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I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems

I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers, distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb. I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in education is that they have trouble applying to the larger picture of compulsory education.

dimitrios1 2y ago
This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique. They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart" mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.
8338550bff96 2y ago
If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there are parts of our education system that continually resist adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and parents can't do their part because they have to work far too hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't solve that.
  - labster 2y ago
    But if teachers could use AI to grade exams and automate the boring work, then they could take a second job and be able to afford housing. Sounds like an easy win for AI.
    - nozonozon 2y ago
      I love the idea that no one is 'only' a teacher. Teachers that live in the real world make much more sense to me. My ideal work week: 10h administrative work (figuring out what and how for the rest of the week) 10h technical job 10h teaching in a classroom 10h 1:1 mentoring
    - stavros 2y ago
      I read this comment and it struck me as excellent parody, but now I'm worried it's in earnest.
      - labster 2y ago
        This was my club in university: https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society I think that 20 years later it is much harder make effective satire, so I rarely do it now. More extreme positions are taken pretty regularly by folks online, so even people like you in my target audience are never sure if something is satirical or just extreme.
        shermantanktop 2y ago
        That’s why most satire is pretty lame. The more obvious it is, the less funny; the less obvious it is, the less interesting. And the whole thing is built on an inside/outside dynamic that is pretty basic.
    - phs318u 2y ago
      Realising the promise of AI, freeing teachers from the drudgery of 'boring work' so they can take on a second job as a food-server, burger-flipper, shelf-stacker or Uber driver (at least until robotics and self-driving tech eliminate those jobs too).
- __loam 2y ago
  I got an excellent education from the public school system and had passionate, committed teachers throughout, and was well prepared to pursue an engineering degree at a top university. The solution to education is not to try and scale up some absurd and ineffective AI system that is worse than teachers, it's to pay teachers an actual proportionate salary that is in line with their impact on our society so we can retain good people. Just because people like Karpathy understand AI doesn't mean they understand education.
  - nightski 2y ago
    It's not zero sum, we can do both.
    - __loam 2y ago
      You're right lets divert millions if not billions of dollars that could be used on known working solutions for these problems to an unproven technological bullet that is famously capital intensive.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    The incentives just are not properly aligned. I went to an urban school system that paid many teachers quite well (upwards of $130k 10 years ago for many), but the pay was just totally ubcorrelated with teacher performance. Many of the worst teachers were the best paid because they had seniority and that was how the union had structured pay agreements, whereas many of the younger better teachers were paid very poorly (around $50k in a major metro) despite having left very high paying professional jobs to give back. The problem is that there is little-to-no economic incentive to do anything to improve student performance.
- will1am 2y ago
  You touches on a critical aspect of educational reform
wendyshu 2y ago
> Education ... should be egalitarian Why?
- tucnak 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - OKRainbowKid 2y ago
    We do?
- __loam 2y ago
  We shouldn't have to explain that it's plainly obvious that society massively benefits from an educated populace, especially one that claims to be a democracy. There are incredibly broad benefits from a reduction in crime to the expansion of the skilled labor pool. I've noticed that many people in tech seem to disregard or disrespect educational institutions. So I'll turn it back on you. What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education? Do you hate living in an educated society that much? Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?
  - iftheshoefitss 2y ago
    Very uneducated so I can’t comment on this but I’m living in a Malthusian nightmare and definitely wouldn’t recommend it :)
  - brezelgoring 2y ago
    >Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare? Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth. That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you). I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough. Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ants_everywhere 2y ago
> Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. This is the approach I'm taking. There are a few psychological and technological tricks here or there, but in my opinion the hardest part is getting the incentives right. It's very easy to build an educational system that incentivizes for the wrong things. And even if we all agree what the "right" things are, something like universal education is a collective action problem with all the difficulties that come with that.
r3trohack3r 2y ago
> Education [...] should be egalitarian It is self-evident to me that this is not true in the U.S. There is very little about education that is egalitarian. An inner city grade school in Michigan is in no way comparable to a grade school in the Palo Alto suburbs. > Such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb. To drive this point home, in the real world we do not hold this standard for air conditioning. Tens of thousands of schools in the U.S. do not currently have adequate HVAC systems. If we are not currently applying this standard to A/C, I don't know why we would choose to selectively apply it to AI. Attempting to gate innovation behind complete social conformity and universal adoption doesn't strike me as a rationale stance.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Nit: you’re replying to what “should be” with what is. Those two concepts are not the same. Our property-tax-based educational funding system is widely seen as a tragedy.
- ipaddr 2y ago
  An inner city grade school in Detroit gets 16,500+ per child a regular child in Michigan gets 9,500. Palo Alto spends 25,143 per child. New York spends $29,873 per child. The states that spend the least Utah, Idaho are around 9,000. Part of the cost is localized like salary, utilities costs. Detroit isn't necessarily being under funded compared to Palo suburb when you normalize regional cost differences. It does affect the quality of teachers one can attract but so does the location in general. Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student. Palo Alto is home to many immigrant from many places who self select and place education as extremely important for the next generation. For the average Detroit kid education isn't cherished and valued over everything else. Until you can equalize those believes things won't change. You won't be able to buy a higher educational rate by painting the walls twice as fast or by hiring more educational assistants.
  - buttercraft 2y ago
    > Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student. Are you sure about this? It seems suspiciously self-reinforcing.
j45 2y ago
Out of curiousity have you worked in education or EdTech? Trying to get the context of this.
richardw 2y ago
I think a good place to start is “anyone in the world who wants to learn and is hindered by their school and teachers”. Not “this must work in every American school from the start”. A smart kid with a phone in Kenya should be able to have a shot. Wikipedia allows this. Khan Academy helps. This in the extreme is Khan Academy but potentially for every course a kid (or adult) could want, generated on demand from scratch if need be. The next optimal study session generated for your current state of knowledge, energy level, learning goals, by the teaching agent who is provably the best at delivering that lesson for you, using the optimal mediums for your context. Video at home or in a class, audio when on a bus, printouts if you want. Add in spaced repetition and a few fun quizzes, gamify it. Let each person fulfil their potential unhindered by the resources of their school, parents or country.
- levocardia 2y ago
  Even if this ends up being nothing more than "Khan Academy but I can ask questions and get answers and it's all in my local dialect of Urdu" it is a huge step forward for educations AS LEARNING.
  - 1auralynn 2y ago
    Khan Academy already has a robust AI chatbot/features (https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/) - they have an ongoing relationship with Microsoft/OpenAI
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  To me, the good place to start is "what do teachers want that they feel would make their teaching more effective" rather than "the entire community of teachers is a barrier and we must work around them."
will1am 2y ago
Is just a complex and challenging process
JoeJonathan 2y ago
I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from learning a language, which is different from learning the history of science, which is different from learning ethnographic methods. There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of expertise but don't work at all for others.
walledstance 2y ago
Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because education shouldn’t be treated like a business. Educational goals are to educate people not make money. Education requires countless failures. Business models are composed to be failure averse or reduce risk. Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from its participants to grow in knowledge. Thank you for setting this.

