8 ms·

China has started a grand experiment in AI education

102 points by Errorcod3 7y ago

fitech 7y ago
This article could be interesting, given the depth and breadth that one could explore given the topic. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into fluff marketing for the Chinese company they focus on. Is Technology Review accepting money for articles?
- knolax 7y ago
  Isn't Technology Review just some college newspaper? I've always found their articles be at buzzfeed quality.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Interesting article but I think this is really a broader topic: not just how AI can transform tutoring/education but also how AI will impact all areas of work, how human productivity and job satisfaction can be increased, and how we will deal with “not enough work for people to do.”
- z2 7y ago
  There may be plenty of unrealistic prerequisites before the machine revolution can start distributing its economic surplus to everyone, and give people not enough work to do, but-- "...while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." --Marx, The German Ideology Just replace 'society' with 'centralized AI'. To keep busy, maybe the reality if you don't need to create real value anymore is that life becomes a half-empty series of paint nights, cooking classes, and other such role-play.
  - MikeTheGreat 7y ago
    I wonder about looking backwards in history for examples of how people dealt with 'no enough work'. For example, I believe that ballet got started in part so that Louis the XIV could require his aristocrats to observe the proper etiquette that he'd made up, so that he could better control them. Point being - they had enough food, shelter, and luxuries supplied to them that they didn't need to work.
    - ckris 7y ago
      I don't think people are fearing not having to work, but inequality as a result. If you don't have redistribution your part is only as big as your work or your ownership. Since we are quoting, let's go with Stephen Hawking: "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality." https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... Of course everything old is new, so you could read for example Hannah Arendt. Our societies have mostly evolved out of how to distribute profits from automation. The reason automation is now the boogeyman is because we have changed paths by not thinking about that.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > maybe the reality if you don't need to create real value anymore is that life becomes a half-empty series of paint nights, cooking classes, and other such role-play. More likely is that life for many people becomes a lot more time spent staring at one’s phone. Even in places where people have a decent amount of leisure time, a lot of those old community events and social clubs are struggling now.
- sn41 7y ago
  Society has always made sure that most people remain in the rat race. During agrarian times, it was back-breaking work. During the industrial revolution, it was in sweat shops. Once office became computerised, it became office drudge work. Industrial revolution came with promises of leisure, but they did not materialise (see "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell. [1]) Incomes of the majority, and the debt due to consumerist needs of the majority are kept in balance so that no one has leisure time to fulfil their true human potential, and you need to work 3 decades to subsist. I somehow tend to think that the coming A. I. revolution, if it does come at all, will leave things as they are in a new form - the more things change, the more they remain the same.[2] [1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphonse_Karr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphonse_Karr
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Or we could get free space and experiment on large scale of scarcity is eliminated or vastly reduced. AI won't provide it, of course, we need other technologies.
    - sn41 7y ago
      Yes, material prosperity will improve, no doubt. But I am doubtful about greater leisure.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        Leisure is not the ultimate end. I'd personally prefer a society with some productive work instead, and for the disadvantaged, finding what they fit into. I recommend reading "Accelerando" by Charles Stross which is very imaginative if not in-depth enough... Or potentially the "Culture" series. People there don't just laze forever.
  - Gpetrium 7y ago
    I find the conversation about leisure time throughout history to often be mis-characterized or missing valuable insights to support someone's perspective of "wanting more control of their time. If were were to look at the working hours in a few European countries, it becomes clear that the weekly work hours has diminished from 65-70hrs in the 1870s, to 35-40hrs in 2000s [1]. This, coupled with technology solutions that helps decrease household shores, improves healthcare and decreases time to acquire consumer goods (The list goes on), it becomes clear that we live in unprecedented times in terms of leisure. It is also interesting to see hunter-gatherer societies, which is estimated to have worked from 2.8 to 7.6 hours. Did the increase in leisure time lead to 'true human potential' for these societies? If not, what makes us believe that it will be different today? Is it possible that more leisure time will lead to more boredom, screen swipe, etc? If we were to assume that [1] data will continue to move in the same direction, then we are likely to have further gains in 'leisure time' led by a new technological evolution. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours [2] Working Hours in Hunter-Gatherer and Other Premodern Societies - https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#note-1 https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#note-1
