the format of tonight's conversation. We're going to do a question directed at either Sal or Jake and each of them will have 2 minutes to respond before the original recipient of the question has a 1-minute rebuttal. Um hopefully we get through five or six questions and then we're going to turn it over to you after about 45 minutes um for some audience Q&A. Um So without further ado, um
6:34Jake, first question.
6:37Looking at AI both in the educational and the workplace contexts, should we view AI principally as a tool for humans to employ or a replacement for human critical thinking and creativity?
6:52Well, so the So as a technology correspondent, I I cover inevitably the earliest moments of the discovery of a thing where the motives are pure, the interest is clear, and the purposes are very high-minded. And inevitably, the job winds up being a job about covering the market forces that pervert all of that.
7:19And so in my experience, AI has outrageous capacity to further human understanding, uh foundational scientific discovery, um you know, I know of somebody who's who's creating a a system uh in the state of Vermont that takes newly arrived immigrants and places them in jobs that can't be filled otherwise. Amazing things. I know a guy who says that he can take AI and use it
7:48to automatically go out and strip the lead paint from anybody's home before they arrive home as a baby to make sure that lead poisoning is wiped out in this country. Amazing capacity for for amazing stuff. None of that makes you money.
8:05You're not making any money stripping lead paint. You're not making any money um furthering these these interests. And the short-term pressure that AI companies are under currently to make money immediately, I think means that this thing, which has this amazing scientific capacity, is unfortunately also great at exploiting the patterns in our behavior and driving us to the very worst part of ourselves. And that unfortunately means
8:34that the gulf, the gap between the high-minded purpose of creating a technology like this, and the place that it ends up in the market is is really bad. And I think the gap is as wide as it's ever been with AI.
8:47Thank you. So, Yeah, I mean I I I agree with that to a a big degree. You know, the any technology, I think fundamentally is neutral, but it amplifies human intent, you know, it's like fire. When we learn to harness it, you can burn someone or you can save someone's life, keep them warm, and prepare food. And I 100% agree with Jacob like we know there are people with negative intent. They're going to use AI, and they're going to use this
9:16technology to amplify that negative intent. And we can think about misinformation, deep fakes.
9:22Um you know, we can debate whether the defense industry has negative intent or not, but I'm worried about that around uh you know, intelligent weapons and being autonomous and and things like that. You know, there are people with lazy intent, and there's students, and I think this is a huge problem of people are using these tools to cheat, to do the cognitive offloading, etc., etc. I also think there's a lot of folks, and this is where I I strongly agree with Jacob. I live in Silicon Valley, but I run a nonprofit in Silicon Valley, but we're very close to a lot of the
9:51for-profit players, and all the people are for the most part good people, like, you know, they probably, you know, philosophically, but the the there are market forces.
10:01Sometimes market forces work well. I think a lot of great innovation has happened through market forces, but sometimes it leads to very weird incentives. And we're in this weird race condition now where everyone's just trying to leapfrog each other. They're trying to justify these massive valuations. I don't think even money, like, no one's really making money.
10:18They're just make They're plowing massive amounts of money into it. I actually think the biggest risk that they're creating right now is to our economy, uh just in terms of the the house of cards that's being built. Uh but but beyond that, yeah, that it's just the the sheer amount of uh of money that's there, but um you know, what I I say is those people are going to do that. If we can stop it, great, but there's also so many other good things. And so hopefully, you know, all of us collectively can also use that to amplify our good intent. Cuz if we don't do that, we're
10:48pretty much just ceding it to to the the un- unfettered um forces.
10:55Jake, your response?
10:57So, as you may know, we're going to agree on a lot of stuff tonight. I I have a new I have enormous and respect for Sal Khan. He is, I would say, one of the most universally admired people in tech and in education.
11:11And the problem with being Sal Khan, I think, is that everybody wants a piece of you. And they want to use what you've built to justify their weird visions about all kinds of things. And in the case of tech oligarchs, in my experience, a lot of them really want to blow up education for either ideological reasons, or because they just have this weird college freshman's idea that they are the ones to somehow gut it and make it better.
11:35And I think that you know, I do not envy Sal his position. I don't envy you your position in staving off the efforts of people to do that. I remember when you when you came on stage to announce the the arrival of Khan Academy at an Open AI event.
11:52I remember thinking boy, I bet that was a tough call for this guy. And I and boy, I bet this is a a hard a weird environment in which to operate as Sal Khan right now.
12:03Thank you. Um so you you say tech you say oligarch, I see philanthropist. No, I'm kidding.
12:09[laughter] They're both.
12:12That's the problem, I mean, I know that's Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. It's just it's almost they're almost an anagram of each other.
12:22So um so leaning into this question of educational institutions specifically, we've seen across America from public elementary schools in New York and Los Angeles to the law schools at U Chicago and UC Berkeley um broad bands on on generative AI use and devices in the classroom.
12:41To what extent do you agree or disagree with these bans and their premise which views AI use as detrimental to skill building?
12:48Where, if anywhere, have you found exceptions to this rule? We'll begin with you, Sal.
12:53Yeah, you know, I think anytime someone just blanket bans anything, you should you should double click on it. I I what what [laughter] what what what what Yeah, you know, the the horror stories you hear in schools, you know, there's this one story about a kid using Netflix in class for 2 hours and you know, this is more screen time than AI. And I was like, that wasn't a screen time problem, that was a classroom management problem. Like of course you shouldn't just have computers up all the time. It can be a
13:23distraction. You should with any tool, even paper, even calculators, you you should say, "Okay, this is why we're doing it pedagogically." So, I it's a classroom management issue. AI cheating is a big deal. Uh you know, when I talk to high school students, college students, they'll say, "I don't cheat, but all my friends are cheating."
13:41Um is that what you say?
13:44Uh very ethical young man. We had a long conversation.
13:49Roger doesn't cheat. We actually believe it.
13:50I actually believe that with him. But but um Good.
13:55But the solution here is educators need to take a step back and say, "What are the things that we really need to make sure that students can do truly on their own?" And some of the stuff we're making kids do is busy work that they don't really But if we Okay, and I do think they really know how to do math on their own. They have to be able to write on their own. They have to They will use AI better that way. You proctor those things. You make them do it in class.
14:15So, you know, I I wrote a book on AI in education and I wrote a chapter on cheating and did some research. There was a lot of cheating before AI. AI in some ways democratized it, but it was it was already going on. And and and so, to some degree, they should have proctored it a long time ago. So, my view is when you fix those and then on top of that, when you do the blanket ban like in New York or LA, I don't think it's the end of the world for eight-year-old for eighth grader or younger to not see AI, but we
14:45are starting to see some areas where AI can push your thinking harder, make you explain your reasoning. Instead of having a multiple-choice question, having to explain things out right.
