The Teacher’s Role as Philosopher in the Emerging AI and Quantum Computer World
For those of us who have not yet become numb to the ever-present parade of previously unimaginable technological attainments, you may also be rightly astounded when Neuralink marketed a chip, inserted into the human body by a surgical robot (as it is too small to be inserted by human hands), allowing one to control a computer or mobile device from the neural activity in one’s brain. It is coined a brain-computer interface. Although such an innovation has the potential to immeasurably bless the lives of innumerable people, especially our quadriplegic brothers and sisters (Neuralink, 2025), its development portends a multitude of further advancements for humanity undoubtedly coming down the pike.
Many folks, especially those of us who remember peace, love, and rock & roll, have had to come to grips with the realization that the word impossible will soon have to be redefined in Webster’s Dictionary as nothing more than a tentative assumption. In the Zeitgeist of the 2020s, what was once smugly dismissed by some intellectuals as simply illusions, pipe dreams, or fantasies (think UAPs) is now emerging into our current reality with unprecedented shock and awe. AI is becoming to googling as googling was to the card catalog in the library. Talk about googling, well Google, which appears to completely understand that resting on one’s laurels is a death sentence in today’s world, has developed a quantum computing chip dubbed “Willow.” I fear my very 20th century brain cannot adequately explain its potential, so I will let the official Google (2025) company blog do it for me:
‘Willow’s performance benchmark is astonishing. It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.’
Now, what you just read is not found in the musings of some crackpot or much less by someone prone to hyperbole. It was written by Google itself. If the five minutes versus 10 septillion years thing does not impress some, I am sure the parallel universes thing should at least raise a few eyebrows. Google is stating, very speculatively of course (they probably possess a handful of alternative explanations for the results), that the incredible performance could possibly be due to Willow somehow utilizing multiple parallel universes to more quickly and efficiently solve the problem (and I imagine those universes could contain multiple versions of ourselves, all standing there, eyeing the results, with the exact same dumb look on our faces).
I don’t consider myself an alarmist, and I feel we definitely need to press on with all of this stuff (we actually have no choice); however, anyone who has studied the potentialities of all this cannot not be somewhat possessed of a rather healthy apprehension of unintended consequences or intentional nefarious misuse. It has been well understood by intellectuals for many decades now that, as a species, the snail’s-pace evolution of our character has not kept up with the rather hypersonic evolution of our technology.
It is rather axiomatic that education will now necessarily be altered in monumental ways. It will not simply be altered concerning the efficacious and efficient delivery of the material (which will undoubtedly come to pass), but a highly overhauled curriculum will need to evolve with a concomitant change in how we attempt to mold the personalities and characters of our future pupils.
With the advent of AI and quantum computers, we are confronting a future where very few things are off the table. If the reader will indulge me for a minute, as an educator, I would like to express a potentially outlandish concern or two (if anything is outlandish nowadays). I was recently informed by AI itself, who I assume would know, that “forward thinking researchers” believe that a very distant descendent of something like what is now the Neuralink chip, could possibly, in the far-off future, be inserted into humans giving them immediate access to everything AI “knows” (Microsoft Co-Pilot, 2025). I find that prospect somewhat disconcerting. I don't think Olympus is quite ready for 8 billion gods. I doubt we could wear such a ring. I ran the above disconcerting concept by one of my top former students, Timothy Ng - a former employee in the interdisciplinary Research division at Google's headquarters (working alongside Ray Kurzweil and his AI team, among other notable innovators and academics). In the conversation that ensued, he speculated that if such a thing were to ever come to pass, teachers might have to revert from being the disseminators of knowledge, to people who teach others how to ethically leverage the vast amounts of knowledge they will already possess. He thought that the role of teacher could necessarily evolve more into that of philosopher rather than disseminator (T. Ng, personal communication, January 6, 2025). I could not agree more.
