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EM Ethan Mollick Ethan Mollick I am a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“What's actually about to implode are internships and all the ways we actually teach people to do work today, which is informal education where you are a junior person who wants to impress somebody and a senior person teaches you because they have no choice. … Now, every junior person is having AI do all the work and they learn nothing. Every middle manager would rather turn to AI to do the work than interns. They're not teaching anyone.”

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“What's actually about to implode are internships and all the ways we actually teach people to do work today, which is informal education where you are a junior person who wants to impress somebody and a senior person teaches you because they have no choice. … Now, every junior person is having AI do all the work and they learn nothing. Every middle manager would rather turn to AI to do the work than interns. They're not teaching anyone.” — Ethan Mollick, The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway asks whether AI will make higher education implode. Mollick says the opposite. Workplace apprenticeship is what breaks, and universities, which are good at teaching and assessment, may become more needed.

Transcript

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Around 28:04 into the episode
Ethan Mollick

…at once. And I mean, I'm eager to do these things. Not all my colleagues are, nor should they be forced to or in a just world to transform their classes this quickly. So the experience is quite even uneven across the board, depending on who's teaching and what kind of subject under what conditions.

Scott Galloway

A lot of people have said that higher ed is going to implode at the hands of AI. What are your thoughts?

Ethan Mollick

…for a wide variety of reasons, right? So one reason is what's actually about to implode are internships and all the ways we actually teach people to do work today, which is informal education where you are a junior person who wants to impress somebody and a senior person teaches you because they have no choice, right? You have to give you feedback because there's no one else to do the work. Now, every junior person is having AI do all the work and they learn nothing. Every middle manager would rather turn to AI to do the work than interns. They're not teaching anyone. And companies are not incentivized to teach. They want to produce output. So guess who's good at teaching assessment and verification? That is us at universities. Like, look, things are screwed up now. They're always screwed up at universities, but it's pretty obvious the path forward. AI tutors outside of class, inside a class, active learning assessment. We'll figure it out. It's not the end…

Scott Galloway

you have tenure, Ethan?

Ethan Mollick

I do.

Scott Galloway

So I'm curious how I do not. I'm curious to have this conversation with you. We had a robust conversation around tenure at a recent Regents meeting. And I wonder if in an age of AI, if tenure, well, for a lot of reasons, that tenure is going to come under attack because tenure is largely based on…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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