Latest news with #TylerCowen
Business Insider
10 hours ago
- Business Insider
AI isn't just helping students cheat — it's exposing how broken the education system is, prominent academic says
Artificial intelligence is changing the way we learn — and it's revealing how outdated the education system really is. That's according to academic and economist Tyler Cowen, an influential commentator and professor at George Mason University. In a Wednesday conversation with podcaster Azeem Azhar about the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, Cowen said schools and universities are ill-prepared for a world where students have near-limitless, on-demand knowledge. "It means admitting that homework is obsolete," Cowen said. "The easy ways of grading people, like computer-graded exams — they're obsolete." As students increasingly turn to AI to write essays, generate study guides, or explain complex topics, he said many educators are more focused on catching cheaters than rethinking how — and what — students should be learning in the first place. "There's a lot of hand-wringing about 'How do we stop people from cheating' and not looking at 'What should we be teaching and testing?'" he said. For Cowen, the real challenge isn't academic dishonesty — it's institutional inertia. Schools and universities are struggling to shift away from test scores and grades, which he argues are rapidly becoming the least relevant markers of learning in the age of generative AI. "The whole system is set up to incentivize getting good grades. And that's exactly the skill that will be obsolete," he said. Cowen called for a radical shift in how education is delivered. That means moving away from rote memorization and standardized testing and toward mentorship-based learning that emphasizes critical thinking and adaptability. "Faculty teachers need to be more like mentors. That can be rewarding, but it's very time-intensive. It's not something you can do by formula," he said. However, Cowen isn't optimistic about institutions making that shift anytime soon. "Our ability to reshuffle the personnel, the procedures — we just seem to me really quite frozen," he said. "I don't see that they're changing at any level whatsoever." Cowen's warning comes as OpenAI and Google battle for dominance in the AI education space. OpenAI launched Study Mode for ChatGPT on Tuesday, a feature designed to transform the chatbot from an "answer machine" into a personalized tutor that slows students down to help them learn. The tool avoids giving direct answers and instead prompts students to clarify their thinking, a move aimed at tackling the cheating narrative while boosting long-term engagement. Google has rolled out Gemini for Education, a suite of tools that includes AI-generated quizzes, lesson plans, and videos embedded in search — part of a broader effort to win over students early. Both companies are betting big that whoever captures the classroom today will own the workplace tomorrow. Meanwhile, teachers are feeling the strain. Some are embracing AI to create lesson plans and tailor materials, while others are overhauling their assessment models entirely to make cheating harder and learning more meaningful.
Fast Company
6 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Polymarket is making a big bet on pop culture
Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based 'prediction market' best known as a platform for betting on elections, sports, and geopolitical events, is on a winning streak. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission dropped investigations into whether Polymarket was allowing U.S. traders access to the platform despite lacking a proper license. This week, the platform announced that it will acquire QCX, a CFTC-licensed derivatives exchange, giving it fully legal access to the U.S. market. Meanwhile, Polymarket has increasingly become a venue for betting on an array of cultural and even meme-level current events—such as who will be the next editor of Vogue or whether the 'Coldplaygate' canoodlers will each get a divorce. In the process, Polymarket has ended up surprisingly well positioned to become a pop culture brand itself. There are similar prediction-market competitors, notably Kalshi (where you can also bet on possible Coldplaygate aftereffects), but Polymarket has increasingly become a shorthand fixture for the category, often cited by other media. The platform 'has become synonymous with understanding the probability of current events,' Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan claimed in a statement announcing the QCX acquisition, adding that increasingly mainstream audiences are using Polymarket 'to trade their opinions.' The statement noted that its users have bet some $6 billion on the platform so far in 2025. Founded in 