By Rob Cooney (@EMEducation)
Brave New Words – By: Salman Khan
In my quest to stay up-to-date and consider how we might be using Artificial Intelligence in Medical Education, I can across Sal Khan’s second TED talk about how AI could save education. Now, he’s followed that talk with his sophomore book, Brave New Words.
Salman Khan, as the founder of Khan Academy, has long been a pioneer in using technology to broaden access to high-quality education. In Brave New Words, he shifts his focus from access to transformation, explaining how the Khan Academy is approaching generative artificial intelligence and how it is poised to reshape the way we teach, learn, and relate to knowledge itself. With his signature optimism and pragmatic lens, Khan lays out a vision for the future of education that feels surprisingly attainable.
At the heart of Khan’s argument is the idea that AI, particularly large language models, can act as personalized tutors for every learner and teaching assistants for every educator. He calls out Bloom’s 2-sigma problem as an impetus to critically examine education and make a use case for considering AI. He draws from early use cases at Khan Academy (via their Khanmigo AI tutor) to show how these tools can offer immediate, contextual support that scales with the learner’s pace and needs. For faculty teaching in resource-limited or time-constrained environments (all of us in medical education?), this vision of augmentation rather than replacement has powerful implications. Imagine a resident receiving on-demand feedback on a clinical reasoning case or a medical student receiving Socratic-style questioning from an AI before morning rounds.
In keeping with his One World Schoolhouse philosophy, Khan also emphasizes the potential of AI to reduce inequities. He argues that students who have traditionally been underserved, due to geography, language, or systemic bias, could benefit most from access to always-on, nonjudgmental, high-quality learning companions. This aligns with medical education’s broader goals of promoting equity and inclusion, especially in admissions, advising, and remediation. Khan suggests that faculty should lean into these possibilities by becoming skilled curators and guides of AI-enabled learning environments, rather than gatekeepers of static content.
Beyond the technological promise, Khan calls for a rehumanization of education. Paradoxically, as AI handles more routine tasks, educators may have more time to connect with learners emotionally, cultivate curiosity, and focus on mentorship. For clinician-educators juggling service and scholarship, this could be the lever that restores purpose and presence in teaching. Khan’s framing of AI as a means to deepen, not dilute, the human relationships at the core of learning resonates strongly with faculty burnout and disconnection post-pandemic.
Nor does Khan shy away from the ethical and practical challenges. From hallucinations (confabulation) to misinformation to bias amplification, Khan lays out the current limitations of AI and urges thoughtful integration, not blind adoption. For academic leaders, his call to develop AI literacy across the curriculum and to involve faculty in shaping the policy and pedagogy around these tools is an essential reminder.
Finally, Khan offers a hopeful, and pragmatic, vision of what faculty can do today. Embrace AI as a sandbox, he suggests. Use it to generate quiz questions, draft feedback, outline a lecture, or provide simulated patient responses. Test its strengths, expose its weaknesses, and invite learners to do the same. In doing so, faculty move from passive observers to co-creators of the educational future. In Brave New Words, Salman Khan delivers more than a prediction, he offers a blueprint for partnership between humans and machines in education. For medical educators confronting rapid technological change, his framework provides both a compass and a challenge: to lean into innovation not to replace ourselves, but to amplify our impact.
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