One of the most interesting things about artificial intelligence is how quickly it can challenge our assumptions.
I recently sent my friend Todd McLees a video embedded in a blog post by Ethan Mollick, an AI researcher at the University of Pennsylvania whose work I follow regularly. The post, The Dot and the Swarm, explored the growing power of AI agents and featured a music video generated from a well-known 2019 essay by AI researcher Richard Sutton called The Bitter Lesson.
The video was fascinating. It was also a little unsettling. The core message seemed clear enough: throughout the history of AI, systems that leverage massive amounts of computation and data tend to outperform approaches that rely primarily on human-designed rules and expertise. As AI capabilities continue to improve, it is easy to conclude that human knowledge and judgment may become increasingly irrelevant. At least that’s how it initially struck me.
When I shared the video with Todd, he quickly responded with an important observation. Sutton’s original essay was written in 2019 for AI researchers and system designers, before any of us had access to large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Grok. It was a lesson about how to build better AI. The new video updated the message for 2026, but in doing so, it may also have broadened the audience in ways that made the lesson easier to misinterpret.
Thirty-six hours later, Todd sent me something unexpected. He had created his own response, called The Better Lesson, on his Substack. Rather than focusing on the growing power of AI systems, Todd’s video focuses on the growing importance of human direction and how to use AI more effectively. If AI increasingly provides access to vast amounts of knowledge, analysis, and content creation, then perhaps the most important skill is no longer possessing information. Perhaps it is learning to ask better questions, exercise sound judgment, establish meaningful goals, and direct intelligence toward outcomes that matter.
That distinction struck me as profoundly important for higher education. For generations, colleges have helped students gain access to knowledge. Increasingly, knowledge itself is becoming abundant. The challenge for educators may be less about delivering information and more about helping students develop discernment, judgment, curiosity, ethics, creativity, and purpose. These are competencies that formal education often develops indirectly, in ways that can be difficult to define and measure. The magnitude of such a shift is daunting to consider.
In short, the future may not belong to those who compete with AI. It may belong to those who learn to direct it effectively. In the face of what felt to me like an overwhelming transformation, that idea was empowering and reassuring. At least, that’s what I took away from Todd’s response.
Not the bitter lesson.
The better one.
If you’d like to explore both perspectives, I encourage you to start by reading Ethan Mollick’s The Dot and the Swarm and then watch Todd McLees’ thoughtful response, The Better Lesson. The contrast between them is where much of the learning resides.
If you’d rather take just eight minutes to watch the videos back-to-back, here are the links. I encourage you to watch Ethan’s Bitter Lesson first, then follow it with Todd’s Better Lesson. I’ll be curious to know whether you watch them more than once to let their messages sink in.
If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu
