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We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. If history is any guide, the concept of an "AI tutor" won't be used to "[give] ev

We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. If history is any guide, the concept of an "AI tutor" won't be used to "[give] every child their own personal Aristotle," it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes. Seriously, think about how much money can be saved from firing most teachers and locking poor kids in a cubicle farm to stare at an insane "AI tutor's" screen all day. And what's the strongest message sent by replacing human interactions with a machines?: "We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you." Think of how you feel when you have a problem, you make a call to fix it, and all you get are phone menus. And look at all the examples in the article: use GPT to generate crappy stories and educational games for kids to play. How can anyone think that's better than using a book? At least the book's stories and games can be tested and evaluated before use. The actual problem here is the sociopolitical one of unwillingness to allocate enough resources to education to make it truly effective and satisfying, and that's one that technology can't solve.

stephenhuey 4y ago
And the divide may further increase since kids whose families can afford personal human instruction may get ahead even more.
andybak 4y ago
I'm cautiously more optimistic. Education is already chronically underfunded in most places. If it became cheaper to give personalized attention then maybe the quality of education delivered might actually improve.
- tgv 4y ago
  It won't. You don't get attention; you get a reply. MOOCs have terrible performance in comparison with even huge audience lectures. Online teaching during COVID proved that that doesn't work either. A machine doesn't have the authority and conviction of a real person. The combination means that the levels will have to drop only to sustain the idea that this could work. If some country is going to push this, the sunken cost fallacy and the impossibility to hire new teachers will finish education off, once and for all. Optimism should NEVER be a basis for fucking with something as important as school.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I'm not convinced a MOOC is necessarily worse than a pure large lecture class if the material is amenable to auto-graded problem sets. (Leaving aside a regular class would typically have TAs and other students you could get help from.) But they sure didn't live up to the hype. They didn't democratize education in any meaningful way. And I'm not sure even the people with undergrad and grad degrees who made up the majority of MOOC students use them much these days. I know, for me, they were mostly a novelty for a while. Maybe if I want to dip into a topic I'll watch some online video but I haven't even signed up for a MOOC for years at this point.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
It is actually an interesting point. Journalists seem to be catching up to the fact that running ( or at least training data ) is not exactly a cheap task and kids aristotle probably shouldn't be trained on 4chan. Naturally, some analysts would say that means there is tons of consulting money to be made..and it seems like spending is easy and profitable.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes most public school teachers are glorified babysitters at this point anyway, I can recall only a single teacher during my 12 year public school attendance that was actually helpful. From what I've seen from GPT-4 so far, I'd have taken a ChatGPT Plus subscription and laptop over dedicated teachers. YT and Khan Academy were far more useful than my actual teachers
- agentdrtran 4y ago
  teachers do not want to be babysitters, but when you have overstuffed classrooms, no prep time, no equipment, hungry kids, etc etc what are you able to do?
  - dmvdoug 4y ago
    Not to mention state-mandated testing regimes that have nothing to do with actual student learning, hyper-local control of education in elected school boards whose members are often as dumb as a box of rocks, extreme pressure from administrators to get kids through so their performance numbers are juiced rather than actually taking whatever time is needed for those students to accomplish what they need to, etc. I’m a public school teacher. I never cease to be impressed how very little people who don’t work in education understand about the realities of education.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    I don't see what point you're trying to make. Sure, we could make education better by spending more on it, but the voters don't want to, so it's not going to happen. Given that society is not willing to spend more on education what can we do with the budget we have?
