Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy on Running with Robots

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Learn more at GettingSmart.com slash Smart Sprints or at the link in the show notes. Alright, let’s jump in. Greg, what is the 3C economy? I’m glad you asked. So, you know, the 3C economy is something that we sort of envision taking shape over

the next 20, 30 years. Really, the 3Cs stand for caring, creating, and cyber-curating ethics. The context in which we talk about them is sort of thinking, trying to think ahead about, what are the things that humans do best and the things we don’t want to replace them in doing?

And so, the first two are kind of obvious, creating. We as humans love to experience the creations of our fellow humans, whether that’s music or art or clothing, knitting sweaters, any kind of creation at all, any kind of creative act. Sure, machines can do that and machines actually do do that to a certain extent, but we get

a thrill from people doing that. Caring is the second one. Caring, you know, also pretty obvious. The most advanced AI can tell me if that little spot on my back is cancerous. There’s a better job, actually, than a lot of humans who would be reading the same slide

or looking at the same photo, but if it’s really bad, I want a human telling me. I want an actual person holding my hand and telling me what my options are and, you know, again, putting it in context, telling me how long I have to live, what should I be looking at? And then cyber-curating ethics is maybe the one that people wouldn’t be thinking of sort

of in the same terms, but that’s just trying to, as humans, trying to sort of think about what all this stuff means, what all this technology means in our lives, whether it’s dealing with the results of AI and warfare or thinking through the problems of self-driving trucks on crowded highways or any number of scenarios that we really still do need people to kind of be in the driver’s seat about.

Right. I loved your discussion of cyber-curating. Truly about updating our social compact and our shared values, and I really appreciated that you called out the consideration of unintended consequences. What are all the ways that this could go wrong?

Hey, you’re listening to The Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Tom Vanerick, and today I’m joined by Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy, the co-authors of a great new book called Running with Robots, the American High School’s Third Century. Co-author Greg Toppo is a well-known journalist. Greg did a long stint at USA Today where I got to know him.

Greg, it looks like you had a lot of fun writing Running with Robots. Is that right? Oh, my goodness. We had a ton of fun. I attribute most of that to Jim, who was the evil genius who dreamed up the idea of casting

the reader forward 20 years to a fictional high school and a principal who falls asleep one day and wakes up 20 years later and goes to visit his old school. When I read the reviews and saw that that was the case, that every other chapter was as flash forward. It made me nervous because I thought it would suck, but it was so great.

I was guessing that that might have been Jim’s evil genius. It’s really a cool book because Jim, just a beautiful job of combining the history of the last 20 years and the history of the future, at least the next 20 years. Greg, I think you were fortunate to work with a guy like Dr. James Tracy of Stanford. He trained historian who’s led a lot of America’s best independent schools.

Jim, it’s really great to have you back on the podcast. I thought I might recognize your voice when you said that you call out training our students to be computers with a focus on hand calculations that allow only a dedicated few to be able to squeak past the laborious calculations to see the beauty and inherent usefulness of mathematics. I thought that might be your critique.

I think you must have enjoyed working on this project with Greg. It was great fun. I feel very fortunate. I love those images. They do a walking tour of the guy’s old high school.

One of those chapters ends with a cliffhanger. I can’t wait to get back and see the next classroom that they visit. That was really a compelling and generally optimistic picture of the future. Yeah, we tried to. My conception of it was that it was sort of like Socrates and his pupils just sort of

walking in the Athenaeum or just sort of. I think the thing at least that I liked as much as anything about it was it gave the principal from 2020 a chance to ask some really kind of stupid questions to the principal in 2040, which I think is where we are now. We have a lot of stupid questions, but we want to ask them.

Yeah, that was well played. Jim, I’ll ask you that sort of mere question as Greg at the outset, this three C’s curriculum, it’s kind of the corollary to the three C’s economy, but the three C’s curriculum are creativity, caring and collaboration. You see those as being really key in the future, right?

We do. And, you know, I think that I’m glad you asked the question in this way, Tom, too, because I think it’s very insightful that it really captures the process Greg and I undertook in that we sort of asked practitioners and thought leaders who were at the cutting edge of AI, what are the things that are not going to be eclipsed in the foreseeable future by

artificial intelligence? What will what are almost certainly going to remain in the human domain? And then we wanted to sort of capture those and reverse engineer what would be the curricula and what would be the jobs that we could reverse engineer from those. And so we felt that what we’re probably going to see in it may be optimistic, but we kind

of made a choice to be optimistic. And part of the impetus of the book, too, was Greg and I began this project shortly after the election of 2016. And we both felt that we wanted to speak to the anger, which was probably fed by fear on the part of much of the certain portion of the electorate.

And we wanted to show people that there was a viable and optimistic path forward if we made the right decisions as a society. And so in terms of the 3C economy of the carrying cyber curating and creating economy, the corollary is that in the K through 12 or K through 16 educational system, we really need to stop trying to train everybody to multidisciplinary content fluency.

That is taking up all of our time. And it really is teaching back to the 20th century knowledge economy. What we need to embrace is that the algorithms are increasingly going to be the domain of the knowledge fluency. And the human component to that is we want people to have sufficient content literacy,

not fluency, content literacy across all domains, to be able to, A, confirm that what the algorithms are telling us simply makes sense. B, make sure that what the algorithms are telling us in terms of possible solutions to problems we input are ethical and humane and humanizing. And C, be able to be creative with ways in which say origami could inform the unfolding

of a solar panel for a space flight, seeing the connections that would be the unique human insights. What do we do with the time that’s freed up in the school day from having to get everybody to content fluency and now only getting them to content literacy? We spend that time on process fluency, which you’re all the 21st century skills that we’ve

all been talking about for the last quarter century, teamwork, iteration, grit, creativity, and some that haven’t been discussed enough, I think, such as being able to be comfortable with accelerating change, being able to retain linearity of analysis amidst electronic distractibility. These are the process and human skills that we can spend more of our time. I appreciate that, Jim.

You talked about collective intelligence. And this is the idea of smart teams working with smart machines in efficient and ethical ways. We talked to Jamie Marisotis earlier this year about his book, Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines.

I think Jamie also did a nice job describing this collective man machine intelligence taking on big problems. Anything you want to add to that notion of collective intelligence? I would just add that studies have consistently found that with the artificial intelligence systems that we have now, which granted are still nascent and narrow, nonetheless, it’s

quite consistent that a human and an algorithm working together are more powerful and efficacious than either working alone. And that’s true, too. If you take Deep Blue, which B. Kasparov in the World Chess Championship between AI and experiments, Deep Blue actually loses to an average grandmaster and an average sort of

middle of the road AI working together. I would love to fly through a couple of the future state characteristics that I loved most. So, Toppo, why travel as part of the curriculum? I love that.

Rumpel was surprised by that, but why did you see travel as part of the future curriculum? I think it’s kind of getting back to some of the characteristics that Jim talked about a second ago, this idea of sort of like grit and just really allowing students to kind of develop a way to find themselves in any context and be able to operate. And very unfamiliar context, too.

In the chapter where we talk about travel, we talk to a couple of students who find these trips they take, and they’re not like, these aren’t year-long trips. Some of them are just like a week or two. But they find themselves in these strange situations or dining in someone’s home in South Africa.

And they stick with these young people in a way that nothing else does and really equips them with the kinds of characteristics we want, which is to kind of like not just think on your feet, but also to consider who other people are and how you treat them and how to be sort of a better, more interesting person. That was actually a big surprise to me when we started thinking about some of these things.

That was one of those ideas that just wouldn’t go away. No, I loved that. Greg, we wrote a book called The Power of Place that came out today, the WHO declared a global pandemic, and it argued for community as classroom, and suddenly it was. Travel is probably the best preparation for the VUCA world, because I remember landing

in Moscow, and nothing’s in English, and your credit card doesn’t work, and everything is new and different and complex. So I really appreciated that. Jim, when the work cooked up, this art and biology fusion to create new life forms. That was very cool and unexpected.

Is that your evil genius? No, that comes out of, I was blessed to have really a wonderful series of interactions with Freeman Dyson when he was a visiting scholar from Princeton at BU where I was at the time. We had a series of conversations, and over lunch one time he told me his vision that

someday people would, every day people would be genetically engineering these life forms as art forms, just for the aesthetic pleasure of it. You can imagine this happening at Hytek High, where they infuse art into everything. Greg, the holographic Hemingway, was that your ad? That was something I had been thinking about, and just kind of just kicked into reality

once I just started writing it. It actually was one of those ideas that was in the air. It actually, the most direct influence that I could think of was the show of foundation, Spielberg’s foundation, which collects the stories of Holocaust survivors. They’ve been, for a couple of years now, they’ve been working on this project where they film

Holocaust survivors over a course of 12 hours of video, just to get to this massive archives of them answering questions, basically. Then they match it to the most likely questions that somebody would ask them. They sort of seamlessly edit them into these voice activated, basically, interactions, video interactions.