- newguy1234 7y ago
  The "not enough work for people" is mostly a myth from what I've seen. The reality is rote work will be automated but higher-level type jobs will increase. Also the idea of "basic income" will probably come indirectly - not from a state funded program - but simply from cost of goods dropping so low that buying the basics to live will be so cheap that you don't need much money to begin with.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Do you have actual numbers on this assertion? Preferably scaled to population?
    - newguy1234 7y ago
      I don't have the numbers. You would need to go to the history books to find it but you can see the trend in action to a certain extent for certain occupations. A prime example is farming. In aggregate, total employment in farming has declined significantly. The people that are left are doing higher level work, not tilling the field with a donkey and plow, they're driving a tractor or doing soil analysis etc. The field laborers moved to cities and now they do light manufacturing or similar jobs with maybe a few weeks of training.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > simply from cost of goods dropping so low that buying the basics to live will be so cheap that you don't need much money to begin with Basic income gives you not just money, but time. If you receive basic income, you can work less. If people live in a culture where everyone must remain in full-time employment until age 65+ and the vacation time they are allotted is meagre (e.g. the North American situation), then it is cold comfort if the money they make allows them to buy basics for more cheaply. Secondly, while the basics of food or clothing have become cheaper in developed countries (though often only if you are comfortable sacrificing some quality of the product), housing prices are soaring. While a basic income, too, would have a problematic interaction with housing prices, housing costs would remain an issue even in the alternative future you posit.
  - 7y ago
ckris 7y ago
Of course I don't think you need AI for this. You just need something that is slightly interactive so you can modify the learning path to be more efficient. You could even do it with a book. That is the real win of adopting technology, that it can change your mindset. Presumably that is also why the mindset sometime come before the technology, with things like sci-fi. Unfortunately I think in many markets people are focusing on just adopting technology, but not the mindset. So you don't get all the benefits or even make things worse. You get fancy proof of concepts that don't do much at scale.
- newguy1234 7y ago
  I think the bigger problem is the overall influence that "traditional learning" has on the mindset of the learner. In both the USA and China, you can see what every young person's mindset is focused on - studying for that big college entrance exam. Everything is simply a means to achieving a good score on that exam. Perhaps if we allowed kids to move away from that idea of the "big college entrance exam" or similar we could dive into the deeper stuff like...what do YOU want to be when you get older, what problems do YOU want to try to solve and so on. If someone wants to work on video games then start pushing them down that path as soon as possible...get them to learn coding, media design, computer graphics and so on.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    China does not care what you want, and neither does the market economy. They want you to be what they need. There are two ways to sort it out: teach people how to learn first, and teach them how a (small) variety of professions that are in demand work. Only then, specialization. Current Chinese model is to identify talents early then force specialize and reject people even at advanced stages, leaving them with nothing. Western model used to be more general even a century back, but is going now more the same way. People are passed without working knowledge of estimation and arithmetics even, have no idea about basic politics and more.
    - newguy1234 7y ago
      Oh yeah, I completely agree. An ideal education system needs to be something that is more open to everyone and able to teach people at different levels and for different purposes. Have courses for vocational skills and courses for more academic/theoretical type learning. The factory model of education is obsolete.
bluetwo 7y ago
Adaptive learning is great but you still need to develop content using instructional design principles or else you can't adapt anything. You can't just dump content in and hope for the best.
- bitlax 7y ago
  What resources would you recommend that provide instructional design principles?
  - kwooding 7y ago
    I'm guessing "instructional design" is referring to how you model the problem domain being learned so that it's amenable to use with adaptive learning systems? Most research in this area is drawn from the domain of “Intelligent Tutoring Systems,” (ITSs), thoroughly described in Woolf’s book “Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors.” [WOOLFE2009]. I'd say the classic Intelligent Tutor System construction was pioneered by ADVISOR [BWB2000]. It's a two-agent architecture that first trains a student model on real-world data, then uses the student model to train a pedagogical agent using a more resource intensive algorithm. Most modern ITSs make use of Representation Learning (RL) to train the pedagogical agent. One of the main techniques for structuring the problem domain is Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) [CA1995], where you model the domain being learned as a Bayesian skills network; i.e. a 4-tuple of probabilities (init, learning, guess, slip), updated in a Bayesian fashion. An excellent survey work in this area is given in [BGTPF2010]. If you're interested in the RL part of the problem, and how it can work with this setup you might want to look into partially observable Markov decision process — POMDPs. Emma Brunskill has done some nice work in this area. [WOOLF2009]: Woolf, Beverly Park. 2009. Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors: Student-Centered Strategies for Revolutionizing e-Learning. Amsterdam ; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier. [BWB2000]: Beck, Joseph, Beverly Park Woolf, and Carole R. Beal. "ADVISOR: A machine learning architecture for intelligent tutor construction." AAAI/IAAI 2000 (2000): 552-557. [CA1995]: Corbett, Albert T., and John R. Anderson. "Knowledge tracing: Modeling the acquisition of procedural knowledge." User modeling and user-adapted interaction 4, no. 4 (1994): 253-278. [BGTPF2010]: Brunskill, Emma, Sunil Garg, Clint Tseng, Joyojeet Pal, and Leah Findlater. "Evaluating an adaptive multi-user educational tool for low-resource environments." In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, pp. 13-16. 2010.
mistrial9 7y ago
anecdote, if you will.. in a major University setting, for natural sciences, a mixed-level study-group is listening to a presentation on a model of a forested ecosystem using remote sensing and "AI", though the emphasis was on ML with certain inputs. An American with a liberal-arts background and good CS training, asks "in this model, how can we find the limits of the validity of these assumptions. A real world is more complex than what is being modeled, so how can we describe that and find 'blind-spots' in the work here" .. Meanwhile, a serious student who may have been born in China, asks "how can the model results be cross-checked to eliminate human bias in the result interpretation?" Now this same exchange could have happened between any two students with the basic alignments of "objective science" versus "natural sciences", but it did seem telling of a certain pure-science tilt on the part of the student from China. To push that further, one could say that the "objective science" angle lacked a certain "intellectual humility" in the inquiry, with an emphasis on the correctness of the machine results, and an assumption that better math will produce "winning" output. No real evidence, but that was an impression at that moment.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Out of interest, what do you mean by the difference between "objective science" and "natural sciences" in this context? Is it the "formal science" vs "natural science" distinction (i.e. pretty much maths vs everything else).
- ckris 7y ago
  I think it has more to do with that China's strength at the moment is being utilitarian. Their working theory is to increase capacity. That is why they are build a lot of high speed rail, cities and power plants. While in the West we talk about tweaking cars to being self-driving or interest rates in the mortgage market. Because we don't really have that urgency to do things at scale tomorrow.
JabavuAdams 7y ago
The criticisms quoted in this article are rather poor. First the contention that AI is better for rote tasks. Not true -- this is an old and outdated view. Also the pooh-poohing of mere knowledge. You know, our democracies could benefit from more people understanding statistics and/or chemistry. If you understand first year physics + chemistry + biology + math + econ + psych, you get a pretty useful model of how the world works. If you really get those subjects, you're able to make all kinds of inferences and guesses that turn out to be right surprisingly often. As a game developer, I have a lot of exposure to the art-school types, and it's amazing how poor their grasp is of how anything works, other than EDIT: s/humans/human emotions/ and human-centric narrative.
- kiba 7y ago
  I would contend that knowledge is better gained through slower, deeper studies, not through rapid fire education for a single semester. People may be taught physics and biology, but most of the knowledge will wash through them once they finished their exams and got their grade.
  - newguy1234 7y ago
    The AI/self-study type platforms could possibly solve this problem since it would allow the learner to progress at their own pace. I agree that "deeper level study" is huge part of getting the bigger picture.
    - analognoise 7y ago
      The most successful people in MOOCs and boot camps are people with college degrees already!
    - Datenstrom 7y ago
      AI self study can certainly get you to the equivalent of a Masters degree, and much faster for anyone who is motivated, unfortunately I would never recommend that to anyone. The problem is that even after years of working in the field you will likely be underpaid, and it won't be possible to find jobs in the field without a direct connection. Another problem is that if you want to go for a PhD to learn beyond that you will need to sit though years and years of useless classes that you have essentially already taken, just to check some boxes. I don't think anyone self motivated to learn things will sit though 6 years of useless classes to check some boxes or at the very least it will be terribly depressing wasting so much life. At least that is my experience. The open materials for CS and AI are great though.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