    - _justinfunk 4y ago
      I think we've tried the "we could make education better by spending more on it" method. Based on the current state of public education, I don't know that this approach has been proven correct.
UncleMeat 4y ago
I'm very worried about this. We spend an absolute shitload of money educating children. This is paid for by society. But it is also so incredibly worth it. I'm worried that politicians will see an opportunity to shed costs without considering the implications and we end up with children raised online by robots.
nabnob 4y ago
Well fucking said. For a lot of kids, their teacher is one of the few stable adults in their life. There's a ton of social and emotional things kids learn from good teachers beyond just book knowledge.
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  Though there are plenty of people who could provide the social side but aren't equipped to teach the curriculum. Perhaps you could use an AI teacher to deliver lessons that the class teacher was not qualified to teach. This could be done with the real teacher in the room. One of the best teachers my child ever had was limited to teaching first grade due to a lack of maths ability. Everything else about them was fantastic. Maybe AI teachers can help in cases like that.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere doing a job that is considerably less stressful. Education needs to be funded so that it can attract people and it needs to be reorganized to reduce the stress. The vast majority of what is taught in primary schools doesn't need a lot of subject matter skill, what it needs is the ability to teach and the toughness to survive the environment. And it has to pay well enough to attract people who have those qualities because those same qualities make those people attractive to other employers.
    - fn-mote 4y ago
      > There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...] Yes. One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job? As an IC they are implementing features and shipping products. As a teacher...? Test scores going up is uncorrelated with teaching quality, apparently. (NYC, just look at the scatterplot in [1].) So it seems like there's a deep problem here. Now imagine someone in K-12 hiring a CS teacher. Who do they have that is competent to evaluate the skills of the person they want to hire? Probably nobody at all. [1] https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/ https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-re...
ajot 4y ago
> We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. Yep, after reading a piece on ed-tech failures of the decade 2010-2020[0] here on HN[1], I've become pretty convinced that big-scale education is hard (if not impossible) to solve with IT might only. Sure, one person alone can learn something through Wikipedia, Coursera, YouTube, Khan Academy or tutorials, but that can't replace structured environments if your missiob is to educate lots of people. [0] http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132
nextworddev 4y ago
Not sure if an AI tutor is a “poorer” substitute for ALL human teachers given there are many teachers who aren’t be try qualified teaching
motoxpro 4y ago
Very US centric point of view. If the teachers are fine, leave them be. If a place doesn't have the resources to hire said teachers, use tools that help. Or in the US, if teachers are that important, maybe give them more resources to do their job. i.e. buying supplies, computers, etc for your kids class.
imchillyb 4y ago
> ..."We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you." "Thank you for calling customer support. We value your business. Please enjoy this...music...while you wait. Thank you for calling customer support." M U S I C ! ! !
yazzku 4y ago
Remember MOOCs? Some would do well reviewing a bit of history before taking on Medium posts.
yazzku 4y ago
The best part of this post is that it comes from a supposed PhD in neuroscience. Either they were born yesterday or that PhD wasn't worth two shits. What's more concerning is that they also run a school.