It may be incumbent on us to place much more emphasis on ethical decision making and profound philosophical thinking in the K-12 world and beyond. We have no idea if the “singularity” will ever come to pass, but notwithstanding, the technological advancements at the current time call for a greater pedagogical concern with character building and reflective thought. Being a professor who teaches cross-cultural differences (as well as Spanish and Teacher Education), and who has published a few articles on the subject, I am completely aware that ethics and character building can be a cross-cultural minefield. However, it may be one in which we necessarily have to tread to avoid potential abuse of the forthcoming wonders. Plus, resistance to the abuse of power is a human universal and not simply a cultural construct (Pinker, 2002).
It is correctly said that “knowledge is power,” and I think we can assume that greater and more instantaneous access to knowledge will empower many who did not necessarily have to earn it through the tempering and potentially moralizing effect of hard work and discipline. While the word “empower” is obviously celebrated in the educational rhetoric of today, we could soon find out that it cuts both ways. Socrates taught that even though people are highly educated to perform a certain task, they first need to consider if it is the right thing to do before such a task is undertaken (Popkin & Stroll, 1993).
As individuals become more and more empowered (for both good and evil), and as the necessity of teachers as factual disseminators becomes less and less essential, how will current educational models have to be re-imagined? I think all of us, as educators, view our craft as a calling and idealistically strive toward a utopian ideal in one way or another. However, the utopian ideals embedded in teaching may necessarily have to evolve into preventing a dystopian future. It would be incumbent upon us to teach the world how to exercise good judgment in confronting the unknown unknowns that await us.
The ability of AI to personalize instruction (Price, 2024) plus the already extant and increasing teacher shortages in places like the U.S. and Australia (Price, 2024; Teacher Shortage, 2022), will likely result in the “teaching” of more and more subjects through electronic means (A New Era for Teachers, 2025; Price, 2024). When and if that happens, it may leave room for alterations in the curriculum affording teachers the time to explore the following:
Critical Thinking
In a recent article by Loz Blain (2025), he provides compelling evidence that once much of our thinking is done for us, courtesy of AI, our brains could somewhat atrophy, potentially causing a budding host of cognitive concerns. He views critical thinking as vital in flexing our mental muscle. Blain (2025) cites research that indicates that folks who have more faith in AI’s abilities exercise less critical thinking themselves.
However, besides the personal cognitive benefits of critical thinking, a much larger problem is looming. Critical thinking, which might be best taught by a human (Westergaard, n.d.), could be essential for our own survival as we grapple with how to handle the extreme and consequential power humans will possess. It will be crucial in figuring out potential unintended consequences of our vast knowledge and power. We must think of things that have never been thought before and preemptively address them before misuse or accident occur. Plus, the forthcoming reign of quantum computers, where the counterintuitive attributes of subatomic particles are leveraged, accentuates the importance of inculcating within our students the understanding that our brain did not evolve to grasp the fundamental nature of reality, and what is intuitive to us could be completely inapplicable to the situation at hand.
Philosophy
Highly potent power should only be wielded by poignant and reflective thinkers. Philosophy, especially that of the epistemological and ethical kind, can facilitate the development of such. At the appropriate times, students should be introduced to things such as:
• Some of the rich stories from Zen Buddhism
• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
• Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Stoicism)
• The Sayings of Epictetus (Stoicism)
• The African philosophy of Ubuntu (love and interdependence)
• Aristotle’s Golden Mean
• Kant’s Categorical Imperative
• The Golden Rule (the versions of both Jesus and Confucius – with the understanding that neither may consistently work cross-culturally)
• The Three Main Delphic Maxims
• Region-specific indigenous wisdom
Hopefully, philosophy giveth where technology taketh away.
Invitational Education
Some rightly fear that the “digitalization of the classroom” can serve to alienate students from positive relationships and examples (Zierer & Young, 2023). In the classrooms of the future, teachers setting the standard of how to wield power in an ethical and caring way will be paramount in shaping their already powerful students. Invitational Education emphasizes the need for teachers to create a classroom environment of care, respect, trust, and optimism (Purkey, Novak, & Fretz, 2020). Adherents of the theory believe that the teacher’s demonstration of such inviting attributes will serve to better inculcate the same into their students, thereby helping to create a more empathetic and just world (Purkey, Novak, & Fretz, 2020). Invitational Education, or something akin to it, will be more and more essential in the near, more technologically based future (Anderson, 2023).
