In this episode of The Labyrinth, co-hosts Rich Grego and Lisa Carley welcome Joel David Lesses for a conversation about artificial intelligence, education, critical thinking, ethics, creativity, and the future of learning. At the center of the discussion is a fundamental question: what happens to education when artificial intelligence can perform many of the tasks students have traditionally been expected to learn?

The conversation begins with the growing reality that students are already using AI, even when schools prohibit or restrict its use. Students increasingly describe themselves as overwhelmed and exhausted by academic demands. Rather than responding primarily through punishment or moral judgment, the speakers consider whether educators should first understand why students are turning to AI. While AI can certainly be used to avoid intellectual work, it can also help students manage pressure, access information, explore ideas, and develop their understanding.

Lisa describes how AI has challenged her to make classroom learning more meaningful and intrinsically engaging. Through literary study, including an examination of Lord of the Flies using psychological concepts such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, students can move beyond completing an assignment and begin exploring motivation, human behavior, relationships, and the world around them.

This leads to a deeper question about the boundary between using AI as a tool and allowing it to replace the thinking process itself. The speakers recognize that technology has always changed how people conduct intellectual work. Research that once required thousands of handwritten index cards can now be organized and explored digitally. AI dramatically expands that capacity, but the important distinction is whether technology supports human thought or substitutes for it.

The conversation also recognizes AI’s potential to democratize access to knowledge and creative capability. Lisa describes using AI to help develop an application despite not having formal training in business, data analysis, or computer science. Through that process, AI became not simply a means of obtaining answers, but a resource through which he could learn, experiment, and transform ideas into possibilities that might otherwise have remained inaccessible.

Ultimately, the conversation returns to the human heart.

AI can provide information, organize knowledge, assist with writing, and generate ideas, but meaningful education involves much more: curiosity, passion, wisdom, compassion, emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, and human relationship. A teacher can make an idea come alive through enthusiasm and genuine connection in ways that technology cannot simply reproduce.

The speakers therefore move beyond the question of whether AI is good or bad. The deeper question is how we can teach people to use AI without surrendering the human capacities that make learning meaningful. AI may generate information and perform increasingly sophisticated tasks, but education has a deeper responsibility: to help human beings understand, question, create, connect, and develop wisdom.

The Labyrinth invites us to see AI not simply as a technological disruption, but as an opportunity to reimagine education and place the human heart back at the center of learning.