Katherine Rundell, an English author and academic, declared her opposition to AI’s effects on the younger generation, believing that “It risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention”. Whilst I completely understand the concern voiced by many educators regarding AI’s potential to significantly hinder the critical thinking skills and development of younger people, it is perhaps important that we also remind ourselves of a similar objection being held against the introduction of calculators in the 1960s on the basis that they would erode foundational numeracy skills. I am not trying to compare the invention of the high school calculator to modern AI systems, nor am I saying we shouldn’t be careful of how we integrate the use of AI into the school system, but I believe the comparison highlights how artificial intelligence simply represents the next logical step in human innovation: another major technological shift, much like the industrial, electrical, and internet revolutions before it, that will fundamentally restructure how we work and live.

I often use AI myself. It can help me organise my schedule, structure my revision, or explain a topic when I cannot quite understand it. Used in this way, it can be an incredibly useful tool. But this raises a more difficult question: where do we draw the line? At what point does using AI to help us complete a task become relying on AI to complete the thinking for us?

These questions are particularly relevant to education. If an AI system can explain almost any economic concept in seconds, why should you spend time reading a platform such as Making Cents at all? Making Cents does not serve as a similar resource to something like a dense textbook, or a series of hour-long, undergraduate level lectures, so what can a website like this offer that a chatbot cannot?

In reality, the answer to the question I have posed is, at a surface level, quite obvious; AI can already do much of what Making Cents attempts to do. Ask a chatbot why inflation occurs, why house prices are so high, or why some countries are richer than others, and within seconds you can receive a detailed explanation. So why spend time reading an article about it? If I had to give just one overarching answer, it would be because learning is not simply the process of obtaining information, nor is it about reading a huge block of text, compiled from numerous unknown sources, smushed together and compressed into an explanation seemingly dressed up as the “answer”. There is an important distinction between being given an answer and understanding why that answer is true. Economics is not simply a collection of definitions and facts that we need to memorise. It truly is a way of thinking about the world: questioning why things happen, considering the incentives facing different people, examining evidence, recognising trade-offs and, sometimes, discovering that there is no simple answer at all.

This is where I think the way we use AI becomes important. If I am struggling to understand a concept and ask AI to explain it in a different way, it can be an incredibly effective learning tool. But if I immediately turn to AI whenever I encounter something difficult, I risk removing the very process through which understanding develops. I am not going to claim that Making Cents can explain economics better than an AI system in every circumstance. Nor do I think it should try to. Instead, Making Cents is intended to give you the opportunity to slow down and properly interact with the ideas you are learning. Every lesson is carefully curated, the information is rigorously checked, and our sources are available for you to explore further. More importantly, we give you the opportunity to actively connect with what you have learned. You can explore a question and test yourself with our in-built quizzes, rather than giving you an explanation filled with jargon and complex terminology.

Our aim, therefore, is for you to engage with the content, make mistakes, try again, and ultimately learn from your previous errors. Learning through failure is not only rewarding, but can also help us develop a deeper understanding and stronger memory of what we have learned. Becoming comfortable with failure, a sensation which AI will often not provide you with, is invaluable; almost any meaningful achievement in life involves getting things wrong before getting them right.

Bill Gates once said that “it’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure”, and while Making Cents is perhaps not quite on the same level as Microsoft yet, it is through this central philosophy that we hope to make learning economics a more fun, and importantly, meaningful experience.