I thought that it’s so cool, but it’s just the beginning, because you’re interacting with a piece of video. What if you could interact with the actual text and have it superimposed on the image and the voice of Hemingway? Every day, it’s funny because Jim and I were constantly swapping these clips from the news. Every day, something comes up where I say, hey, didn’t we write about this? Didn’t we say this would be 20 years in the future?

Every day these things come to be closer. It was a cool vision of immersive humanities. In some respects, it’s connected that idea of place, but also visiting in time and space, the ability to really interrogate a past time or a future time. Speaking of holograms, I love the holographic teams idea in a couple of respects.

One that you could be working on a team with members from all over the world. Because we’re working with a bunch of international schools, I also love the idea that you could click send my AI avatar to that meeting at 4 a.m. I don’t know if to get out of bed, but what about these holographic teams? You see that materializing soon? I literally saw a demo of this the other day.

It wasn’t quite the fanciful version that Jim and I envisioned, but it’s a kind of a holographic cabinet. In some respects, the Zoom teams that were instantly created two years ago are kind of an early version of this. Suddenly we all work on virtual teams and often teams that are remote. It feels like this is another example of the future showing up faster than we anticipated. I’m very comfortable with it. It doesn’t have its issues, right?

I’m fascinated with the idea of the research showing people having body image issues because they’re spending all day on Zoom, kind of staring at their ill lit face. There’s a lot more people using Botox now because they can’t stand how their face looks. But yeah, we adjust very quickly. I just wanted to play off of something that Greg said. We finished writing this manuscript two and a half to three years ago.

It just takes a while for it to work its way through the press. We felt that we were being quite prescient, that we were years ahead, and we’ve been frantically trading these little snippets with each other over the last two or three years. And increasingly anxious that we were shifting from being prescient to if they didn’t get the book out soon, we would sound like we were behind the times and merely derivative. It just speaks to how quickly things are in fact moving. All right, Jim, this part of the book just made me stand up in cheer.

In 1926, you talk about this crowdsourced water project, and I’ll just read Rumpel’s observation as he watches this young lady who’s crowdsourcing with thousands of teens around the world, working with an AI assist. And Rumpel notes, you’ve developed a model of a highly individualized project based learning that instills in students the skills to organize a global hive of collective intelligence that they use via computational thinking with their AI assist culminating in an engineered proposition to solve real world challenges. And then they present it effectively to a live global audience of experts and investors. Man, that’s a great picture of what high school can and should be in the in the very near future.

Love that. Absolutely. To me, you know, one of the things I didn’t stand up in cheer like you, but but it is kind of a really a mouthful and really kind of an amazing vision of what’s possible. It is. Yeah. My last book was called Difference Making and it argued for all of these elements of projects that matter to the learner in the community, usually taken on in teams, often using powerful new tools and then, you know, presenting that work publicly.

So I love all the elements of that. And the cool thing is, I mean, in this time, if you don’t mind me kind of turning things back on you a little. I mean, the cool thing is, yes, we do spend a lot of time 20 years in the future. But, you know, as your work shows, you know, there are a ton of educators doing this a version of this right now. I mean, you know, I mean, one of the things that I think was exciting to me as we were researching and writing this book was, you know, you were spending all your time. You’re going to these places where like, oh man, I wish we could go there.

How look at this. Did you see where, you know, look at where he went now. And I mean, to me it was really, I mean, you know, talk about just an embarrassment of riches in a way. I mean, it’s not the way we often think about our school system. But I think we’re in a way we’re forced to because there are a lot of people thinking in these terms are a lot of people taking projects seriously taking teamwork seriously, taking you know community service seriously and doing some really just kind of amazing stuff. Now, I love all the schools that you mentioned in the book. Thanks for the shout out to Science Leadership Academy SLA in Philadelphia, Iowa, big in Cedar Rapids. Jim, you told some stories from from Rock Hill. But just love all the great point, Greg, that there’s great things happening around the edges all over the country all over the world people doing what you described in the 2040 vision and they’re doing it today.

