Epic Disruptions: 11 Improvements That Formed Our Fashionable World by Scott D. Anthony
Revealed in September 2025
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Claude Cowork. The extra I combine this platform into my day-to-day duties, the extra satisfied I turn into that AI will change how work in increased schooling is completed.
It’s on this context of fascinated with AI as an epic disruption inside increased ed that I need to speak about—and advocate—Scott Anthony’s new ebook, Epic Disruptions: 11 Improvements That Formed Our Fashionable World.
Full disclosure—Scott is a scientific professor of enterprise administration at my establishment.
Epic Disruptions will not be about AI. Scott might have written a ebook on how AI is disrupting enterprise. His experience in that space is well known. Maybe I’ll have the ability to persuade Scott to put in writing a ebook about how AI would possibly disrupt universities.
What Epic Disruptions can do for our conversations about AI and better ed is place this know-how in a historic context. Not the historical past of AI; as a substitute, a historical past of concepts, practices and applied sciences which might be transformational. This transformation will be on a scale as massive as international locations and geopolitics (gunpowder—Chapter 1) or as slim as a single trade or product (Pampers—Chapter 9).
For Scott, disruptive innovation is a subset of innovation. The place innovation creates worth, disruptive innovation creates worth at scale.
Examples from the ebook vary from the introduction of the assembly-line course of for cars (the Mannequin T—Chapter 5) to the printing press (Chapter 2) to the transistor (Chapter 6).
A disruptive innovation would possibly make a beforehand costly product reasonably priced (McDonald’s quick meals breakthrough—Chapter 8) or would possibly essentially subvert the traditional knowledge of the day (Florence Nightingale—Chapter 4).
What we study from studying Epic Disruptions is that innovation is, to make use of Scott’s phrases, “predictably unpredictable.” Within the second, it’s all the time troublesome to foretell if a brand new service, product, technique, invention or concept will rise to the extent of completely disrupting the established order.
The place does this depart us with AI and the way universities work?
Within the brief time I’ve been experimenting with Claude Cowork, the platform has modified how I do my job.
Cowork’s capability to keep up a persistent context throughout paperwork, databases, web sites, instruments and discussions permits me to collaborate with the AI on all kinds of duties.
I’m sufficiently old to have lived by the transition from pre-internet to web educational life. In grad faculty within the early Nineties, we used computer systems for all the pieces, however most work was achieved on native purposes and batch processing on the college. My dissertation-writing graduate faculty days have been spent studying journal articles, partaking in conversations, working analyses in SPSS (as a batch job on the college mainframe working VM/CMS) and writing in Phrase.
These days, I look again longingly on the hours I had for educational work that weren’t damaged up by e-mail, Slack, Zoom and a number of browser tabs. As we speak, if the campus community goes down, my educational work stops.
We appear to be getting into a second section of upper ed work disruption. Are you able to do your college or employees job in case your AI goes down? As we speak, in all probability so. Tomorrow, possibly not a lot.
Nearly all of the dialog about AI and better ed has centered on the know-how’s affect on instructing, studying and evaluation. My speculation is that the actual change AI will convey to increased schooling will probably be discovered much less within the classroom (digital or bodily) and extra within the work of the people employed by faculties and universities.
Take into consideration what a professor or employees member did daily, hour by hour, of their jobs earlier than there was e-mail and browsers. Now contemplate what it will imply if AI instruments like Claude Cowork made the brand new approach of working at college dramatically completely different from how we work in the present day.
I think that stepping again and taking a wider (traditionally knowledgeable) lens to our present campus AI debates could be smart. Campus committees fascinated with AI would possibly need to contemplate assigning themselves some (pleasurable) homework.
Studying Epic Disruptions won’t present any solutions about how AI will change increased schooling, however the ebook would possibly assist us decide whether or not we’re getting into campus conversations by asking the precise questions.
What are you studying?
