News from the Woods #136 🥾

Hey everyone, this is Filip and welcome to another episode of News from the Forest! Episode 136, and it’s a packed one. We’ll talk about how AI is reshaping schools — from typewriters at Cornell to a school with zero teachers in Chicago. How Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue. We’ll discover a brand-new island near Antarctica and find out how the war in Ukraine is devastating nature on a massive scale. And at the end, you’ll try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. Let’s go.

What do you tell your kid when you know the technology you’re building will rewrite the rules for an entire generation? The Wall Street Journal asked exactly this question to the heads of the biggest AI companies — Daniela Amodei from Anthropic, Jaime Teevan from Microsoft, Ethan Mollick from Wharton. And you know what’s fascinating about their answers? Not a single one said: learn to code.

That Wall Street Journal piece really got to me. Because if I asked you — what should kids study to thrive in a world full of artificial intelligence — most of us would say: STEM, coding, data science. Makes sense, right? Except the people who are actually building AI are saying something completely different.

Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the AI model that, full disclosure, also helps me produce this podcast — says, and I’m paraphrasing: “What won’t be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.” This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is coming from someone whose company just surpassed OpenAI in revenue.

Ethan Mollick from Wharton, who wrote the brilliant book Co-Intelligence, advises his teenagers to avoid hyper-specialization entirely. His logic is straightforward: if your job consists of repeating one specific cognitive task, AI will eventually do it faster, cheaper, and without complaining. The future, he says, belongs to people who bundle three or four distinct skills — communication, judgment, creativity, accountability.

And that word — accountability — is key. AI can analyze data, write reports, propose solutions. But it can’t be held responsible. A human does that. And the ability to say “I own this” is, according to these people, the most valuable currency of the future.

So here’s the paradox: the people building AI are telling their children — be as human as possible. Learn how to learn, be flexible, communicate, take responsibility. And above all — don’t be a narrow specialist, be a generalist.

This theme — the tension between technology and humanity — runs like a red thread through today’s entire episode. Let’s start with how it’s playing out in schools.

I’ve got three stories about education that seem to come from three different universes. And yet they’re all happening right now.

Story one: Typewriters at Cornell

At Cornell University, one of America’s most prestigious schools, a German language instructor named Grit Matthias Phelps does something once a semester that completely blows her students’ minds: instead of laptops, they find manual typewriters on their desks. No screens, no online dictionaries, no spellcheck, no Delete key.

She started doing this in 2023 because she noticed students were submitting grammatically perfect German essays — thanks to AI and online translation tools. As she puts it: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself?”