AI can read the water. It will never trim your sail.
That was my message last week, opening the North Carolina Association for Medical Research (NCABR ) “Bridging the Gap” conference for a diverse room of university faculty, PhDs, and, most importantly, dedicated K–16 STEM educators from across North Carolina.
I started on the water. For years I sailed Buzzards Bay — shaped like a funnel, wide and deep at the mouth, narrow and shallow at the head. Out at the mouth, a stiff wind is easy; the swells are long, and you have time to think. Sail that same boat up into the narrow end and everything changes — the waves stand up and start breaking fast. Same boat, same tide, same wind. The only thing that changed was the depth.
The water got shallow.
That's education right now. And AI is the shallowest water yet. And for everyone.
AI is the best set of instruments ever built. It can tell you exactly where you are, how deep the water is, where the wind is going. But reading the instruments is not the same as sailing the boat.
Head down in the instruments alone, and you drift into a sea of sameness — you miss the real world the data hasn’t seen yet. Head up, ignoring the instruments entirely, and you run a good boat onto the rocks. The sailor who makes it knows both — and has the judgment to know which to trust, when.
That judgment is the human core. And it can be taught.
The sailing is the hard part: the judgment, the curiosity, the empathy, the nerve to ask what's missing and steer toward it.
Smart people find smart people! Story of my life!
An innovator's real job isn't to know everything. It's to know how to think, to ask the right questions, and to have the humility to find smart people for the “how.” That collaborative, question-asking mindset is exactly what our schools can teach best — and it's our advantage in the age of AI.
Here's what I always take from these talks: the more I research and get to know an audience, the more I learn about them — and about myself — as they learn from me.
Thank you to NCABR for the invitation, and to every educator in that room working to teach the next generation.
Remember that “the room that wins — the country, the school, the child that thrives — will not be the one that reads the instruments fastest. It will be the one that still knows how to trim the sail.”
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