14:53Those kids aren't going to get that opportunity. And then if you're a high school student and you don't have access to it, you're going to go to Dartmouth next year or some other college and the kids with more resources are already going to know how to deploy agents and their parents are going to tell them about Claude and this and that, and your internship's going to expect that, and you I think you might be at a disadvantage.
15:13So, let's see. I I guess I would say um I I think that the I wish that there there as much of an experimental spirit, especially in the public perception of regulation, as there is the experimental impulse around what we deploy for money-making purposes.
15:33Companies are allowed to experiment on us all the time, but for some reason policy makers are not. And that bothers me. I think that policy makers should be absolutely [clears throat] allowed to play with a ban for a little while. The new cool thing about New York's ban, I can't speak to the LA ban, which is a one-year full-on ban, but New York's ban is selective. There's basically a control group and an experimental group.
15:52They have a plan under Mondani to to, you know, really try and test what is the effect of this. You know, on Sal's point of of, you know, are people left behind once they get into high school?
16:05Personally, I'm of the opinion that these companies are so good at frictionlessly getting you on board and sort of hooked into this system, that it's not really a disadvantage to be off it until much later in life.
16:17But, you know, for for me, the the studies that I've been reading in preparation of this conversation, you know, there aren't a lot of them, but there are more than there have ever been, and they and and there are, you know, at this point a a good eight or 10 good long-term studies about the use of AI in education.
16:33And they find things like kids who use it tend to basically do just about as well as kids who do not, as long as the resources are there for the kids in both cases. But, in places where a kid is uh either from a marginalized community, from one of the poor most poorly funded school districts, the imbalance is enormous. And it's subtler than that even. It's things like the homogenization of their thinking gets stronger and stronger.
17:07So, for me, the problem is we know like I I respect an administrator or a mayor who says, "We're not confident enough in the resource that we put into our education system to to mess around with this yet." And I and to my mind I I I think that is it is better to be conservative in that way than than experiment too quickly with this.
17:34I This is one of like I definitely don't think it's the end of the world, especially for eighth graders and below.
17:40And I do generally agree with you. Like even the juniors and seniors in high school they can figure it out. And the reality is a lot of them the ban's really just banned it in the school setting. They're still going to access it at home and I do worry about there might be a little bit of inequality there.
17:58But um yeah, it's it's I'm I'm if it's a one-year experiment etc. maybe okay. But in a world where you know, the kids where where my my kids go to school, they go to school that I helped start, they are able to like really push their the teachers are more savvy. So they've but they are able to push these kids thinking in interesting ways that they weren't able to do before. They are able to you know, we're we're building an assessment platform. Traditional standardized testaments which no one
18:26likes are just multiple choice, you know, drill and kill. We're introducing you you have to explain your reasoning. You have to instead of saying what is the author's intent B, you say I think the author's intent. So it's encouraging more writing. And I I just hope that the fear doesn't allow us you know, doesn't keep us from tapping into some of those possibilities.
18:50Many have expressed concerns about algorithmic bias resulting from so-called data deserts which disproportionately impact historically prejudiced groups, while others have embraced AI as a tool to improve educational access for under-resourced communities. You both have brought up potential socioeconomic implications of AI use already this evening. Where do each of you stand on this debate about whether AI will improve or worsen socioeconomic inequalities? Jacob, the floor is yours.
19:19So, the evidence is pretty strong. I mean, it's always been the case, right? That experiment that that sort of when when the market pulls opportunity away, it tends to pull it away from the most vulnerable members of society. And this is being born out in the early studies of AI in education settings. Um kids from the most disadvantaged backgrounds wind up uh with the most adverse outcomes in terms of you know, everything from their thinking being
19:49smashed into a smaller and smaller spectrum to um the idea that they, you know, can basically be shown uh as if they are scoring well on tests in the short term, when in fact their long-term retention of the material is is far worse than other people's. There was a uh an experiment back in the day. I'm sure someone remembers this uh thing called Rocketship. Rocketship Education was this series of charter schools for low-income kids.
20:18And the whole idea was we're going to slap these kids in front of a laptop for about a quarter of each day. And in so doing, we're going to save money on the teachers and let and and let them commit time to deeper thinking and so forth, which is the same kind of crap that they used to sell AI to us in general. You'll all be doing watercolors in your garden and you won't have to work, right? It's that sort of idea. The market doesn't want you to do that. And in the same case in in the case of Rocketship, the test scores were pretty good. They
20:48looked good. The The result looked good.
20:50But the turnover of teachers was incredible because they were being saddled with 90 kids per teacher, right?
20:57It's a warehousing of of poor kids.
21:00And [snorts] that is what I think what the market does in this case is it pulls on the the vulnerabilities that we already know are everywhere in the education system. The United States, the gap between the richest and poorest states here is a three times expenditure in the United States. And and you know, Canada is the close competitor and that's double in their case, right? So we are so uh unfair in how we provide resources already and I think that AI is going to deepen that so fast if we let it.
21:31Yeah, I I think it's going to be a mixed bag. Um I think if you are a a a curious person, a young person and you know, we get stories at Khan Academy all the time. A young woman in Afghanistan, a kid in rural Alaska, or someone who just left the prison system.
21:45This is one of the best times to be alive. You know, even before AI, you have MOOCs and Khan Academy and like the good part of YouTube if you want to learn stuff and now AI, if you're curious, you can go way deep. If you're curious about quantum physics and you're in a village in Alaska, you can go deep in that. So and you you are seeing these these spikes. Um I do worry though that a lot, you know, what we see in a lot of classrooms, when kids even use it, they you know, and our AI is Socratic, it doesn't give you the
22:15answer, there's oversight. The kids who are engaging in it, we're starting to see signals that actually is helping them. But most, if it's most are not interested. They get frustrated by something that's actually pushing them on their thinking. And actually that's a sign because a lot of these students never got that actually in their education. Like someone pushing them Socratic, going back to the rocket ship example. Like yeah, if you're just doing drill and kill all day, no one ever had a Socratic dialogue with you. And even with an AI, they're having trouble explaining. So I I I I think there's an opportunity
22:44there. Um and I I also worry, you know, most technological things, people people one of the criticisms, which is somewhat fair of Khan Academy even the early days, was hey, when I go into my neighborhood in Greenwich or Palo Alto or wherever, everyone's using Khan Academy. But when I go into East Palo Alto or Harlem, a lot of the parents haven't known about it. So, even though your mission is democratizing education, isn't this in some ways And I was like, kind of. This is an awareness problem.