One problem with AI in education is that it promotes magical thinking. That is, if you rationally understand what the AI is doing, it seems awfully simple. And then the disappointment comes: if it is simple and understandable, it isn't really AI. That's why you see a race for obscurity -- lots of jargon to describe the complexity of the system. In reality, good educational software is about good design, good goal alignment, good assessments, good sequencing, good intervention material -- it's all based on classic instructional design, not a superior algorithm. Has the software been set up to support data driven continuous improvement? That is more important than an algorithm.
- scottlegrand2 7y ago
  I'm going to disagree here. I have enough understanding of AI to have built a deep learning framework from first principles. That deep learning framework makes a pile of money for Amazon to this day. That I know how it works because I wrote the thing doesn't take away from the miracle that it makes that kind of money for doing complicated but not all that complicated stuff. When I look at generative adversarial networks and the recent attention-based language models I am similarly amazed at what they can do. But I am also 100% aware of their limitations and I think the hype that they are near-term AGI technology is the real magical thinking.
ausjke 7y ago
I foresee when more people get AI educated, the nation will be more likely to have free speech and a real legal system, because there will be less people easily get brainwashed that is, so this is good news.
- Vrondi 7y ago
  Except that they will be brainwashed by the AI, in whatever direction the authorities dictate.
  - swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
    Or simply the bias that the training data set (i.e. current curriculum) will have.
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. If you make having a high percentage at a standardised tests the point of education and use software to make you drive those numbers up, negative externalities are going to come back to you in a few decades in crazy ways... And the article does note this: "Earlier this month, the government also unveiled a set of guidelines to focus more on physical, moral, and artistic education". How much that's going to be gamed as well is going to be interesting I guess.
- josinalvo 7y ago
  What negative externalities do you have in mind?
the8472 7y ago
One step closer to "a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
- mncharity 7y ago
  But not much closer, if content, rather than delivery, is the pressing bottleneck. My experience has been, that of the few first-tier astronomy graduate students that aren't mistaken about the color of the Sun, as many learned it in seminar coverage of common misconceptions in astronomy education, as learned it in their own atypically extensive and successful astronomy education. Current content is really, really bad. A "Primer" will require much better. AI doesn't help much if your large textbook publisher's science education content is written by inexpensive liberal arts majors with no science background, consulting with "scientists". If one instead uses science graduate students, double majoring in education, with misconception lists in hand, you might get that Sun color right. Maybe. And interviewing researchers about their own research areas is even better. But... Say you're writing a children's picture book about atoms. What magnitude of domain expertise support do you need? How about a small room full of MIT physics professors? Is that enough? Can you see a bare atomic nucleus with your naked eye? Why not? Did you just now say too small, rather than beyond-violet "color"? That much is easy. But what if you wish to discover that a couple of atypical atomic nuclei can be seen with your room-lit naked eye, can be made to brightly fluoresce visibly (a multi-step spin-isomer decay, with one step visible)? So you can include a photo, of a glowing green dot in a vacuum vessel, in your picture book, to reinforce that nuclei are real physical objects. My experience has been that a room of MIT professors, most with some nuclear physics background, is likely an insufficient gathering of expertise. Unless it's a lunch for a visiting professor, whose focus is nucleus simulation, who self-describes their focus as a (with emphasis) "small" subfield, and who perhaps thinks all this obvious. Reflect on that: A room full of MIT physics professors is insufficient domain expertise to write an excellent children's picture book about atoms. How might we then go about writing a Primer, if it takes such an awesome gathering of expertise? Before Primers can be airdropped, they need to be written. And I suggest we're not yet even at the point of recognizing and acknowledging the primary challenge there, let alone scoping, funding, and addressing it. It's not pedagogy and ed tech that's blocking the road to a Primer. It's the sciences. And their incentives and funding. It's something I'd love to be working on, but finding people to work with has been a challenge.
ConfusedDog 7y ago
I was in China few months ago. My general impression is that parents are crazy generous toward their children's education. There are whole department store building devoted to extra-curriculum classes for all different ages - and they ain't cheap at all. My impression of Squirrel AI is really just using more advanced analytics for education, which is good in concept; but really they are selling parents' the fear that "if you don't buy our services, your children WILL be left behind."
auslander 7y ago
Year 2110. Citizen Interface is a mandatory implant into newborns brain.
ggggtez 7y ago
There are us companies that do this too, on a limited scale. In my opinion, there is no real reason you can't learn this way. Teaching math this way is likely perfectly fine for middle school
qserasera 7y ago
I'm really excited for ML analysis of education, problem solving, and information retention on various pupils.

