Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning – Derek Muller Explains

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming tonight.

It is my absolute pleasure to be here to talk about how AI will change education.

I must admit, maybe first off, that I wanted to sort of shoehorn AI into this

talk a little bit, because what I'm really passionate about is education.

So my question is really, how is AI going to play a role in that? But first we have to understand the bigger

picture of how education actually works or doesn't work in some cases.

You may have seen this clip. This is an AI tutor from 10 months ago.

So let's take a look. Can you first identify which sides of the triangle are the opposite adjacent

and hypotenuse relative to angle alpha? All right, so I'm pretty sure this

is the angle alpha right here. Right now, looking at the triangle, which

side do you think is the hypotenuse? Remember, on the hypotenuse,

I'm not totally sure. I think it might be this one, but I really am not sure. The side ac.

You're close. Actually, side AC is called the adjacent side to the angle alpha.

The hypotenuse is the longest side of a right triangle and is directly opposite the right angle.

Can you find which one is the hypotenuse? Oh, okay, I see. So I think the hypotenuse is this

really long side from A to B. Will that be correct? Exactly. Well done.

Okay, so it's pretty impressive. And again, this was 10 months ago. So AI tutors have only gotten

better, I'm sure, in that time. I think if you had told me five years ago that such a technology would exist,

I might not have believed you. AI, as we all know, has gone incredibly quickly. So the question is, is this the future?

Is this how everyone's going to be learning in the future? Well, I wanted to reflect on two things.

The first is that you can always complain about education. You can do it now.

People were doing it 10 years, 100 years ago. You can always complain about the state of education, and I can kind of see why.

I've got some examples of the failures of the education system for you right here. What's water made of?

Water. What makes water Water.

Okay. What elements does it take to make water? H2O. So what does that mean? It is water.

Yes, yes. H2O. It is water. Okay, this one seems like it's maybe going

in a good direction, but then it takes a turn. See if you can spot where things go wrong. So what's happening to the level

of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now? Well, I guess, you know, we've got this whole

climate change and, you know, and I guess people believe that obviously carbon dioxide is a, you know, impacts on the climate change.

So carbon dioxide, you know, everything emits carbon dioxide. You know, trees, human beings, I guess like

animals and trees are contributing to the. Oh, definitely. But it's. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, so trees are, I guess,

one of the original primary sources of emitters of CO2.

It's the trees, guys. I don't know if you knew. Just cut them all down, we'll be okay.

CO2 emitting trees. Yeah, it's not good.

You could always complain about education. You can always say, you know, it's no good.

So we can ask the question, why aren't people learning? You might point to certain things. Maybe the education system is stale.

Maybe it was made to create factory workers. Maybe it's because we didn't have AI tutors yet.

I'm going to come back to this question, but I think it is an important one to think about what is really going on.

What are the outcomes we're getting from the school system and why. The other thing I wanted to point to,