23:12But, think about what the problem was before. Before in Greenwich, you could hire a tutor for your child $500 an hour, and then the other kid has nothing. Now, it's just an issue of of awareness.
23:23And, you know, we are doing program in Philippines, India, etc., etc. What the the the the thing that I'm most worried about and I'm writing a book right now about jobs. And I think this is where it's going to hit. And it's it might hit people in surprising in surprising ways.
23:38You know, the Filipino economy, talking about 7% is directly related to call center work. And my VC friends, they said last year call centers were 20% AI, 80% human. Now, they are 80% AI, 20% human.
23:54That the Filipino economy, I mean, those those call center workers were like the good middle-class jobs. And they go into restaurants, etc., etc. The They're probably 20 or 30% of their economy is indirectly related to call center work, business process outsourcing, India. So, we're all going to be talking about, "Wow, we're getting our call centers even cheaper now, and we're all going to benefit." But, they are going to really, really, really suffer. You know, it's even the the whole free trade argument.
24:20Like, you know, it's always like you'd go to the the cheapest labor place, and then the the second to cheapest labor place gets screwed. And now the cheapest labor place is going to be fully fully um AI. So, I worry about that. I worry in the US, um you know, anywhere from a ride-share driver, I think, you know, the the the conversation about software engineers.
24:43What we're seeing now is if you're at the very top of software engineering, you actually might be getting paid more now. But, if you're kind of middling, okay, your job's in trouble.
24:52Administrative assistants, all of these things uh 10% of women are working some form of administrative assistant. And if any of you all have played with some of these new agents like Muse or Instinct or or chat GPT dots, they can do a lot of that if you trust them. Uh-huh. Uh and and but but these problems are going to So so I I actually think that's where we're going to hit socioeconomic problems. Now, the one interesting
25:20twist here is the narrative has always been white-collar work, academic work is where the growth is. If you want That's where we might see some of the biggest contraction. And I've been talking to people in the energy sector, not just petroleum, but clean energy and utilities, [clears throat] they're going to need 35 million people uh uh starting salary to a line worker at utilities is $150,000 a year. I think you might see a a renaissance of the trades, which is less about how good are you at algebra, things like that.
25:50So, [snorts] early on in your interview, you said that there's, you know, that that if you're curious, you can get all of this benefit from it. And unfortunately, what I hear, and I don't think that you are of this attitude, I know that the whole mission of Khan Academy is to is to give free, open education to every to everybody.
26:10But there is a a The The tech CEOs that I interview for a living have a very elitist idea about who counts in the future. And they very often use similar language. And I'm not saying that you feel the same way they do about this world, but the language reminds me of what they say, which is um you know, "You don't need college if you're already an exceptional kid." That kind of thing.
26:37But their logic then is nobody gets college, and only the exceptional kids get to sort of excel.
26:45And so, to my mind, I just think it's important for us all to just keep in mind that the people funding this stuff and the people who are going to want their money back from this stuff are very much of the attitude that only [clears throat] the smartest really deserve a shot in society. And that I know we agree is not the basis of education or how we should be designing it. And unfortunately, I think we're we're going to stray away from that.
27:09Looking to the future of AI implementation, what do we still need to know more about to inform development?
27:15On which impact areas would you like to see independent researchers focus?
27:23Look, I mean I I I don't think I'm going to say anything super novel here.
27:27Um it's it's bizarre what's going on at these labs when you look at like the the safety and you know, this whole hugging face incident. I mean, in some ways it was good that incident happened. It was kind of like, you know, COVID was horrible and I know it hurt a lot of families, but it was like if you're going to have a pandemic, it was like not as bad of a pandemic as some of the things that we we we could have imagined. And you know, the hugging face incident with the open AI bots kind of going wild and breaking out, it didn't do any harm, but it at least caused a
27:55little sobering in the industry. But the fact that it's just I might I I and I live in Silicon Valley and some of my friends are these people and I unfortunately kind of agree with you. There's there's not all of them, but there is a a good chunk of them that have this fascination. I I It's It's actually even less about like it's just for the smart people.
28:17They're just like, let's see where this goes. Isn't this Isn't this cool? And they're they're Yes, but it could kill us all. Like, you know, like let's let's And and and I and and I and I meet some of these people. You know, there was that Saturday Night Live skit of Dario, but it couldn't be more accurate where he's like, I urge you to urge me Yeah.
28:40to stop. You know, to slow down. It's like, what is going on here? Like, how is How is And and Yeah, so there's a lot of just I'm confused by by what's going on. You know, I even there is this logic of potentially like doom marketing is a is a thing. Um, you know, I recently interviewed Bill Gates for my book and I mean he has an interesting he doesn't think the doom marketing is a thing. He does but at the same time like open AI kind of did get back into the headlines because they're bots. And if you just
29:09look at what they did, they they put them in a they gave these bots, they trained them to be unusually persistent. Unusually persistent.
29:18They're doing this reinforcement learning. Then they give them impossible tasks. And they gave them a little bit of an opening. If they really wanted to to to shut these things down, they could have just unplugged all the fiber optic wires and just said, you know, but I so I I think there is a strange fascination with what these things can do and there's a strange, you know, talk about market forces. You they need to almost put a show on for the market in order to raise money at these stratospheric valuations. I you know, I a friend I we
29:46had dinner with a friend who's a VC and he's like he's like he's like ready to retire cuz he's like I'm tired of this. Like there's no real cuz he pointed out to me I didn't realize Anthropic got half of all venture capital investing yes last year.
29:58Like the the I mean when you're talking about tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. So they almost have to put on the show to to show [clears throat] how good they are and that I don't have the clear solution to it but something feels very off.
30:12Um so in terms of what I want to see breakthroughs on [clears throat] um I want to see breakthroughs on the naming, measuring, and pricing of the behavioral and societal damage that we do to each other in the name of making money.
30:28I think that the social media trials that are going on right now, we saw a verdict in Mexican New Mexico, a verdict in Los Angeles that put a price and a name on the effect that social media was having on the behavior and the relationships of kids. And I have been very heartened by that.