102 points by Errorcod3 7y ago

This article could be interesting, given the depth and breadth that one could explore given the topic. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into fluff marketing for the Chinese company they focus on. Is Technology Review accepting money for articles?

knolax 7y ago
Isn't Technology Review just some college newspaper? I've always found their articles be at buzzfeed quality.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Interesting article but I think this is really a broader topic: not just how AI can transform tutoring/education but also how AI will impact all areas of work, how human productivity and job satisfaction can be increased, and how we will deal with “not enough work for people to do.”

z2 7y ago
There may be plenty of unrealistic prerequisites before the machine revolution can start distributing its economic surplus to everyone, and give people not enough work to do, but-- "...while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." --Marx, The German Ideology Just replace 'society' with 'centralized AI'. To keep busy, maybe the reality if you don't need to create real value anymore is that life becomes a half-empty series of paint nights, cooking classes, and other such role-play.
- MikeTheGreat 7y ago
  I wonder about looking backwards in history for examples of how people dealt with 'no enough work'. For example, I believe that ballet got started in part so that Louis the XIV could require his aristocrats to observe the proper etiquette that he'd made up, so that he could better control them. Point being - they had enough food, shelter, and luxuries supplied to them that they didn't need to work.
  - ckris 7y ago
    I don't think people are fearing not having to work, but inequality as a result. If you don't have redistribution your part is only as big as your work or your ownership. Since we are quoting, let's go with Stephen Hawking: "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality." https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... Of course everything old is new, so you could read for example Hannah Arendt. Our societies have mostly evolved out of how to distribute profits from automation. The reason automation is now the boogeyman is because we have changed paths by not thinking about that.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > maybe the reality if you don't need to create real value anymore is that life becomes a half-empty series of paint nights, cooking classes, and other such role-play. More likely is that life for many people becomes a lot more time spent staring at one’s phone. Even in places where people have a decent amount of leisure time, a lot of those old community events and social clubs are struggling now.
sn41 7y ago
Society has always made sure that most people remain in the rat race. During agrarian times, it was back-breaking work. During the industrial revolution, it was in sweat shops. Once office became computerised, it became office drudge work. Industrial revolution came with promises of leisure, but they did not materialise (see "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell. [1]) Incomes of the majority, and the debt due to consumerist needs of the majority are kept in balance so that no one has leisure time to fulfil their true human potential, and you need to work 3 decades to subsist. I somehow tend to think that the coming A. I. revolution, if it does come at all, will leave things as they are in a new form - the more things change, the more they remain the same.[2] [1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphonse_Karr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphonse_Karr
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Or we could get free space and experiment on large scale of scarcity is eliminated or vastly reduced. AI won't provide it, of course, we need other technologies.
  - sn41 7y ago
    Yes, material prosperity will improve, no doubt. But I am doubtful about greater leisure.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Leisure is not the ultimate end. I'd personally prefer a society with some productive work instead, and for the disadvantaged, finding what they fit into. I recommend reading "Accelerando" by Charles Stross which is very imaginative if not in-depth enough... Or potentially the "Culture" series. People there don't just laze forever.
- Gpetrium 7y ago
  I find the conversation about leisure time throughout history to often be mis-characterized or missing valuable insights to support someone's perspective of "wanting more control of their time. If were were to look at the working hours in a few European countries, it becomes clear that the weekly work hours has diminished from 65-70hrs in the 1870s, to 35-40hrs in 2000s [1]. This, coupled with technology solutions that helps decrease household shores, improves healthcare and decreases time to acquire consumer goods (The list goes on), it becomes clear that we live in unprecedented times in terms of leisure. It is also interesting to see hunter-gatherer societies, which is estimated to have worked from 2.8 to 7.6 hours. Did the increase in leisure time lead to 'true human potential' for these societies? If not, what makes us believe that it will be different today? Is it possible that more leisure time will lead to more boredom, screen swipe, etc? If we were to assume that [1] data will continue to move in the same direction, then we are likely to have further gains in 'leisure time' led by a new technological evolution. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours [2] Working Hours in Hunter-Gatherer and Other Premodern Societies - https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#note-1 https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#note-1
newguy1234 7y ago
The "not enough work for people" is mostly a myth from what I've seen. The reality is rote work will be automated but higher-level type jobs will increase. Also the idea of "basic income" will probably come indirectly - not from a state funded program - but simply from cost of goods dropping so low that buying the basics to live will be so cheap that you don't need much money to begin with.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Do you have actual numbers on this assertion? Preferably scaled to population?
  - newguy1234 7y ago
    I don't have the numbers. You would need to go to the history books to find it but you can see the trend in action to a certain extent for certain occupations. A prime example is farming. In aggregate, total employment in farming has declined significantly. The people that are left are doing higher level work, not tilling the field with a donkey and plow, they're driving a tractor or doing soil analysis etc. The field laborers moved to cities and now they do light manufacturing or similar jobs with maybe a few weeks of training.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > simply from cost of goods dropping so low that buying the basics to live will be so cheap that you don't need much money to begin with Basic income gives you not just money, but time. If you receive basic income, you can work less. If people live in a culture where everyone must remain in full-time employment until age 65+ and the vacation time they are allotted is meagre (e.g. the North American situation), then it is cold comfort if the money they make allows them to buy basics for more cheaply. Secondly, while the basics of food or clothing have become cheaper in developed countries (though often only if you are comfortable sacrificing some quality of the product), housing prices are soaring. While a basic income, too, would have a problematic interaction with housing prices, housing costs would remain an issue even in the alternative future you posit.
- 7y ago