2020, Polymarket uses blockchain technology that enables users to buy and sell 'shares' in possible outcomes of various events. But aside from actual bettor participation, Polymarket and other prediction markets have attracted attention as de facto gauges of probability, applicable to just about any future event, with commentators like popular economics blogger Tyler Cowen regularly dropping references to interesting Polymarket data points. In particular, the platform has attracted attention as a predictor of election results. (Polling guru and gambling expert Nate Silver has been an adviser to Polymarket since 2024.) Today there's an ever-shifting array of events to bet on, whose probability, according to those bets, is neatly quantified as an expression of market sentiment. An Israel-Hamas ceasefire before August? Polymarket says there's a 35% chance. Will Tesla launch a fully driverless, open-to-the-public Robotaxi service before August? The chance is 3%, according to Polymarket. How many times will Elon Musk tweet next week? What will be the highest-grossing movie of 2025? Will the existence of aliens be confirmed this year? (There's a 6% chance—the same odds as Trump getting the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.) New bets are introduced regularly by Polymarket, with suggestions and input from its users. Myriad regulations and laws govern gambling, as well as trading what are essentially options contracts, and until recently, Polymarket's regulatory standing has been murky. In 2022, it agreed to pay a $1.4 million penalty and restrict access to U.S. users. Many bettors in the U.S. seem to have found work-arounds, leading to the renewed scrutiny, but that appears to have been resolved. The next regulatory (and competitive) challenges may focus on sports betting, still heavily restricted in many states. (Rival Kalshi has recently partnered with popular trading app Robinhood on sports-prediction products.) Even so, the rise of Polymarket and its rivals speaks to how culturally accepted gambling has become. Strictly restricted and borderline taboo a decade or two ago, betting is now baked into sports discourse. And it's against that societal backdrop that Polymarket has in effect leaned into the role of marketizing watercooler topics. Its Coldplay-couple market involves a parlay—a gambling term for a multipart bet: For a bettor to win, both of the canoodlers (or their spouses) must announce their intention to divorce by the end of August. Polymarket currently pegs the chances of this happening at 16%. The platform's brand stance is notably more highfalutin, positioning prediction markets as 'more accurate than pundits' by gathering collective knowledge and perspectives into 'a single value that represents the market's view of an event's odds,' as a company statement puts it. 'Markets seek truth.' That said, prediction markets can miss their target—Polymarket gave Robert Francis Prevost only a 1% chance of becoming the new pope. But of course, that's an attraction for bettors: As with any form of gambling, the real money is in outsmarting the wisdom of the crowd. Polymarket is betting that this is part of the appeal that will bring prediction markets into the mainstream, and part of the cultural conversation on just about any topic. And lately, its odds are looking better than ever.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Matthew Lau: Toronto the Good's continuing downward slide
Toronto, where I have lived my whole life, certainly has high points. There is the financial district, which is the second largest financial centre in North America and home to several good coffee shops. Toronto also features some excellent cuisine. Tyler Cowen, who in 2011 was listed among Foreign Policy's top 100 global thinkers and whose blog with Alex Tabarrok Time magazine ranked third-best financial blog, once concluded after a restaurant tour of Scarborough plus rolls from a Sri Lankan locale and lots of driving around, 'Scarborough is the best ethnic food suburb I have seen in my life, ever, and by an order of magnitude.' With all it has going for it, Toronto really should be a world-class city. But I fear if it continues on its current path, it will instead become an honorary third-world city — certainly with respect to the unreliability of its public transit system, its inept municipal management, its descent into lawlessness and social dysfunction, and its NHL team's dismal playoff performance. On this last point, explanations and proposed solutions vary; for the first three the causes are quite clear. If Milton Friedman's classic 1993 essay Why Government is the Problem were being written today, Toronto could feature prominently in it. The unreliability of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) has recently become intolerable. Last