30:43I really love that because even a few years ago when I was first like in 2016 when I first started writing my book about AI, I was trying to figure out like what is the sort of political and legal tolerance for saying um [clears throat] that our the way we make decisions that human agency should be protected in some form. Is there any legal groundwork for that? And at the time there wasn't. You know, in the United States especially we like to blame people for their addictions. We like to you know, say that that you know, if you made a bad choice, that's
31:12your fault. We don't like to think about systemic guidance. We don't like to think about any of that. And now we're in a world in which real harm is being identified, named, and priced. Even the Pope is naming this stuff now when it comes to AI. The the the risk that it's going to determine our value for us is one of the central things that he had to say about AI.
31:35And so one of the things I'm most excited about and interested by in the world of AI at the moment is and especially in the context of something like education, if we get to a place where people truly where we begin to see effects like people are more isolated. We know already that high-end very expert scientists who are given AI tend to collaborate vastly less with one another once they're given it. And that kind of isolation I think it's going to be a huge problem if a young [clears throat] kid gets used
32:04to isolated work with AI and doesn't develop the proper social skills to even be a entry-level person at a job, um [clears throat] I think somebody should pay for that. I think that should be expensive for people to have messed around with. And and for me, I think [clears throat] along with all of the experimentation that we're seeing, cuz these guys are rolling the dice all every day, I think there needs to be some new legal and political experimentation with the cost of the damage that they're going to do.
32:33Yeah, I I agree. And the the tough thing here, you know, I was talking to a bunch of AI folks and some of them are just like, "Oh, we already have liability and like, you know, just have them take on the liability." But, the problem here is even if these comp even a Google or an you know, they're worth trillions of dollars, but if they take out the electrical grid of a country for you know, by accident, one of their their models goes rogue and you know, the liability is $5 trillion. First of
33:02all, they're not going to be able to pay that, even some of these mega companies.
33:05And then the second thing is I actually do think they could kind of be I don't know if the word is too big to fail or like too in some ways strategically important to fail because then the Department of Defense is going to get involved and said, "Wait, oh wait, if we let Anthropic go under, our autonomous weapons aren't going to be able to keep up with the So, I I'm I'm worried about that, that we're not creating the right incentive. The The best the I have another friend who's a researcher at Stanford and he's really
33:34trying to as as many people know, these models are just trillions of numbers, parameters, and they're trained and [clears throat] no one really understands what part of the neural nets are driving this rogue behavior that rogue behavior. There are people working on that. So, I mean, to your point about it, if there was a breakthrough, if I had to pray for a breakthrough, and maybe even AI might help us make this breakthrough, is if we could start making sense of which parts of these neural nets, which are really modeling like a a neural structure, um
34:03actually are leading to more rogue behaviors and things like that. You know, the people call this the alignment problem. Like, how do you make sure that the the the robots are aligned with our values? And then there's a whole question of even humans have What are our values? Exactly, our values are all over the place. Um but it's you know, it it's it's it's it's hard on in terms of how you I I I I had one one good idea I've heard is people it I mean, this is a little bit in the self-regulation because government, you
34:32know, they don't it it's hard for them to keep up here. They don't even have the talent right now cuz these companies are paying [clears throat] $80 million to hire some of these AI researchers. There could be an adversarial like before Anthropic releases a model, SpaceX or Google has access to their model and makes it try to do bad things and embarrass them. Hmm. And only when they're not able to make that model embarrass Anthropic for, you know, 2 weeks, then then say, "Okay, you can release that model." Maybe that could that could work.
35:01So, Jake, you you brought up some potential harms to children, and you both are fathers, so I figured a good question to move on to from here would be should American families feel comfortable leaving their children with these technologies, especially as apps are introducing AI companions to their user interface?
35:23The number one thing we know, if we know nothing else about the effect of AI on education, is that the unstructured use of AI by kids is bad. It It leads to worse outcomes in test scores, worse outcomes in retention, um you know, in study after study, if you give somebody as an open-ended access to ChatGPT or anything like it, they use it to cheat, and they uh and they wind up they wind up In one study, they wound up
35:50writing papers that they couldn't then quote from. Couldn't quote their own work. Their own work, right. So, you know, uh that's just and that's as my mom would call it, that's the uptown problem. Like, that's the good problem. Be deeper than that, you get into kids who are isolated from one another.
36:11Um I've been I'm working on a piece right now in which I'm interviewing uh intake personnel at emergency rooms across the country who are having to improvise a code of an administrative code in inside their hospital for the enormous amount of psychosis they see from people spending way too much time on a chatbot and becoming convinced that they are Jesus or in the in the case of one New York in tech person, she said that the guy was there complaining about um being lost in New York and trying to get back
36:40to his home country and and she was trying to figure out what is this guy where is he from and then pretty soon she figured out that he thought he was the king of England and [clears throat and snorts] and you know and it was in so you know and beneath that you get into a world you know there's a there's a very smart guy connected to something called the Center for Humane Technology you probably know Tristan Harris who's from there Aza Raskin is sort of his his intellectual partner and Aza Raskin said to me on my podcast once he said "Humans are most valuable when they are isolated
37:10and lonely. As a market that's the that's what we're taught in tech as they are most valuable when they are alone and and without social connection."
37:19And and that's the thing don't let them be alone and without social connection on these systems. They only the only proven value that we know so far in an educational context or in any other context is a highly supervised person. I want Sal Khan over my kids shoulder as they use something like ChatGPT. I do not want them alone with it.
37:39Yeah, I'll pick up right there cuz I you know I for me it's actually the isolation and loneliness that is a problem that is you know predating even even the AI and the screens and the screens and maybe the AI are getting into that.
37:53And so my ideal as a parent is you know and my wife is here like we're always like okay do they have good friendships? Are they going outside? Are they active? Do they have a healthy relation? Are they And and so that I think is like the highest order bit like just make sure they're having a healthy childhood. And we have to do that as adults too like are we interacting with other people? Are we putting the phones down? And we're all guilty of it sometimes our kids want to ask "Hey hey dad." you know and I'm like wait wait wait you know, like
38:23that's the kind of stuff that um we we all have to be careful about. I also agree, I mean, you definitely don't don't want any I I I personally think actually like if you're just uh doom scrolling on Tik Tok or Instagram that if I were to make a hierarchy of bad things, that is much worse than a student who's depending what they're doing with AI, like there there are some kids that will go and have a nerdy conversation, dig deep, and even there you want to make sure they're go have that with your friend now and and and and and go do
38:52something else. But uh you know, my my view is yes, just make sure it's in moderation. Be on top of it. Make sure it's healthy. I wouldn't It's not the end of the world if you if they have no access, but there are some positive things. I'll give it one example, our daughter and I you know, this was a a somewhat positive thing we saw in the house, you know, she she sometimes picked on our youngest.
