Opportunity Knocks #146 - Magic elevators, gated rooms, and AI
Every week I share reflections, ideas, questions, and content suggestions focused on championing, building, and accelerating opportunity for children.
In Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent new biography of DeepMind’s Founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, The Infinity Machine, there’s a throwaway line about how a student dropping out of a prestigious U.K.-based university in the late 1990s would have been foolish because it was a “magic elevator,” particularly for a student from a low-income background. I hit pause on the audiobook.
The arguments for college as a magic elevator have shifted over time from knowledge (1950s) → credentials (1980s) → networks (2000s), but have always fundamentally been about access to something that has otherwise been gatekept.
The magic elevator in higher education was never just a credentialing engine. It also functioned as a signaling machine, having as much to do with who someone knew and who would vouch for them as with what they actually learned.
On the credentialing side, the techno-optimists would argue that AI will eventually democratize access to credentials and the underlying knowledge. The credential loses value; the capability gains it. This is more hope (or hype) than trend. There is scant evidence so far that capability without credentials is being rewarded at scale in hiring or social mobility (though there are promising signs: the elimination of degree requirements in some public sector jobs, GitHub, public portfolios, Substack). The argument is intellectually serious. The optimists might even go so far as arguing that colleges never created talent; they ratified it and then extracted rent from that ratification for decades. If true, AI holds promise to break this choke point, making individuals’ underlying capabilities visible independent of their credentials. This is genuinely exciting (though unproven).
In the latter case, the signaling machine scenario, where proving you belong was—and, many would argue, remains—the most important lever, AI probably doesn’t change anything. Yet.
The elevator’s magic was never just about the degree. It was the dinner, the internship, the phone call from a professor to a former student who now runs something, with a suggestion of who to hire. It was the room. Trust. Reputational transfer. Not locked to everyone, but inaccessible to most. The physical and social spaces where opportunity is actually allocated.
Assume AI can give you the all the knowledge, maybe even the right capabilities to succeed in any professional endeavor. It might eventually give you the credential. But it can’t yet give you the room. And the room is still where the elevator actually stops.
So the question I’m left with is: can we build a magic elevator that doesn’t require a room? And if we can’t—if the room is the thing AI can’t replicate or make obsolete—then who are we actually building these elevators for?
Until next week, be calm and be kind,
Andrew