[routerl]

So, Khan Academy is experimenting with providing every student with (what they call) a "personal tutor".

Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing, the AI writes with the student, rather than for students.

The flip side is teachers saving time on lesson planning, grading, etc, all the work that's adjacent to actually teaching.

A lot of this is a feature preview for Khan Academy, and a big part of it is just the ReACT pattern[1] (have people settled on this name?).

To me, even all of the above is just an efficiency increase, which means workloads will increase to fill the available time, and we might see student to teacher ratios in the order of tens of thousands to one. How much of a future teacher's career will be about maintaining their AI systems? How much of learning will be like that too?

[1] https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/python-react-pattern

[seanhunter]

I don’t think it’s ever safe to procnosticate on the basis that something is “Just an efficiency increase”. Plenty of tech that is just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society.

[cultofmetatron]

>just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society.

truer words haven't been spoken. one big one off the top of my mind was the us governments decision to allow civillians to access gps at the same resolution as the arms. with that, all sorts of applications that require realtime location tracking. uber, lyft, rappi, gojeck off the top of my head.

[fragmede]

More fundamentally, the telegraph was "just" a more efficient way to send messages over sending a message via pony express, and the Internet evolved from there.

[akasakahakada]

And efficiency is everything. People defending bad education system using "gov has no money" "country has no teacher" excuses while the higher education is pumping out unemployed graduates every year. They can act more actively to make teacher as an job option to people. They just don't like problem being solved. Now GPT4 personal tutor exist, make them no excuse to not provide better education to people.

[stuckinhell]

Do teachers as we know them even exist in a world where that idea of tutoring goes to scale ?

I don't think they do. It sounds more like a world, where in person testing and certification is extremely important when a human skill needs to be evaluated.

[lewhoo]

Do teachers as we know them even exist in a world where that idea of tutoring goes to scale ?

Do students as we know them even exist in such a world ? I'm thinking if AI can effectively teach (AI asks questions to the student, gives feedback and leads the lesson, reacts to situational events, maintains discipline etc.) then AI can also do. Aside from the romantic take of learning for the pleasure of learning why would we assume that such AI teachers aren't also going to be AI employees. Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff on a mass scale if the main or one of the main motivators for education is the market (or is it ?).

[lisper]

> Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff

Because someone still has to make decisions. Much as the educational-industrial complex would have you believe otherwise, living the good life does not equate with getting the right answers on standardized tests.

One of the unfortunate aspects of the education system we've built over the last several hundred years is that it conceals this from most people. This is because the purpose of the system is to feed a societal system where a very small number of people make decisions and the rest are expected simply to obey orders. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's really important not to lose sight of the fact that replacing the current education system with AI is not the same as replacing educated people with AI, or even the same as replacing all of education with AI.

[fragmede]

Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.

[ben_w]

Plenty of people have already made the decision to delegate decisions to AI.

We generally hear about this under headlines like "man attempts to drive into ocean while following satnav" or "flash crash in stock market caused by algorithmic traders" or https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/smallbusiness/keep-calm-and...

[MathMonkeyMan]

> Plenty of people have already made the decision to delegate decisions to AI.

That got me thinking.

[lisper]

The problem is that decisions can only be made with respect to some quality metric, and deciding what that should be cannot be delegated. Only you can know what you want.

[ben_w]

The other problem is we often say "it's common sense!" as a result of someone (or something) else following our metrics in a technically correct way that's totally not what we meant.

[fragmede]

As we know it? I don't think so.

The tutors scale up, but so can the testing. Instead of standardized testing, every student can get interviewed as if the teacher had only them as a student and be given an in-depth assessment of their skills and knowledge, rather than being simplified to a letter grade.

Pedagogy is an area of study outside of my expertise, but I do know there are institutions that didn't give grades.

[morelisp]

> the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?")

We are removing the last vestiges of empathy and interiority from our reading process? Good good, carry on then.

[ben_w]

I'm not sure what you mean, to the extent I'm wondering if either or both of "empathy" and "interiority" are auto-corrupt?