39:14Our our daughter's the middle, she's now 15 and and he's he's now 12, but this was a couple of years ago. And we always are trying to get her to be like kinder to her brother. He always wants to be involved and and apparently we all of a sudden saw her being a little kinder to him.
39:29And we're like, oh, we should praise this. We said, you know, hey, this is good. Like and we didn't realize and this is us maybe bad parenting. She's like, oh, I've been journaling with Chat GPT.
39:38So, we didn't know that, but um but it told me it it told me that like you're only going to live with your brother for another few years. These are the reasons why he really wants like your time.
39:50And and we could have given that exact same speech to her and she would have rolled her eyes and she would have Totally.
39:55But and Gen Z like her her Chat GPT speaks in Gen Z slang. It's like, hey girl, like, you know, this that. And it and that resonated. And so like, you know, this was a positive thing. I mean, it could have like you know, radicalized her or something too and we wouldn't have But but you know, that's a positive example. Then our 12-year-old, you know, he is out of all of the three kids the one we we worry the most about. he can get addicted to the screens and once again, I think it's YouTube and stuff that is more addictive.
40:23Um but like, you know, he's been he's been doing some of this vibe coding stuff and he's he's able as long as it's moderation, he's able to creatively express himself in ways that have been like, he's he's actually created real apps that him and his friends use and that so moderation, I I don't want to say that like, yes, all in, but there some baby steps that are worth trying.
40:47I mean, I would I guess I would say moderation, yes, but more importantly, supervision. Like, I need again, I want Sal and his and his very awesome wife to like be as involved in every kid's life, right? Like, and this is the problem is that that's not where we're at. And then unfortunately, we have to design a system on the principle of protecting the least protected people inside that system. And so for me, foregoing the benefits for the most advantaged people uh
41:16so that we can protect the least advantaged is the essence of democracy.
41:20And we have to come up with a system in which we can you know, agree together that there's been a legitimate set of considerations uh you know, considered where we know the price of the damage that can be done, we know the risks and we've and we've made a choice about it as a society. And right now it's these weirdos you know, who are begging us to stop them, literally saying, "Stop me before I kill again." They're the ones making these choices and I wouldn't trust them
41:49with your daughter or mine or anybody else. So, that's the thing.
41:54I'm going to ask one more question and then we're going to turn it over to the audience. So, if you haven't started thinking about what you want to ask, now's the time.
42:02[clears throat] Um okay. So, just to conclude, I wanted to ask each of you what in your opinion the other gets right when it comes to AI. Um we're going to we're going to begin with you, Sal.
42:13Yeah, I mean as you can tell, we're not like in strong disagreement with each other on on anything. I mean, look, I think Jacob's 100% right. Like we have to be super skeptical and especially on the market forces, a little bit of a silver lining on the market forces. I think in the age of social media, which is still going on, somehow these companies have said, "Oh, this isn't my content.
42:36This is just free speech." But it is their algorithm that is putting that in front of you and their algorithm is optimizing and somehow they've gotten out of that like "Oh, it's not me that radicalized that person who just shot five people. That was just free speech doing it." But you know, your algorithm fed that to that person and you probably knew that that person was like using it.
42:54So, 100% agree with that and when we start seeing um, that type of thing, I think it is a win. Maybe we already are starting to see that with AI. Like absolutely. Like we have to be 100% on top of that. I 100% agree though that you know, we're in a very bizarre market situation right now with these these these AI labs. I actually think a lot of them aren't going to survive. But um, in the interim, when you have like this desperation to stick out and to have the best
43:24technology and and at the same time you have wars going on with drones and that's a national security implication and countries are afraid to fall behind.
43:33It is scary. I mean, you know, I always tell people you you need to focus on what you can control and I feel like I have some control. I know some of these people. Some of these people I know personally. Like I've joked and it's kind of a dark joke. I'm like, the only thing I can do is like get like a duck costume or something for like when the drones are looking for humans, I could say, "No, [laughter] I'm just a duck." Like, you know, quack quack, you know, like move on. You know, there's a human.
43:56Um, sorry. Sorry, that's maybe a little dark, but um, no, I I look, I I am I am generally worried about AI writ large, but as as obviously Jacob is, but I just say what's in my control is can I we also harness this for very good things, including policing the bad.
44:15[snorts] So, I would just say again, I have the utmost respect for you and for what you do and for I think Sal, you know, is a very rare creature. I deal with a lot of very disreputable and dishonest people in my life and he is not that guy.
44:28He's the best of them.
44:29Yeah. No, no, no. No. No, an entirely different species and yet somehow moves effectively among them. That's the thing that I think is so incredible about Sal Khan, right? And so and and the thing that I would I would say also is his willingness to swim in those shark-infested waters and experiment with the thing that is important to him.
44:49Which is trying to get our kids the education that they deserve in the same way that your family member was your inspiration in starting this thing out, you know.
44:56She's here, by the way, right there.
44:57Nadia. That was the first cousin I tutor.
45:03You know, like it's that stuff is inarguable. There's a There's an episode I I was really focused on for a long time about uh in 1952, a guy named Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center, was hired to make these housing projects in St. Louis, Missouri, called the Pruitt-Igoe Homes.
45:23And they He modeled them on this utopian ideal from the 1920s, this guy Le Corbusier had come up with where you'd put this vertical life in a field of nature and it would be this beautiful thing and it was. It was a beautiful concept, utopian concept. And Yamasaki designed this these buildings that were beautiful and the and this modernist sort of temple and then this river of green.
45:47And immediately they got rid of all the landscaping cuz that was too expensive and they um cut it down such that it basically turned this thing this place into a prison, right? Over time. And in 1972, So, they finally tore them all down and and one architect called it the the end of modernism.
46:05The architect got blamed for years. Bad design, blah blah blah blah blah, right?
46:11But, he wasn't to blame. The finances were to blame. The market forces were to blame. And so, in this case, I think that Saul is a very brilliant architect of a very important thing. And and I just want to make sure that the market forces don't take what he's trying to do and strip away the very humane things he wants to build into it because that is absolutely what they're going to try to do. So.
46:38Any last words or should shall we move to the audience?
46:41No, I agree about the market I used to work at a hedge fund, so I I I understand, you know, and that's why we're not profit. So, hopefully we can we can hopefully steer clear.
46:51[clears throat] Okay, great. So, um moving into the audience Q&A portion. Um just as a reminder, we ask that you keep your question concise. Um uh limit yourself to a brief introductory statement to leading to your question, just so we can get through as many as possible. Um we have our two library staff mic runners here, so they will run you the mic.
