“A fascinating odyssey from the birth of the American high school in the nineteenth century to today, and beyond. If you are looking for a different kind of book about the schools of tomorrow, this one is for you.”

-Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?


A journalist and an educator look at developments in artificial intelligence and other fields that promise to transform white-collar, “thinking” jobs, bringing us not only driverless cars but doctorless patients, lawyerless clients, and possibly even teacherless students.

They trace the development of artificial intelligence from the musings of computer pioneers in the 1950s to today, probe what AI can (and cannot) do, and meditate on the importance of trust in digital realms. They look at what AI is doing even now to their industries, and of course they visit schools from New York City to Iowa to Arizona that have begun preparing for this new world.

Toppo and Tracy intersperse these reports from the present with bulletins from the future, following a fictional high school principal who, Rip Van Winkle-style, sleeps for 20 years. Upon awakening in 2040, he can hardly believe his eyes: the new principal's too-efficient assistant is a bot, math class is computer-assisted, and students, grouped by competence and not grade level, focus on big, ambitious, conceptual projects. They also interrogate a student-built Ernest Hemingway bot. Long story.

The lesson to be learned from both the present and the book's thought-experiment future: human and robotic skill sets are complementary, not in competition. We can run with robots, not against them.