This post is going out early as a thank-you to paid subscribers. The full piece opens up to free subscribers next Tuesday. I’m grateful you’re here, and grateful for your commitment to rethinking what education can be. Your support is what keeps this work going.
Regular readers probably know that I spend a lot of time on YouTube, partly because I run a channel of my own. Over the last few years, YouTube has also become the place where I get most of my news about AI. And every now and then, a video from well outside education ends up shaping a post here as well.
That is how a video by the Genetically Modified Skeptic turned into my post on AI religion, and how Noraly Schoenmaker’s motorcycle travels on Itchy Boots turned into a post about why we name our tools.
Today’s post is another one of those. This time the video comes from a cardiologist. Dr. Rohin Francis works in Britain’s National Health Service and runs the Medlife Crisis channel, where he explains medicine carefully and with the timing of a stand-up comedian. (He also does stand-up, so the timing is no accident.)
In AI WILL replace doctors, and here’s why, he criticizes his own profession for organizing more and more of its work around exactly the tasks AI does best, like ordering tests by protocol and ticking boxes on forms. Doctors who practice that way, he says, are making themselves easy to replace. His advice to colleagues who want to keep their jobs is simple: “Talk to your patients.”
What I found fascinating is that if you swap “doctor” for “teacher” and “patient” for “student,” most of the video still makes sense. In fact, I recognized several of my own arguments in it. And his core advice is the same one I have been giving educators on this Substack for quite a while now: “Talk to your students.”
Francis frames that advice as the main thing that keeps a doctor from being replaced by AI. In teaching, talking to students does even more than that. It is how a teacher finds out what a student understands, and it is also one of the ways the student comes to understand it in the first place. Apart from that, though, Francis’s advice carries over to teaching remarkably well. That is why, in today’s post, I want to put Francis’s arguments next to mine and see how far the comparison goes.