47:23Hi there, I'm Chris Swanson.
47:25Hi there, I'm Chris. Uh thank you guys, this is a great talk, really appreciate it. Um so, I have four daughters under seven, and I'm curious if you guys uh it sounds like you guys agree on a lot, but any practical advice for parents who are trying to learn this stuff as fast as we can uh in order to guide the little ones as they come up through this.
47:44I I mean, my, you know, like uh every Sunday, uh one of the things I've learned to enjoy my, I take both of my sons for piano classes, and then while the older one's in the class, me and my 12-year-old [clears throat] now, we walk to a local frozen yogurt place and he we end up having these fun conversations and like the other day he asked me like, "How much would sea levels decline if Japan disappeared?"
48:09And and I'm like, oh and so my first I was like, okay, well let's think it through. It was like a consulting question. I was like, "How how deep does Japan go?" And let's try to estimate it.
48:19And you know, we we actually you know, we made an estimate I made him do most of the math, try to estimate it all and then I said, "Okay, let's see what AI has to say." And about our analysis. And so like I think stuff like that is like a super healthy um you know, like just some weird question and first try to think about it yourself then dig into it. You don't have to do it. Like if your kids never see I mean especially their age if they don't see it at all, completely fine. But if they're hearing about AI, if they're curious about it, we all know kids ask like, "Why is this?
48:46Why is that? Why is that?" And it hits our limit. I mean the AI is pretty pretty powerful that way. Um so, you know, but once again, do it in a way with you explore it together. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. Let's let's try to figure it out. Let's guess and then let's let's go go to the AI.
49:01My I think there's going to be so much distraction and temptation in your kids' life coming up that there are so many terrible people who are going to try and grab their attention and use it as a product.
49:17And as a result and those people have employed some of the finest behavioral science minds in the world. go and work with them. I can't tell you how often I find some brilliant behavioral scientists that I love speaking to and then they get hired by some company that means I can't talk to them anymore.
49:32Um So, what I have would highly recommend is get talking with your kids as early as possible about their brain as if it's a separate person from them. Think about it as like there's you and me and we're talking. Your brain is tired and angry and that's why we're having trouble communicating right now. I I remember one of my proudest moments was my now 13-year-old.
49:55She was a little kid at the time. She was like, "I want to trick my brain into liking cleaning my room."
50:02And And that [clears throat] thing of of taking fault and shame out of the bad choices they bad choices they're going to make that are have in fact been guided by these entertainment and attention systems that are trying to make money off of your kids, I think the best way to inoculate them against them is to take as much shame out of their decision-making as you can and get them into a mindset of my brain is an organ that is vulnerable to certain things. I have allergies, brain allergies. Means I can't be on this thing. I'm allergic to
50:32it. That kind of talk can help. I think can is is what we're going to need to do to basically vaccinate our kids against this stuff that's coming right now.
50:43Good evening. I heard loud and clear your concern about market forces and the negative impacts that has on many of the good things we want to have come out of out of AI both for education and and in general.
50:56Um how about the role of government?
50:59You know, without turning this into another hour-long conversation on the role of government in AI, is what's the starting point for what the role you'd want government to play that is not currently playing in the development roll out of AI?
51:12I'll let you go first.
51:13I I would I mean my perspective on it is that the government um in the United States is is going to take its cues from the courts first. It's not the way we should do it. It's not the way the academics would say we should you know, the political scientists would say we should do it, but it's absolutely how we're going to do it. And as they begin to understand the appetite for uh vengeance that parents have for instance, I think that's going to inform law in this country around around certainly the attention economy and
51:43things like that. I just came back from 2 weeks in Europe uh speaking in Scandinavia at a variety of events and speaking to WHO and various people. Man, that place is so opposite us when it comes to stuff. I was saying this to Sal earlier, there was one guy I had a dinner with the guy and he said to me as a conversation started, he's like, "You know what my favorite American regulation is?"
52:04And I was like, [laughter] "What?"
52:07[clears throat] Like, no a phrase no one has ever said to me. He was like, "The Americans with Disabilities Act. It is awesome. What a great thing. We don't have that here." In Europe, they don't have those kinds of access laws because of the cities are too old to adjust.
52:20You know, like It [clears throat] turns out that if if I think if you're if you're if your attitude is that regulation is literally for what the market cannot address, that got that's what government does and that there are some things that we fundamentally just shouldn't be trying to make money off of, um, and I think the education system is one of them.
52:39Uh, I think I think we just have to sort of start with that assumption. I don't think we're in that place politically in our lives, of course, and as a result I I definitely think that liability law and the plaintiff's attorneys, the ambulance chasers, are going to absolutely drive the the bus for a little while and right now I'm rooting them on. I want those throat slitters as hungry for money as they can get because that's how we're going to get real change in this country. It's the It's I think the only way we're going to do it in the short term.
53:05I actually I mean, yeah, if if they'll I would like to see some of the liability law, you know, as we've said, like what OpenAI did to Hugging Face, if I did that, the FBI would have showed up at my house. I probably, you know, like but someone was like, "Oh, that was cute." You know, they committed a bunch of felonies, but we don't know what they are.
53:23Um, so so I I 100% This sock puppet isn't me.
53:27Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I I I agree with that. I am sk- um, I've been trying to think like what would I do if I was emperor on the like slow down regulation or I urge you to urge me whole thing. And that you You I already told you about this like maybe I heard this idea of this adversarial like make it make market forces. Hey, I want to embarrass the other the other company.
53:47That's an interesting idea.
53:48So so that's the current best idea I have heard. Um I you know I this was at the end of the Biden administration he'd come to San Francisco and I was in a room with like oh some of the the the AI folks you meant but Tristan Harris was there too and a couple of other people and some people were saying regulation and I give Biden credit he he said okay, I hear you but like make that tangible for me. What does that regulation look like and and even the the pro-regulation people are like well yeah, I think we have to you
54:17know there there there there aren't very tangible things and people have given the example which I agree with like we clearly regulate cars cuz it can kill people. We regulate planes but we didn't start really regulating it until we understood how cars were actually Yeah.
54:33uh harmful. Um cuz you you also don't want to regulate here and then all the harms are are over here. So uh that's that's the other unknown question. If I was government I thought I would be very worried about uh workforce uh what's happening now. I think I I think this utopian oh jobs are always created industrial revolution. I think that's completely false and I think you're going to start seeing a lot of people drop out of the labor force in the next 5 years which I'm super worried about.
