Can AI Replace Professors? The Mystery Is Over — Right, Agatha?

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Influencer Marketing Professor…

In my classes, I’ve talked about AI replacing professors in the future. Guess what? The future is heeeeeeeeere…

Agatha Christie ON WRITING via BBC Maestro

“In a world-first, the bestselling novelist of all time offers you an unparalleled opportunity to learn the secrets behind her writing, in her own words. Made possible today by Agatha’s family, an expert team of academics and cutting-edge audio and visual specialists, as if she were teaching you herself…”

FYI: Christie passed away nearly 50 years ago.

So who’s the next virtual professor? Aristotle? Einstein? Confucius?

Takeaway for my fellow professors: time to up our game. Teaching basics and fundamentals won’t be enough.

1. Fill class sessions with insights on current events and student experiences.
2. Serve as a mentor, not just a lecturer, helping students find their way through an ever competitive and confusing world.
3. Start learning how to roof houses, fix cars, cut hair, and make cocktails on the side.

That should work… until the androids get here.

Update:

A few hours after sharing this post on BlueSky — which has a vocal anti-AI contingent — I received my first pushback from a professor who specializes in printmaking.

Also can we stop pushing this narrative, please? Unless we’re actively condemning this line of thinking? Clickbait articles that are furthering AI concerns we’re already stressed about aren’t contributing to a solution. This, folks, is why print will never, ever be dead.

I have no idea what that last sentence means, but I empathize with academics fearing for their jobs, especially when higher education is under attack from multiple sources, not just the Trump regime. But dismissing reports about technological disruption as mere “clickbait” isn’t just Luddite, it’s myopic. As the late, great business professor Theodore Levitt noted in his seminal article “Marketing Myopia”:

It is impossible to mention a single major industry that did not at one time qualify for the magic appellation of “growth industry.” In each case, the industry’s assumed strength lay in the apparently unchallenged superiority of its product. There appeared to be no effective substitute for it. It was itself a runaway substitute for the product it so triumphantly replaced. Yet one after another of these celebrated industries has come under a shadow.

Levitt cited the example of railroads, which once dominated transportation of both people and products across the planet, but are now just another option.

I’ve seen this over my own career, with digital media completely disrupting successful and arrogant industries. When I worked at MCA Records, I asked an exec if he worried about digital music replacing physical albums. He scoffed at the idea, noting the enormous size of digital-music files and their far lower quality. “Fans will always pay for higher quality music,” he said. And some do: vinyl has enjoyed a resurgence. But we all know where most people get their music these days.

Same thing with newspapers. They were in a prime position to own their own social networks, where they would be the primary source of the news, but they believed that their “core competency” was simply reporting. That myopia enabled Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to dominate the much more profitable news dissemination business.

So professors think higher education is immune to disruption?

Technology is already changing how people learn. Instead of spending thousands of dollars taking a foreign language class with a college instructor, consumers are using Duolingo and other apps. Instead of driving across town to learn cooking or yoga, they tune into YouTube and TikTok. And now ChatGPT teaches everything from how to code to how to write cover letters to how to cope with anxiety and stress.

How about fiction writing? A course at UCLA Extension costs a reasonable $700. It features a human professor, but is consequently limited to set hours and a certain number of students. The above Agatha Christie course: $89, available 24/7, open to an unlimited number of students. Surely, the human instructor offers a higher quality product, right? It depends on the course and the human.

As an undergrad, I took large classes alongside hundreds of other students, with the world-famous professor a tiny figure walking on a distant stage, and most of our interactions involved an unknown TA. And this was at Harvard.

In my MBA program, I endured an introductory statistics course with a professor who mostly read out loud from his book. He didn’t like to be questioned by students. He taught basics that we could have learned anywhere. And our assignments consisted of exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that could have been graded by a computer. That course cost me thousands of dollars.

So for certain courses, I not only see AI replacing costly professors, I openly welcome it. That will push — and liberate — human professors to create more sophisticated courses, with more student interactions and stronger relationships. It’s a challenge I’m embracing for myself. And if I can’t deliver more value to my students than an AI, an app, or a YouTube video can, then the fault lies with me.

That’s not just “a line of thinking”; it’s a line we’re already crossing.