stephenhuey 4y ago

And the divide may further increase since kids whose families can afford personal human instruction may get ahead even more.

andybak 4y ago

I'm cautiously more optimistic. Education is already chronically underfunded in most places. If it became cheaper to give personalized attention then maybe the quality of education delivered might actually improve.

tgv 4y ago
It won't. You don't get attention; you get a reply. MOOCs have terrible performance in comparison with even huge audience lectures. Online teaching during COVID proved that that doesn't work either. A machine doesn't have the authority and conviction of a real person. The combination means that the levels will have to drop only to sustain the idea that this could work. If some country is going to push this, the sunken cost fallacy and the impossibility to hire new teachers will finish education off, once and for all. Optimism should NEVER be a basis for fucking with something as important as school.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I'm not convinced a MOOC is necessarily worse than a pure large lecture class if the material is amenable to auto-graded problem sets. (Leaving aside a regular class would typically have TAs and other students you could get help from.) But they sure didn't live up to the hype. They didn't democratize education in any meaningful way. And I'm not sure even the people with undergrad and grad degrees who made up the majority of MOOC students use them much these days. I know, for me, they were mostly a novelty for a while. Maybe if I want to dip into a topic I'll watch some online video but I haven't even signed up for a MOOC for years at this point.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

It is actually an interesting point. Journalists seem to be catching up to the fact that running ( or at least training data ) is not exactly a cheap task and kids aristotle probably shouldn't be trained on 4chan. Naturally, some analysts would say that means there is tons of consulting money to be made..and it seems like spending is easy and profitable.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes most public school teachers are glorified babysitters at this point anyway, I can recall only a single teacher during my 12 year public school attendance that was actually helpful. From what I've seen from GPT-4 so far, I'd have taken a ChatGPT Plus subscription and laptop over dedicated teachers. YT and Khan Academy were far more useful than my actual teachers

agentdrtran 4y ago
teachers do not want to be babysitters, but when you have overstuffed classrooms, no prep time, no equipment, hungry kids, etc etc what are you able to do?
- dmvdoug 4y ago
  Not to mention state-mandated testing regimes that have nothing to do with actual student learning, hyper-local control of education in elected school boards whose members are often as dumb as a box of rocks, extreme pressure from administrators to get kids through so their performance numbers are juiced rather than actually taking whatever time is needed for those students to accomplish what they need to, etc. I’m a public school teacher. I never cease to be impressed how very little people who don’t work in education understand about the realities of education.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  I don't see what point you're trying to make. Sure, we could make education better by spending more on it, but the voters don't want to, so it's not going to happen. Given that society is not willing to spend more on education what can we do with the budget we have?
  - _justinfunk 4y ago
    I think we've tried the "we could make education better by spending more on it" method. Based on the current state of public education, I don't know that this approach has been proven correct.

UncleMeat 4y ago

I'm very worried about this. We spend an absolute shitload of money educating children. This is paid for by society. But it is also so incredibly worth it. I'm worried that politicians will see an opportunity to shed costs without considering the implications and we end up with children raised online by robots.

nabnob 4y ago

Well fucking said. For a lot of kids, their teacher is one of the few stable adults in their life. There's a ton of social and emotional things kids learn from good teachers beyond just book knowledge.

forgotusername6 4y ago
Though there are plenty of people who could provide the social side but aren't equipped to teach the curriculum. Perhaps you could use an AI teacher to deliver lessons that the class teacher was not qualified to teach. This could be done with the real teacher in the room. One of the best teachers my child ever had was limited to teaching first grade due to a lack of maths ability. Everything else about them was fantastic. Maybe AI teachers can help in cases like that.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere doing a job that is considerably less stressful. Education needs to be funded so that it can attract people and it needs to be reorganized to reduce the stress. The vast majority of what is taught in primary schools doesn't need a lot of subject matter skill, what it needs is the ability to teach and the toughness to survive the environment. And it has to pay well enough to attract people who have those qualities because those same qualities make those people attractive to other employers.
  - fn-mote 4y ago
    > There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...] Yes. One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job? As an IC they are implementing features and shipping products. As a teacher...? Test scores going up is uncorrelated with teaching quality, apparently. (NYC, just look at the scatterplot in [1].) So it seems like there's a deep problem here. Now imagine someone in K-12 hiring a CS teacher. Who do they have that is competent to evaluate the skills of the person they want to hire? Probably nobody at all. [1] https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/ https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-re...

ajot 4y ago

> We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. Yep, after reading a piece on ed-tech failures of the decade 2010-2020[0] here on HN[1], I've become pretty convinced that big-scale education is hard (if not impossible) to solve with IT might only. Sure, one person alone can learn something through Wikipedia, Coursera, YouTube, Khan Academy or tutorials, but that can't replace structured environments if your missiob is to educate lots of people. [0] http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132

nextworddev 4y ago

Not sure if an AI tutor is a “poorer” substitute for ALL human teachers given there are many teachers who aren’t be try qualified teaching

motoxpro 4y ago

Very US centric point of view. If the teachers are fine, leave them be. If a place doesn't have the resources to hire said teachers, use tools that help. Or in the US, if teachers are that important, maybe give them more resources to do their job. i.e. buying supplies, computers, etc for your kids class.

imchillyb 4y ago

> ..."We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you." "Thank you for calling customer support. We value your business. Please enjoy this...music...while you wait. Thank you for calling customer support." M U S I C ! ! !

yazzku 4y ago

Remember MOOCs? Some would do well reviewing a bit of history before taking on Medium posts.

yazzku 4y ago

The best part of this post is that it comes from a supposed PhD in neuroscience. Either they were born yesterday or that PhD wasn't worth two shits. What's more concerning is that they also run a school.