Wednesday during evening rush hour the TTC shut down a significant stretch of its Line 1 subway for two and a quarter hours. Just before 5:30 p.m., service was suspended from Lawrence to St. Clair due to a track-level injury at Eglinton (three stations spanning five kilometres of track). Also around that time, northbound passengers at a major interchange, Bloor-Yonge, were kicked off their train, causing significant overflow that took some time to clear. Later the initial service suspension was extended south to include Bloor-Yonge — making seven stops in all. Service was not restored until around 7:45 p.m. This was the second serious subway outage in less than a week: the previous Thursday, a significant part of the other major line was shut down for much of the day due to an oil leakage from a subway work car. Mass public transit chaos has become almost commonplace since last winter. In mid-December, the TTC experienced lengthy shutdowns during the morning rush hour on no less than three days, with varying causes, including a trespasser on the tracks, multiple signal issues and a lost raccoon wandering the rails. Then in February, extensive TTC delays were blamed on snow and ice. In a further demonstration of the City of Toronto's inability to provide basic municipal services, snow piled up everywhere, with some sidewalks taking three weeks to clear. It was later reported that of the city's 59 pieces of winter sidewalk-clearing equipment, nearly half were out of commission on average during the three days of heaviest snowfall. More evidence of a city headed towards third-world status: increased lawlessness. The joke is that TTC really stands for 'Take The Car,' but last year that became the police's recommended phrase for homeowners to tell criminals. Amidst rising car thefts, one police officer suggested homeowners leave car keys at the front door to prevent a home invasion by criminals: just let the criminals take the car. After reaching all-time highs, car thievery now seems to be abating, but there are other trends in the wrong direction. Matthew Lau: Minimum wages are even more harmful than we thought Matthew Lau: Lessons for Canada in Argentina's newly freed markets There has been an explosion of antisemitic hate crimes in Toronto in the past two years. In recent weeks mobs have continued to attack Jewish businesses and block streets, in one case forcing police to divert an ambulance. There are increasingly common news stories of attacks on and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish businesses, and even antisemitism in public schools. Don't get me wrong. It is still possible to live a good life in Toronto. Trudging 20 or 30 minutes every so often, even in snow or rain, because the TTC has again broken down is not that great a hardship for me. I am only a very casual Leafs fan, Sportsnet turfing Don Cherry in 2019 having dulled my hockey enthusiasm, while the sight of empty arenas during the pandemic killed off most of the rest. But for many other Torontonians, the unreliability of the TTC and other municipal services, the hapless Leafs, the increased crime and the growing antisemitism weigh much more heavily. Toronto still has much to offer, but only if these problems are solved. Solid political leadership and better hockey players are needed. Matthew Lau is a Toronto writer. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
Tyler Cowen
Philanthropic organizations are often mired in bureaucracy that can make the process of applying for funding lengthy and tedious. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, is pioneering a different approach. Since 2018, Cowen has run Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for entrepreneurs working on highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society. Applicants answer a handful of questions and get a response in a week or two. To date, the program, which is backed by donors such as Schmidt Futures, has supported over a thousand people—many still in their teens—working on ventures ranging from scientific innovation to personal development. The 2025 cohort includes a University of Chicago research director working on a non-invasive blood glucose monitor and a Vanderbilt University student developing prosthetics and bionic arms. 'I've focused on trying to mobilize talent that otherwise is not discovered or inspired,' says Cowen, who screens most applications Ventures' successes include funding one of the first COVID-19 saliva tests via its Fast Grants program and a prison reform startup that used data analysis to identify over 150,000 safe candidates for early release. With dedicated tracks for applicants in India, Africa and the Caribbean, Ukraine, and Taiwan, grantees have regular meet-ups across the world. Says Cowen, 'Anyone who wins has a direct line to me.'