ckris 7y ago

Of course I don't think you need AI for this. You just need something that is slightly interactive so you can modify the learning path to be more efficient. You could even do it with a book. That is the real win of adopting technology, that it can change your mindset. Presumably that is also why the mindset sometime come before the technology, with things like sci-fi. Unfortunately I think in many markets people are focusing on just adopting technology, but not the mindset. So you don't get all the benefits or even make things worse. You get fancy proof of concepts that don't do much at scale.

newguy1234 7y ago
I think the bigger problem is the overall influence that "traditional learning" has on the mindset of the learner. In both the USA and China, you can see what every young person's mindset is focused on - studying for that big college entrance exam. Everything is simply a means to achieving a good score on that exam. Perhaps if we allowed kids to move away from that idea of the "big college entrance exam" or similar we could dive into the deeper stuff like...what do YOU want to be when you get older, what problems do YOU want to try to solve and so on. If someone wants to work on video games then start pushing them down that path as soon as possible...get them to learn coding, media design, computer graphics and so on.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  China does not care what you want, and neither does the market economy. They want you to be what they need. There are two ways to sort it out: teach people how to learn first, and teach them how a (small) variety of professions that are in demand work. Only then, specialization. Current Chinese model is to identify talents early then force specialize and reject people even at advanced stages, leaving them with nothing. Western model used to be more general even a century back, but is going now more the same way. People are passed without working knowledge of estimation and arithmetics even, have no idea about basic politics and more.
  - newguy1234 7y ago
    Oh yeah, I completely agree. An ideal education system needs to be something that is more open to everyone and able to teach people at different levels and for different purposes. Have courses for vocational skills and courses for more academic/theoretical type learning. The factory model of education is obsolete.

bluetwo 7y ago

Adaptive learning is great but you still need to develop content using instructional design principles or else you can't adapt anything. You can't just dump content in and hope for the best.

bitlax 7y ago
What resources would you recommend that provide instructional design principles?
- kwooding 7y ago
  I'm guessing "instructional design" is referring to how you model the problem domain being learned so that it's amenable to use with adaptive learning systems? Most research in this area is drawn from the domain of “Intelligent Tutoring Systems,” (ITSs), thoroughly described in Woolf’s book “Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors.” [WOOLFE2009]. I'd say the classic Intelligent Tutor System construction was pioneered by ADVISOR [BWB2000]. It's a two-agent architecture that first trains a student model on real-world data, then uses the student model to train a pedagogical agent using a more resource intensive algorithm. Most modern ITSs make use of Representation Learning (RL) to train the pedagogical agent. One of the main techniques for structuring the problem domain is Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) [CA1995], where you model the domain being learned as a Bayesian skills network; i.e. a 4-tuple of probabilities (init, learning, guess, slip), updated in a Bayesian fashion. An excellent survey work in this area is given in [BGTPF2010]. If you're interested in the RL part of the problem, and how it can work with this setup you might want to look into partially observable Markov decision process — POMDPs. Emma Brunskill has done some nice work in this area. [WOOLF2009]: Woolf, Beverly Park. 2009. Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors: Student-Centered Strategies for Revolutionizing e-Learning. Amsterdam ; Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier. [BWB2000]: Beck, Joseph, Beverly Park Woolf, and Carole R. Beal. "ADVISOR: A machine learning architecture for intelligent tutor construction." AAAI/IAAI 2000 (2000): 552-557. [CA1995]: Corbett, Albert T., and John R. Anderson. "Knowledge tracing: Modeling the acquisition of procedural knowledge." User modeling and user-adapted interaction 4, no. 4 (1994): 253-278. [BGTPF2010]: Brunskill, Emma, Sunil Garg, Clint Tseng, Joyojeet Pal, and Leah Findlater. "Evaluating an adaptive multi-user educational tool for low-resource environments." In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, pp. 13-16. 2010.

