Hope and Power Skills on the Cusp of the AI Revolution

The widespread use of artificial intelligence is driving an evolution in the educational landscape as schools and universities seek to empower students as active architects of a future shaped by AI. 

This week, UTS brought together two of the top educational leaders in our country ‒ Dr. Steven Katz, an Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Associate (OISE) Professor and Dr. Susan McCahan, University of Toronto Associate Vice-President and Vice-Provost for Digital Strategies – for an evening event, Shifting the Success Paradigm in an AI World: Navigating new paths to academic success.

As the panel discussion took shape, I shared Dr. Katz and Dr. McCahan’s hopes for the future – by redefining success, reimagining student assessment and cultivating essential "power skills" like collaboration, adaptability and critical thinking, education can shift to give students the tools and agency to shape our rapidly changing world. AI literacy has emerged as essential for students and teachers, and ethical use of AI tools is fast becoming an integral part of how students learn and teachers teach.

With AI, homogenous intelligence lies at our fingertips. The traditional model of education, which dates back to the Industrial Revolution, grades students on their ability to acquire knowledge. When he was a high school student, Dr. Katz recalled how he memorized mathematical formulas to earn 99 per cent grades in calculus, and how instead he wishes he learned more about connections and collaboration in high school.

Now knowledge is everywhere and easily accessed, the focus of education can evolve – one way it can do that is moving towards “power” skills that will serve students well in the era of artificial intelligence such as collaboration, adaptability and critical thinking.

What we pay attention to gets valued, and what gets valued gets worked on, Dr. Katz said. “We call them soft skills, but we should treat them like hard skills, meaning we should pay attention to their intentional development. We should figure out how to assess them, teach and support them.”

As the use of AI becomes widespread among students, what Dr. Katz coins as the “homework apocalypse” is upon us. Traditional methods of assessment like essays and assignments may have to be rethought. Students should also be encouraged to take risks and innovate, and schools must evolve to facilitate new types of learning and reflect upon its measurement.

With knowledge widely available, the unique perspectives that we bring as humans are going to be more valuable, said Susan McCahan. But she also shared a world of caution: “AI models are people pleasers, and they will reinforce your bias. They designed these models to be flattering, because they know you are more likely to come back and use it again and use it more.” 

Dr. Katz compared AI models to the algorithms used by social media companies to keep us engaged as long as possible, touching on how OpenAI launched a new more sycophantic model in April and then rolled it back because it was too flattering.

AI can be irresistible as it takes advantage of our natural state as “cognitive misers” he said ‒ human beings are all well-designed to do the least amount of thinking possible. We evolved to take as many different shortcuts to avoid hard thinking, and that manifests in cognitive biases. We like it when AI confirms what we already believe. 

Al can be used to up-skill, helping us do things we can’t do, and to de-skill, by replacing the human skill required to complete a task. In that lies the temptation to outsource the work that we find most difficult to AI. What we should be doing, according to both Dr. Katz and Dr. McCahan is to enhance our AI literacy and learn to use AI for the easy tasks while using deep thinking for the things that remain hard.

Dr. McCahan said that with the advent of AI, humans will find opportunities to create meaning in their lives beyond technology. “When new technologies come along, we invent new things to be new jobs that did not exist before…just as we are innovating in the AI space, we are going to innovate in the human space as well.”

The challenge that lies ahead is to embrace AI in a way that gives us hope while sitting with that ambiguity it brings, knowing exciting advancements lie ahead if we manage it with critical thinking and empathy, upholding our humanity in the process. 

The event marks the beginning of a deeper, ongoing dialogue at UTS with our close partners at OISE and U of T about how we can shape the future of education together, which will continue with more panel discussions in the 2025-26 school year.