54:59Can I throw in one extra thing just to I want to just plug someone that I really think everyone should should know there's a Duke Law Professor named Nita Farahany who um has a book uh called The Battle for Your Brain. She has a new book that's now coming out um but her she has a whole legal framework around the notion of cognitive liberty. The the freedom to make choices without being manipulated. And and she is now teaching a a course at Duke Law on the legal constraints around AI that we should be
55:28considering and she posts the syllabus every week and the lessons she does she works her ass off. I don't know how she does it. But anyway, I I recommend subscribing to her substack if you're interested in that question. She is great on those on those questions. This gentleman had He had his hand up first and and Yeah, you did.
55:44He the first and highest. He was ready. I just stickler for justice here.
55:49we're going to go over here after.
55:51Okay, great. Sorry, I just took Thank you. Thank you, Sal. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you for for moderating. Um I was slight I'm slightly taken aback by the somewhat dark tone. You know, as a user I work in finance.
56:04As a user and my job is very interactive and probably will never be supplanted, I think. But as a user of AI, you know, you you you've come across very eloquently as, you know, a somewhat pugilistic force and and and I see more as a progenitor for for good things. Not withstanding the concerns that you have.
56:25So that was It's not so much a question, it's an observation. But my my I've always been struck by why is it called artificial intelligence?
56:34You know, which is mendacious in itself. But why why do you think that came about? How did it because the answers are not artificial. The answers are accurate and sensible and to my expect.
56:47Yeah, I mean that's that's a that's a good point. I mean you could be called automated intelligence or or something like that.
56:52It was a I mean it was it was a summer camp at Dartmouth uh in the in the '50s. It was a group of nerds at Dartmouth math guys who got together and began thinking about how would we make a self-improving machine.
57:03And they were the first people to slap those words together and I think that was the mistake, the first big mistake cuz we just we love to feel oh, intelligence. And that's how we get away with like a thing that's a company that's committing crimes but gets to somehow blame its product as if it's some separate entity.
57:19You know, like what are we talking about? So it is a very um yeah, I think it's a it's a very extremely misleading piece of terminology.
57:26And and on the dark tone like I and I'm I'm I'm supposed to play play the optimist role on this on this stage today today today [laughter] on this debate. Look, I I 100% agree with that. I mean my wife will tell you like I I mean it has already been transformational even inside the organization at Khan Academy.
57:42We're able to do much more than we were ever able to do. Like there's all sorts of good stuff and we can talk about the medicines that are going I mean there are genuinely good things that are going to happen from this, but there are genuinely you know, I think the labor dislocation is a real one. And then you know, these I I I'm a little bit on the fence. I think so I actually still think social media is a bigger problem. If I had to put a hierarchy problems relative to kids going deep with AI. I'm not saying that's not a problem, but
58:12that's where the social media I I would say it's unfortunate especially young girls, unhealthy body image and like there's a lot of stuff going on there and you know, most of the radicalization we tested a lot of the models in the first I I would this is a little bit of a ray of hope. Like if I I I made videos on world religions on on Khan Academy many years ago and we posted them on our site and we posted them on YouTube. And the YouTube algorithm and we're friends with very good friends with Google. They've been great supporters of Khan Academy over the years, but the algorithm
58:41gets you to keep watching and if you they keep showing videos and it's a Khan Academy video on Islam, Khan Academy video on Christianity.
58:48But the videos next to it are from some very charismatic person who slowly gets you into some rabbit hole and then you watch that video and then there's even more crazy people. And so that radicalization or that unhealthy body image and um I mean I've I've gotten into rabbit holes on testosterone supplements. I'm like, wait, no, I don't want to I'm happy with my testosterone, I think.
59:09Uh I just turned 50, so I'm Yeah, I've got those I've got those ads, too.
59:13But you get the same ads.
59:14They're all awesome.
59:17But so anyway, I'm I'm more worried about that um from our kids psychological health. I'm very worried about the loneliness problem. That's why I'm I'm getting involved with Ted cuz I'm like, oh, we have TEDx, we can maybe we could convene people and get people to get in a rooms together and have conversations like this. And so so that's a real problem, but this this very dystopian Terminator world that Dario and Anthropocene and all these other people are afraid I don't know the
59:46likelihood of that happening. The people are saying P Doom, right? Probability of Doom. And people are like, 10%. They're making up numbers. I don't know what to make of that, but it is not impossible.
59:56I would also just say with all due respect to to your your personal experience of AI, you also are operating in a professional context that's a highly regulated environment with people who are on the far end of enormous amounts of education at a time when it was not being gutted the way it is currently. And so I would just argue like the experience of a lot of people professionally is this thing is awesome, and it is. And that's true for all these people on the far end of a really wonderfully protected kind of
1:00:23human experience. But the the stuff that we're dealing with right now is is not that. And all of these kids futures are at stake because for one thing, we don't even have a data privacy law in this country. We don't have data transparency laws in this country. You know, these companies have somehow convinced us that kids over the age of 13 are allowed or should be allowed to be on their own on the internet, you know? Like so so I just would say that the the experience of our generation [snorts] professionally is going to be very different from the stakes we have
1:00:53to consider as a democracy.
1:00:56I have a question right over here.
1:01:00I'm interested in talking a little bit about the data sets that AI is using. I've had conversations with AI about topics where I said, well, this isn't actually true. Why are you giving this equal weight? That's clearly not a solution to this type of thing. And they say, oh, I'm so sorry.
1:01:16Of course Yeah, I won't do that again.
1:01:18You're right. So I just be really interested in understanding anything educational perspective. You know, data sets are really important and the information that we're feeding children could be quite inaccurate at times, too.
1:01:30Well, you know, this was obviously when we first got access to this. And we we got a preview in summer of 2022 before ChatGPT came out. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman reached out to us and we immediately saw this is this this could be really cool as a tutor and blah blah blah, but we saw it could be used for cheating and we saw it was making up stuff. It was hallucinating. It was unusually bad at math. And so we've made the decision and we're benchmarking. I think we're one of the few people that are doing the work of benchmarking. What is the hallucination rate? What is the math
1:02:00error rate? And we've anchored it all on our content, which is human edited and created. So it brings you know, the hallucination the hallucination rate when it's anchored on our content is pretty close to zero. We but we still warn the user like verify anything you see. But we we would never if it was like 10% hallucination, we wouldn't feel responsible putting it out there. And then on math errors any type of a math error in a whole conversation, we have it down to about 1
1:02:30to 2%. Which actually and it's not like it's it's teaching you the wrong thing.