Yeah, and I think, I mean, to me, I think like, it’s almost like malpractice if we don’t look at them and see what they’re doing and learn from them. I mean, that’s, you know, to me, that’s sort of like their highest purposes, not just to not just to serve, you know, a couple dozen or a couple hundred kids, but to serve everybody, you know, as a model. So, Jim, on page 98, you talked about the kindergartenization of the entire school. What does that mean? You know, picking up on on the comments that you and Greg have made about the fact that there are practitioners out there who are really sort of engendering new paradigms that we can live into for this brave new world. The sort of obverse of the same coin is that we don’t have to create everything ex nihilo. And in fact, much of what’s at the core of what Greg and I are envisioning is a recapitulation of a core humanities curriculum.

And one one that is very familiar to educators, it includes certainly some elements that one would find at the very center of Dewey’s vision, even Rousseau’s Emil Montessori. So, for teachers to begin to embrace and and Adam Bray these is not necessarily, or at all going to mean that they have to be immersed in the completely unfamiliar. And kindergarten, in fact, is a real model for what we’re envisioning in terms of hands on real world, creative collaborative project oriented learning. And, and if you go back to the 19th century, you met, metresnick discusses this in his book, but most educators would already be familiar with the fact that the kindergarten movement came out of a very explicit sort of ideology around that in Germany in the 19th century. And what I was struck by when we tried to incorporate a very, if I could just start that again.

What I was struck by at Rocky Hill School when we tried to really integrate these models into the entire K through 12 continuum was that the consistent leaders of our faculty were the kindergarten team. And like the two of you my study of the near future leaves me quite paradoxical I think I’m, I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity, and I am pretty freaked out by a number of their risk, particularly growing inequality and the way that AI and machine learning and exponential tech. Largely, it’s sort of with the pandemic and with climate change or like a triple ratchet on inequity in the book you went into a discussion of, of a guaranteed basic income and sort of a guaranteed universal access to basic health care are those a couple of the examples of some of the elements of the new social contract that you think need to be in place to deal with this widening inequality. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if we come down really hard on on either side of this. Certainly I would you would say that you know everybody needs access to health care. I don’t know how, how universal basic income or UBI, UBI or whatever we want to call it sits in terms of the bigger picture of this. I mean one of, I think one of the things that we we looked at with some of the research, showing that, you know,

UBI’s have sort of mixed is sort of a mixed blessing and they have sort of mixed results based on sort of number one how well they’re administered or you know kind of what people can expect. So I don’t know and I think, I mean I think if there’s anything that we could, maybe one of the things we don’t explore as much as we could is the idea of inequality. And, and you know, maybe Jim has a sense of that that I don’t, but I do feel like we, we didn’t, we didn’t attack that head on. It’s an education book. I guess I’m just acknowledging the, you know, as you surface in the book the unintended consequences of AI are worth considering and they’re a long list and I appreciated in the several times in the book you talked about cyber ethical considerations and making that a core part of the curriculum. So, you know, surfacing these current issues and inviting young people to be part of the solution around this new social contract. Well I definitely think we should be teaching young people to be skeptical about technology.

And that, you know, inequality or not I think everybody needs to learn that. I mean I, I, one of my favorite conversations in the book is where we quote a tech writer who says, you know, who poses the really interesting question should you should should young people like to Alexa. And, you know, and you know, most of us will say of course we should of course they should you know, because everybody should be polite to everybody else. And then, you know, the issue really becomes well, you know, that goes down a slippery slope because then you start to think of Alexa as a person, and she’s she’s nothing, you know, of the sort. And the, you know, the analogy uses is that you wouldn’t say please to a jar of peanut butter as you’re trying to get it open. And that’s the way we should treat Alexa you know she’s just a dumb machine. No these are, they’re going to be live issues for the future. Jim, I want to talk about updating student learning goals. One observation that you, you make in the book that the time traveler says what will be key what will be the key value proposition that humans bring 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, and how they work collaboratively,

increasingly with intelligent systems. So, I love that idea of encouraging faculties to think hard, probably with community partners about those, those key skills and dispositions likely to be most valuable in the future and so, Given that are you optimistic about the fact that hundreds of communities in this country and around the world are sort of updating their student learning goals developing new learner profiles or portrait of a graduate often prioritizing a lot of the skills that you talk about in the book are you optimistic about that. I would have to sort of give a forest answer to that question Tom it’s a really good question and I think that I’m optimistic by the fact that we have opportunity to make a lot of really leveraged and informed decisions that will be transformational for educational outcomes. Am I optimistic that we will make those choices. I go back to Antonio Gram she’s data victim of pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will. I think that history would suggest that we have not consistently made these decisions to pivot in a right way for the types of educational changes the types of educational reforms that we for desperately need but I refuse to accept that we won’t.