dimitrios1 2y ago

This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique. They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart" mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.

8338550bff96 2y ago

If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there are parts of our education system that continually resist adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.

arrosenberg 2y ago
Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and parents can't do their part because they have to work far too hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't solve that.
- labster 2y ago
  But if teachers could use AI to grade exams and automate the boring work, then they could take a second job and be able to afford housing. Sounds like an easy win for AI.
  - nozonozon 2y ago
    I love the idea that no one is 'only' a teacher. Teachers that live in the real world make much more sense to me. My ideal work week: 10h administrative work (figuring out what and how for the rest of the week) 10h technical job 10h teaching in a classroom 10h 1:1 mentoring
  - stavros 2y ago
    I read this comment and it struck me as excellent parody, but now I'm worried it's in earnest.
    - labster 2y ago
      This was my club in university: https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society I think that 20 years later it is much harder make effective satire, so I rarely do it now. More extreme positions are taken pretty regularly by folks online, so even people like you in my target audience are never sure if something is satirical or just extreme.
      - shermantanktop 2y ago
        That’s why most satire is pretty lame. The more obvious it is, the less funny; the less obvious it is, the less interesting. And the whole thing is built on an inside/outside dynamic that is pretty basic.
  - phs318u 2y ago
    Realising the promise of AI, freeing teachers from the drudgery of 'boring work' so they can take on a second job as a food-server, burger-flipper, shelf-stacker or Uber driver (at least until robotics and self-driving tech eliminate those jobs too).
__loam 2y ago
I got an excellent education from the public school system and had passionate, committed teachers throughout, and was well prepared to pursue an engineering degree at a top university. The solution to education is not to try and scale up some absurd and ineffective AI system that is worse than teachers, it's to pay teachers an actual proportionate salary that is in line with their impact on our society so we can retain good people. Just because people like Karpathy understand AI doesn't mean they understand education.
- nightski 2y ago
  It's not zero sum, we can do both.
  - __loam 2y ago
    You're right lets divert millions if not billions of dollars that could be used on known working solutions for these problems to an unproven technological bullet that is famously capital intensive.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  The incentives just are not properly aligned. I went to an urban school system that paid many teachers quite well (upwards of $130k 10 years ago for many), but the pay was just totally ubcorrelated with teacher performance. Many of the worst teachers were the best paid because they had seniority and that was how the union had structured pay agreements, whereas many of the younger better teachers were paid very poorly (around $50k in a major metro) despite having left very high paying professional jobs to give back. The problem is that there is little-to-no economic incentive to do anything to improve student performance.
will1am 2y ago
You touches on a critical aspect of educational reform

wendyshu 2y ago

> Education ... should be egalitarian Why?