1:02:34It's it's kind of like a if you're if we're tutoring with each other and at first I'm like, wait, I would have done it Oh wait, wait, no, you're right. Like it's a little bit like that. And I realize like you know, my error rate when I'm tutoring my my my cousin or my cousins or my kids is actually probably higher than that. I I I self-correct. But even there, we need to educate the users and make sure they understand this. And I also this isn't a new phenomenon. You know, pre-AI people would search on Google. There's all sorts of crazy stuff on there. All sorts of crazy stuff on social media.
1:03:03And even what you're seeing, you know, in a classroom, what the professor tells you. You know, I I I will defend our crazy world and I I as you can we've gone to dark places, but you know, even we all kind of crave the Walter Cronkite era of like a really responsible person who you can trust and but if you think about how like how many shady things we were doing in the world at that time, you know, I mean the Iran stuff goes back to 1953 and we overthrew their democratically elected government and
1:03:32and just so that BP could get better oil rights. Walter Cronkite didn't tell us that.
1:03:37Um you know, uh we had a the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to to as essentially I mean I don't want to call it a false flag attack, but it was a false rationale for declaring war and killing millions of people. Walter Cronkite didn't tell us about that. So there there there there it's it's it's easy to kind of wish for that again, but this critical thinking and be able to call BS on anything is actually a super important critical a skill. So I'm not being an apologist for the AI. Like we go through great pains to minimize that
1:04:06and we still want to educate the user, but we want to educate the user beyond just calling BS on the AI. We want them to be able to call BS on anybody and and user and user critical thinking skills.
1:04:17Uh I would just say first of all, Walter Cronkite didn't know about any of that stuff.
1:04:21didn't know about it. He didn't know about it.
1:04:22And also yes, also as soon as he discovered the American government was lying to Americans about Vietnam, he told everybody immediately. So let's be clear.
1:04:30I am a fan of Walter Cronkite.
1:04:31let's use that I got to just want to ask. We've got we've got enough problems with media trust at the moment, but okay.
1:04:38And I had some other smart thing to say, but I can't remember what it is.
1:04:42I need AI to do that. Anyway, yeah, go ahead.
1:04:46Yeah, I was going to was Yeah, I guess the um Oh, yeah, that's right. That that also to Sales credit and to the discredit of the big companies, their benchmarks don't show you very specifically what it does and doesn't do and they don't warn you very well about what it lies about or doesn't. Um whereas Sales people in a 400 person organization with vastly less funding than those guys uh is doing the work to show you how much you can trust the product or not. Those guys are not incentivized to do that. They do some
1:05:15They issue some benchmarks, but it's mostly about boasting and not about liability or anything else. And so, that's another thing. It's just to recognize that like they're not going to tell you only Sal will, you know.
1:05:26Um and just to note, this is going to be our last question.
1:05:29Uh hi. Thank you for really interesting conversation. I'm a trustee of the library and we're beginning to discuss a policy about AI. Trying to develop uh a policy to talk about some of these issues and I wonder what insights you would share with us uh specific to libraries and public access to our resources.
1:05:55I'll let I'll let Sal think that one through and I'll just tell a little story and kill time, which is um I discovered I was talking to my dad this morning uh in preparation for coming here. Uh my grandparents are from Cos Cob. Lived in Cos Cob uh just the next town over. And it turns out that my grandfather programmed this library speaking series after his retirement in the in the 1980s. F. Champion Ward, if anybody is from this community. Anyway, super cool.
1:06:20[applause] And he was a He was a lifetime educator. My My grandmother who escaped a super oppressive childhood through her education um uh loved education, you know. And so, they would be sitting right here and they would tear us up right now. They would not believe the moment that we are in and the way that that this stuff is is being used. And so, I just sort of want to say like I don't envy you having to create a a set of policies for this for this institution or anything.
1:06:50Yeah, I know. I'll I'll think of it a little bit broader. Like look, there there's the narrow way I could I could answer your question, which is you know, libraries are a place to be kind of a a temple of of access to knowledge and information. So, in a lot of ways our our mission and and your mission is is the same mission. Khan Academy's mission and your mission.
1:07:08Um and I think there's things you can do with AI where you could do AI literacy, you could do courses, you know, some of the stuff of like, how do you make someone know when the AI is, you know, where in this content institute, which we're doing for kind of a higher education program, we are actually making people go through simulations where we we intentionally make the AI hallucinate and we can see if the people can catch that. Like, that's part of the uh assessment. Um so, there's all sorts of interesting things, but I actually think there's even a more powerful role for the library, especially cuz a lot of what we talked about is isolation,
1:07:37loneliness, etc. And you have these great commu- like kind of what we're doing tonight is what I think the future of the library is. And so, you know, if if I were emperors of the emperor of the library system of the world, um I would lean hard on and look uh I'll us at TED, my I'll put my TED hat on, we we actually are thinking about, what if we and we you talked about the Pope, we we we we're trying to actually loop the Pope in somehow. Like, if I was the Pope now, like and I'm being
1:08:06self-aggrandizing, but like if I was the Pope, I I you could cut out middle management now. You can just say like, this is the topic this week, 1.whatever billion Catholics and everyone else who's interested, I'm the Pope, you like me, and um you know, it's how has your ego helped or hurt you um in the past month? Or how do you be a better husband or wife? Or how do you uh you know, build for your community or or something like that? And people organize into groups of eight, nine, 10 at the
1:08:33library or at churches, at synagogues, at mosques, and people's living rooms. Like, that's I think there's a deep craving for that. I was talking I This is an idea for you at Dartmouth. I was talking to a a family friend who's Actually, I was talking to a He's a sophomore at Stanford and I I was like, "Oh, it's amazing to be at a campus like a Dartmouth or a Stanford.
1:08:53You meet all He's like, "Yeah, everyone kind of just hangs out with their their same people." And I'm like, "That's a waste." Like, if I was Stanford or Dartmouth, you should start this, I would mandate every week you have to have a coffee with five random classmates. It's literally maybe an AI just sets you up with five five random classmates that says this is the topic and it's it's it's a high-minded topic. It's about your ego.
1:09:17It's about being a better person, whatever. It's about why are we here?
1:09:21The afterlife. I don't care. But you did that, you will get like 10x more out of your Dartmouth experience and like we should all be thinking about it and I think the library has a big role to play in doing that.
1:09:35[applause] I want to Oh yes. I want to thank you all very much for joining tonight on behalf of everyone from Dartmouth Dialogues and also everyone here at the Greenwich Library. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful rest of your evening and thank you to Sal and Jake.