Business Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
Slowing innovation is ruining American politics
IF THERE'S one thing every American agrees on, it's that politics has become vicious. There are plenty of explanations for why that is, from gerrymandering to the partisan sorting that has made both parties increasingly ideologically homogenous. One I'd add – but which often gets overlooked – is the slowdown in US technological progress outside of computing. Technology is the most important driver of economic growth, and its rapid progress allows political disputes to centre on how best to distribute gains. That's easy. What's hard is when technology stagnates, growth slows and politics become zero-sum. The last few years have seen the promise of new technologies that could help us escape that trap – but the Trump administration is throwing that opportunity away. The idea that technological progress has slowed might seem counter-intuitive when you consider the smartphone you probably have in your hand right now. But George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has mustered convincing evidence that that's exactly what's happening in nearly every field other than computing. For example, the Wright Brothers made their first flight in 1903; both the Boeing 747 and the Concorde appeared less than 70 years later. If you had shown either jet to the Wrights, they would have thought they were hallucinating. Fast forward another half century and the differences between the 747 and a modern passenger plane are subtle, while no civilian aircraft approaches the Concorde's speed. Life expectancy The problem stretches far beyond aviation. The most basic measure of social well-being is life expectancy. Advances in technology, such as vaccines and antibiotics, constantly increased our life spans during the 20th century. Yet American life expectancy peaked more than a decade ago. Why is innovation in such a slump? Government is certainly part of the problem. Across many areas (particularly housing), bad policy is crippling growth, as shown by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance and Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works. But there's more to it. Science has, in Cowen's words, plucked the 'low-hanging fruit'. You can only invent penicillin or jet engines once. In drug development, progress has become so difficult that it's governed by 'Eroom's Law' (Moore's Law spelled backwards), which posits that the cost of bringing a new treatment to market doubles every nine years. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Similarly, since the 1970s, innovation has shifted away from material technologies and towards digital ones which are far less constrained by energy requirements and physical limits. Largely unchecked by antitrust laws, dominant technology companies such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms have been able to form durable monopolies and capture the gains from these digital innovations, securing multi-decade positions atop a sector that was once characterised by constant ferment. Technological advances can make everyone better off. If you're reading this, you have more access to information and medical care than the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth did when your grandparents were born. These gains make reform easier by creating a surplus, which can be used to compensate interest groups hurt by the changes. When kerosene replaced whale oil for light, it devastated the whaling industry. But the benefits were so large that everyone, even (eventually) the communities that used to be supported by whaling, ended up better off. When that surplus goes away, people end up fighting much harder to avoid losses than they do to secure gains, making it difficult or even impossible to fix broken systems. Healthcare reform, for example, has stalled at least in part because any change to the system would hurt someone. If healthcare technologies were still leaping ahead as quickly as they were when antibiotics first rolled out, improvements in quality and efficiency would create the slack to compensate those hurt by the reforms. Recently, however, science and technology have offered the promise of revolution once again. On the energy front, the cost of utility-scale solar cells declined by 88 per cent from 2009 to 2024. Similarly, the price of lithium-ion batteries declined by 97 per cent from 1991 to 2021. This makes new renewable energy cheaper than new fossil fuels – and prices will continue declining. Further in the future, breakthroughs in nuclear fusion pioneered by companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (an MIT spinout) might offer energy abundance of the sort once imagined by 1950s science fiction. Miracles discarded There are other examples throughout the sciences. Merck & Co's Keytruda and other immunotherapy drugs have transformed the way we treat cancer. SpaceX has cut the cost to put a satellite in orbit by a factor of 10. And AI may supercharge our ability to innovate, ranging from biological and drug-discovery research to improvements in materials science that may drive advances in the field, including superconductors and quantum computing. All these potential miracles, however, are being discarded. The administration's new budget proposes a 55 per cent cut to the National Science Foundation (the government's primary arm for research outside medicine) and a 40 per cent cut to the National Institutes of Health (America, and the world's, foremost medical research institution). These build on massive cuts to universities (most prominently Harvard, where I taught for many years, but others as well) where much of America's most important research happens. Even the flow of scientific talent into the US – long one of the nation's greatest advantages – is reversing, with top AI minds no longer coming here and the EU allocating almost US$600 million to lure away top American researchers. Science and technology can do amazing things. If we let them, they might even help fix our broken politics. The recent wholesale assault on science isn't just a threat to the American economy or health. It's a threat to the functioning of democracy, and perhaps our best shot at making it work better. BLOOMBERG The writer teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of 'Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter'