Deep Culture
Many students’ exposure to diverse cultures comes from foreign language classes. However, most of what they learn currently is rather superficial. Classroom materials may include topics such as Jennifer Lopez, paella, and French bread. As good as these topics are, French bread will not save the world in a potentially impending tech-induced disaster (although some of my colleagues down the hall may disagree). Seeking to understand the paradigms that inform the realities of our Spanish and French-speaking brothers and sisters would be much more helpful. Deep culture does just that (Ivers, 2007). Some deep cultural topics with which the students of the future should be familiar might be:
• Emotional Expressivity Tolerance – when do we assume strong emotional expressivity constitutes an insult or a threat versus when does it not? There are significant differences in where one would “draw the line” throughout the world (Ivers, 2016).
• Individualism vs. Collectivism – possibly the most impactful cultural difference (Triandis, 2001)
• Fatalism vs. Non-Fatalism
• What offends in one culture, but would not in another
• High context vs. low context communication styles
• Differences in showing respect
• Attributional tendencies
• The importance of the word “interpretation”
Conclusion
The subjects we teach in school, as well as the objects of our society’s diversions and adorations, betray what is honored in our culture. Plato taught that “what is honored in a culture will be cultivated there” (Weiner, 2016, pp. 61-62). To better endure the upcoming technological and societal disruptions, it may behoove us to tweak, somewhat, our society’s “honorees.” More curricular honors may need to be bestowed upon the concepts of ethics and empathy.
Bibliography
A new era for teachers as AI disrupts instruction. (2025, March 14). eSchool News. https://www.eschoolnews.com/digital-learning/2025/03/14/a-new-era-for-teachers-as-ai-disrupts-instruction/?form=MG0AV3
Anderson, C. (2023). Utilizing Invitational Education theory to adopt ethical artificial intelligence policy. 2023 Annual World Conference of the International Alliance for Invitational Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa, November 30, 2023.
Blain, L. (2025, March 13). Use it or Lose it: The human brain will be reshaped by AI. Education Today. https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/Use-it-or-Lose-it-6444
Google. (2025, January 22). Introducing the Willow Quantum Chip. Google Blog. https://blog.google/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/
Ivers, J. (2007). Metacognition and foreign language cultural instruction. Journal of Transformative Education. 5(2), 152-162.
Ivers, J. (2016). Invitational Education, deep culture, and dealing with diversity. In S. Gregory & J. Edwards (Eds.), Invitational Education and practice in higher education: An international perspective (pp. 123-140). Lexington Books.
Microsoft Copilot. (2025, February 20). AI chips and future technology: Instantaneous access to AI knowledge. Retrieved from the chat conversation.
Neuralink. (2025, February 6). Robot. Retrieved from https://neuralink.com/#robot
Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate. Penguin Books.
Popkin, R., & Stroll, A. (1993). Philosophy made simple (2nd ed.). Doubleday.
Price, M. (2024, October 2). How AI is changing the role of teachers in education. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/10/02/how-ai-is-changing-the-role-of-teachers-in-education/
Purkey W., Novak J., & Fretz J. (2020). Developing inviting schools: A beneficial framework for teaching and leading. Teachers College Press.
Teacher shortage. (2022, August 3). Universities Australia. https://universitiesaustralia.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/220803-Teacher-shortage.pdf
Triandis, H. (2001). Individualism-Collectivism and personality. Journal of Personality, 69(6), 907-924.
Weiner, E. (2016). The geography of genius. Simon & Schuster.
Westergaard, S. (n.d.). The irreplaceable role of teachers in the age of AI. Education World. https://www.educationworld.in/teachers-or-tech-the-irreplaceable-role-of-teachers-in-the-age-of-ai/?form=MG0AV3
Zierer, K. & Young, J. (2023, February 17). The grammar of learning in the digital world. Education Today. https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Grammar-of-Learning-in-the-Digital-World--5843