tucnak 2y ago
[flagged]
- OKRainbowKid 2y ago
  We do?
__loam 2y ago
We shouldn't have to explain that it's plainly obvious that society massively benefits from an educated populace, especially one that claims to be a democracy. There are incredibly broad benefits from a reduction in crime to the expansion of the skilled labor pool. I've noticed that many people in tech seem to disregard or disrespect educational institutions. So I'll turn it back on you. What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education? Do you hate living in an educated society that much? Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?
- iftheshoefitss 2y ago
  Very uneducated so I can’t comment on this but I’m living in a Malthusian nightmare and definitely wouldn’t recommend it :)
- brezelgoring 2y ago
  >Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare? Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth. That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you). I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough. Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. This is the approach I'm taking. There are a few psychological and technological tricks here or there, but in my opinion the hardest part is getting the incentives right. It's very easy to build an educational system that incentivizes for the wrong things. And even if we all agree what the "right" things are, something like universal education is a collective action problem with all the difficulties that come with that.

r3trohack3r 2y ago

> Education [...] should be egalitarian It is self-evident to me that this is not true in the U.S. There is very little about education that is egalitarian. An inner city grade school in Michigan is in no way comparable to a grade school in the Palo Alto suburbs. > Such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb. To drive this point home, in the real world we do not hold this standard for air conditioning. Tens of thousands of schools in the U.S. do not currently have adequate HVAC systems. If we are not currently applying this standard to A/C, I don't know why we would choose to selectively apply it to AI. Attempting to gate innovation behind complete social conformity and universal adoption doesn't strike me as a rationale stance.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Nit: you’re replying to what “should be” with what is. Those two concepts are not the same. Our property-tax-based educational funding system is widely seen as a tragedy.
ipaddr 2y ago
An inner city grade school in Detroit gets 16,500+ per child a regular child in Michigan gets 9,500. Palo Alto spends 25,143 per child. New York spends $29,873 per child. The states that spend the least Utah, Idaho are around 9,000. Part of the cost is localized like salary, utilities costs. Detroit isn't necessarily being under funded compared to Palo suburb when you normalize regional cost differences. It does affect the quality of teachers one can attract but so does the location in general. Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student. Palo Alto is home to many immigrant from many places who self select and place education as extremely important for the next generation. For the average Detroit kid education isn't cherished and valued over everything else. Until you can equalize those believes things won't change. You won't be able to buy a higher educational rate by painting the walls twice as fast or by hiring more educational assistants.
- buttercraft 2y ago
  > Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student. Are you sure about this? It seems suspiciously self-reinforcing.

j45 2y ago

Out of curiousity have you worked in education or EdTech? Trying to get the context of this.

richardw 2y ago

I think a good place to start is “anyone in the world who wants to learn and is hindered by their school and teachers”. Not “this must work in every American school from the start”. A smart kid with a phone in Kenya should be able to have a shot. Wikipedia allows this. Khan Academy helps. This in the extreme is Khan Academy but potentially for every course a kid (or adult) could want, generated on demand from scratch if need be. The next optimal study session generated for your current state of knowledge, energy level, learning goals, by the teaching agent who is provably the best at delivering that lesson for you, using the optimal mediums for your context. Video at home or in a class, audio when on a bus, printouts if you want. Add in spaced repetition and a few fun quizzes, gamify it. Let each person fulfil their potential unhindered by the resources of their school, parents or country.

levocardia 2y ago
Even if this ends up being nothing more than "Khan Academy but I can ask questions and get answers and it's all in my local dialect of Urdu" it is a huge step forward for educations AS LEARNING.
- 1auralynn 2y ago
  Khan Academy already has a robust AI chatbot/features (https://www.khanmigo.ai/ https://www.khanmigo.ai/) - they have an ongoing relationship with Microsoft/OpenAI
UncleMeat 2y ago
To me, the good place to start is "what do teachers want that they feel would make their teaching more effective" rather than "the entire community of teachers is a barrier and we must work around them."

will1am 2y ago

Is just a complex and challenging process

JoeJonathan 2y ago

I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from learning a language, which is different from learning the history of science, which is different from learning ethnographic methods. There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of expertise but don't work at all for others.

walledstance 2y ago

Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because education shouldn’t be treated like a business. Educational goals are to educate people not make money. Education requires countless failures. Business models are composed to be failure averse or reduce risk. Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from its participants to grow in knowledge. Thank you for setting this.