School leaders believe pairing AI and life skill courses is the future of education.
Alpha private school leaders believe AI learning paired with life skill courses will be the standard for modern schools in the future. The school doesn’t have teachers but instead uses what it calls “guides.”
Are they going to teach them how many countries in Africa start with the letter K?
It’s actually none. The closest is Kenya.
This is horrible
I wouldn’t be surprised if some form of automated education becomes a big thing in the future, but this is just a shit idea right now meant to keep costs low and profits up.
Even as it is now, I could see it being good for some kids.
I certainly could’ve benefitted from a guided, fully-self-paced curriculum. I was bored off my ass in high school.
Like this, you could teach an entire high school and have a teacher:student ratio of like 1:200. Really just need SMEs annd a big computer lab, and that’s it.
But it’s definitely not for everyone. Most kids need more hands-on, especially with new topics. And there has to be human oversight (humans writing exams/quizzes and intervening if the AI is incorrect or ineffective).
have you asked an AI how to bake a cake?
It’s a headline, or soundbite.
“We don’t have teachers,” said Alpha private school cofounder MacKenzie Price. “Now, what we do have is a lot of adults who are in the room engaging with these kids, working as coaches. So they’re helping the kids get clear on what are some goals that they’re working on, what are they doing academically? What are they interested in? How can we really turn on that spark for learning?”
So they have teachers, they just aren’t calling them that. Maybe they’re not specialized or have the proper training, but they’re still acting as teachers. Probably trying to fuck over the trained teachers though. That’s our national sport.
So just like Mal-Wart. No cashiers except the ones hanging around to fix the self-checkouts.
You can program AI you see, not as simple programing real flesh and blood human beings who care about education as they’re the only ones stupid enough to accept the meager pay, stress, and vilification needed to survive in that field.
So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all “thinking machines” and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That’s why everything’s analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.
But unlike what one might think, they didn’t destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn’t be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.
So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we’re heading to the same crossroads at some point.