And I want to, I want to thank you for your for your vision and leadership at the very forefront of of encouraging our country to make those decisions. You’ve been an inspiration to so many of us in that regard. Like you trying to figure all this out. I’m curious Greg what what parts of the future state were the hardest to figure out or maybe the most surprising. You know, I guess when I when it came right down to it. There’s this idea you know I mean I remember when I was a kid thinking about I was born in the 60s I remember that when I was a kid thinking, you know what it will be like in the year 2000. I’m sure you guys grew up doing the same thing and then I remember readings like a sign like a popular science piece or camera what it was.

And I literally I think I was sitting in the dentist office. And I remember picking up this magazine piece and it said, in the year 2000. Pretty much everyone will be living in the same homes they’re living in now. And, and it just like knocked me sideways I thought what the hell, I’m gonna be living in like you know a space house you know like circling the globe or you know I mean, you know things will be totally different come on. And I guess, I guess I’m sort of taking that idea forward in this book. I mean, a lot of what we do a lot of what we do with one another I think will be the same I mean a lot of the things we want students to learn. A lot of the aspirations we have for them will be the same.

I just think we have to, we have to think of them in a different context and think of them, you know, in slightly different ways. So, I don’t know if that’s a kind of a weird sideways way of answering your question but. I’m going to mention two insights that I took from the book and invite you to add a third. The first was given this this volatile unpredictable future of working with smart machines that the focus on creating and problem solving often in teams often with smart tools is is really I think a vital insight. The second is subtracting that to make more space for that there’s some stuff that we have to do less of and we’re not very good at that particularly in America we just keep adding stuff to what we ask of schools and I think your book was quite good at describing the things that we’re doing less of and

we’re not doing things that we need to do more of and so Greg as you mentioned earlier this isn’t whole clause something new it is a matter of of valuing creating and problem solving in teams carrying and doing less content memorization content for So, those are two big insights would you add Jim you want to add anything to that as an important insight for leaders. I would say the recent realizing of the humanities because so much of what we’re going to be doing in a co biotic and sorry so much of what we’re going to be doing in a co botics society and work environment will entail the humans input around values. And so that’s that’s as an example, we’re going to have to have people who are not just engineers working with algorithms but people who also can anticipate what are the values we want this algorithm to make when it’s unleashed on its own into the world and who is also spot checking when with what value education will be spot checking to make sure that there are no unintended consequences.

Love that Greg any any other insights you want to underscore for head leaders. I mean, I think, along the lines of what you were saying, Tom, I mean, I think it’s a really healthy exercise for people. As they’re thinking about the future to say, is there anything we’re doing we shouldn’t be doing. Are there things that don’t make sense anymore. The, you know, the one that to me sort of jumps out.

And I think will piss a lot of people off. But I think is worth thinking about is a foreign language, you know, teaching foreign languages that is requiring everyone to have years and years, learning a foreign language. We don’t say it’s a thing you shouldn’t do we just say it’s a thing that should be put in its place. Yeah, it’s interesting, Greg. I was a big advocate until recently and I went on to a Google meet and I clicked closed captioning and then you can pick whatever language you want to caption and suddenly it feels a bit less urgent than it was in the past. So appreciate you.

Technology allowed us to go to these places where we needed to speak Spanish right now it’s allowing us to speak Spanish without knowing Spanish so let’s keep moving. Hey, we’re talking about running with robots the American high schools third century it’s a terrific new book by Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy. Everybody ought to read this book. Get it. Share it with your faculty.

This is a great book for high schools for colleges. It’s a great book for book studies to take on. It’s a terrific book. It’s a fun book. It’ll make you laugh out loud. It’ll occasionally make you angry. Jim and Greg what a what a treat to have you guys on the podcast. Thanks. Thank you our producer Mason Pasha and everybody. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Keep learning and keep innovating for equity. See you next week. Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next and learning.

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