mistrial9 7y ago

anecdote, if you will.. in a major University setting, for natural sciences, a mixed-level study-group is listening to a presentation on a model of a forested ecosystem using remote sensing and "AI", though the emphasis was on ML with certain inputs. An American with a liberal-arts background and good CS training, asks "in this model, how can we find the limits of the validity of these assumptions. A real world is more complex than what is being modeled, so how can we describe that and find 'blind-spots' in the work here" .. Meanwhile, a serious student who may have been born in China, asks "how can the model results be cross-checked to eliminate human bias in the result interpretation?" Now this same exchange could have happened between any two students with the basic alignments of "objective science" versus "natural sciences", but it did seem telling of a certain pure-science tilt on the part of the student from China. To push that further, one could say that the "objective science" angle lacked a certain "intellectual humility" in the inquiry, with an emphasis on the correctness of the machine results, and an assumption that better math will produce "winning" output. No real evidence, but that was an impression at that moment.

arethuza 7y ago
Out of interest, what do you mean by the difference between "objective science" and "natural sciences" in this context? Is it the "formal science" vs "natural science" distinction (i.e. pretty much maths vs everything else).
ckris 7y ago
I think it has more to do with that China's strength at the moment is being utilitarian. Their working theory is to increase capacity. That is why they are build a lot of high speed rail, cities and power plants. While in the West we talk about tweaking cars to being self-driving or interest rates in the mortgage market. Because we don't really have that urgency to do things at scale tomorrow.

JabavuAdams 7y ago

The criticisms quoted in this article are rather poor. First the contention that AI is better for rote tasks. Not true -- this is an old and outdated view. Also the pooh-poohing of mere knowledge. You know, our democracies could benefit from more people understanding statistics and/or chemistry. If you understand first year physics + chemistry + biology + math + econ + psych, you get a pretty useful model of how the world works. If you really get those subjects, you're able to make all kinds of inferences and guesses that turn out to be right surprisingly often. As a game developer, I have a lot of exposure to the art-school types, and it's amazing how poor their grasp is of how anything works, other than EDIT: s/humans/human emotions/ and human-centric narrative.

kiba 7y ago
I would contend that knowledge is better gained through slower, deeper studies, not through rapid fire education for a single semester. People may be taught physics and biology, but most of the knowledge will wash through them once they finished their exams and got their grade.
- newguy1234 7y ago
  The AI/self-study type platforms could possibly solve this problem since it would allow the learner to progress at their own pace. I agree that "deeper level study" is huge part of getting the bigger picture.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    The most successful people in MOOCs and boot camps are people with college degrees already!
  - Datenstrom 7y ago
    AI self study can certainly get you to the equivalent of a Masters degree, and much faster for anyone who is motivated, unfortunately I would never recommend that to anyone. The problem is that even after years of working in the field you will likely be underpaid, and it won't be possible to find jobs in the field without a direct connection. Another problem is that if you want to go for a PhD to learn beyond that you will need to sit though years and years of useless classes that you have essentially already taken, just to check some boxes. I don't think anyone self motivated to learn things will sit though 6 years of useless classes to check some boxes or at the very least it will be terribly depressing wasting so much life. At least that is my experience. The open materials for CS and AI are great though.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

One problem with AI in education is that it promotes magical thinking. That is, if you rationally understand what the AI is doing, it seems awfully simple. And then the disappointment comes: if it is simple and understandable, it isn't really AI. That's why you see a race for obscurity -- lots of jargon to describe the complexity of the system. In reality, good educational software is about good design, good goal alignment, good assessments, good sequencing, good intervention material -- it's all based on classic instructional design, not a superior algorithm. Has the software been set up to support data driven continuous improvement? That is more important than an algorithm.

