AI May Ruin the University as We Know It: The existential threat of the newest wave of ed-tech.

By Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley October 31, 2024

A social-media post for a Google product known as NotebookLM outlines the following instructions to college students for “how to do school.” First, close your laptops, use your phone to record lectures, and write down only the important bits. Next, upload the recording and scans of any handwritten notes to Google. Finally, process the material through an executive summary generated by NotebookLM. An added perk, or shortcut, as the case may be: At the end of the week, generate a summary of the summaries in the form of a synthetic podcast narrated by a pair of conversational agents. No more extracting concepts from long-form arguments, no more psychic struggle with complex ideas: just autosummary on demand, made possible by a vast undifferentiated pool of content that every successive use of the service helps to grow.

Such is the ed-tech vision of higher education now. What the example of NotebookLM’s promotional campaign demonstrates is the emergence of a new model or template for education, if not for learning itself: a productivity schema ready to be laid across the full spectrum of the postindustrial knowledge economy. It is not difficult to see that in the next phase one can eliminate the lectures and discussions and simply start with the summaries (and eventually the summaries of the summaries), streamed on demand.

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