scottlegrand2 7y ago
I'm going to disagree here. I have enough understanding of AI to have built a deep learning framework from first principles. That deep learning framework makes a pile of money for Amazon to this day. That I know how it works because I wrote the thing doesn't take away from the miracle that it makes that kind of money for doing complicated but not all that complicated stuff. When I look at generative adversarial networks and the recent attention-based language models I am similarly amazed at what they can do. But I am also 100% aware of their limitations and I think the hype that they are near-term AGI technology is the real magical thinking.

ausjke 7y ago

I foresee when more people get AI educated, the nation will be more likely to have free speech and a real legal system, because there will be less people easily get brainwashed that is, so this is good news.

Vrondi 7y ago
Except that they will be brainwashed by the AI, in whatever direction the authorities dictate.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y ago
  Or simply the bias that the training data set (i.e. current curriculum) will have.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

> The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%. If you make having a high percentage at a standardised tests the point of education and use software to make you drive those numbers up, negative externalities are going to come back to you in a few decades in crazy ways... And the article does note this: "Earlier this month, the government also unveiled a set of guidelines to focus more on physical, moral, and artistic education". How much that's going to be gamed as well is going to be interesting I guess.

josinalvo 7y ago
What negative externalities do you have in mind?

the8472 7y ago

One step closer to "a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"

mncharity 7y ago
But not much closer, if content, rather than delivery, is the pressing bottleneck. My experience has been, that of the few first-tier astronomy graduate students that aren't mistaken about the color of the Sun, as many learned it in seminar coverage of common misconceptions in astronomy education, as learned it in their own atypically extensive and successful astronomy education. Current content is really, really bad. A "Primer" will require much better. AI doesn't help much if your large textbook publisher's science education content is written by inexpensive liberal arts majors with no science background, consulting with "scientists". If one instead uses science graduate students, double majoring in education, with misconception lists in hand, you might get that Sun color right. Maybe. And interviewing researchers about their own research areas is even better. But... Say you're writing a children's picture book about atoms. What magnitude of domain expertise support do you need? How about a small room full of MIT physics professors? Is that enough? Can you see a bare atomic nucleus with your naked eye? Why not? Did you just now say too small, rather than beyond-violet "color"? That much is easy. But what if you wish to discover that a couple of atypical atomic nuclei can be seen with your room-lit naked eye, can be made to brightly fluoresce visibly (a multi-step spin-isomer decay, with one step visible)? So you can include a photo, of a glowing green dot in a vacuum vessel, in your picture book, to reinforce that nuclei are real physical objects. My experience has been that a room of MIT professors, most with some nuclear physics background, is likely an insufficient gathering of expertise. Unless it's a lunch for a visiting professor, whose focus is nucleus simulation, who self-describes their focus as a (with emphasis) "small" subfield, and who perhaps thinks all this obvious. Reflect on that: A room full of MIT physics professors is insufficient domain expertise to write an excellent children's picture book about atoms. How might we then go about writing a Primer, if it takes such an awesome gathering of expertise? Before Primers can be airdropped, they need to be written. And I suggest we're not yet even at the point of recognizing and acknowledging the primary challenge there, let alone scoping, funding, and addressing it. It's not pedagogy and ed tech that's blocking the road to a Primer. It's the sciences. And their incentives and funding. It's something I'd love to be working on, but finding people to work with has been a challenge.

ConfusedDog 7y ago

I was in China few months ago. My general impression is that parents are crazy generous toward their children's education. There are whole department store building devoted to extra-curriculum classes for all different ages - and they ain't cheap at all. My impression of Squirrel AI is really just using more advanced analytics for education, which is good in concept; but really they are selling parents' the fear that "if you don't buy our services, your children WILL be left behind."

auslander 7y ago

Year 2110. Citizen Interface is a mandatory implant into newborns brain.

ggggtez 7y ago

There are us companies that do this too, on a limited scale. In my opinion, there is no real reason you can't learn this way. Teaching math this way is likely perfectly fine for middle school

qserasera 7y ago

I'm really excited for ML analysis of education, problem solving, and information retention on various pupils.