I feel like the article is severely overestimating the state of the art and the current capabilities of the "big 5".<p>All of them are working on the most basic fundamental components that are prerequisites to a Primer and every prerequisite is still pretty far off: no one can currently build a useful conversational agent (anything beyond query-and-response of Alexa), no one can really extract useful semantic meaning from text comments with surrounding context, no one can construct good automatic customized lessons for 5th graders based on feedback loops. There is no meaningful version of a primer that can exist without all of those things just being solved problems.<p>Given the inability to meaningfully execute in any of those areas, the challenges listed in the article seem laughably meaningless to me: the problem of "they won't use it 24/7, so the system wouldn't be able to learn everything it needs to" is meaningless if we can't make something learn something from 24/7 use. Similarly, a system diagram showing that it would be a book with sensors and smarts doesn't really seem to be providing any insight at all.
This is close to the inspiration for the One Laptop Per Child project, as far as I am aware. YLIP was a major philosophical impetus for it, and it was even named "Nell" after the main character in Diamond Age.<p>The Amazon Kindle was also codenamed "Fiona" after another main character, Fiona Hackworth.
I love this book. Still very current despite the fact it was published in the nineties. I re-read most of Neal Stephenson's stuff every few years. Just finished Anathem, again ;-).
> TYLIP is...a book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story. It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics, even self-defence.<p><a href="http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-primer/" rel="nofollow">http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-prime...</a>
<i>"Scaling one-on-one tutoring is seen by many experts and researchers as the silver bullet for human cognitive development"</i><p>While I admire the author's intentions, this is completely the wrong approach. There are multiple reasons why having actual human tutors is important:<p>0. The creation of a deep, long-lasting relationship between tutor and tutee<p>1. The benefits to the tutee: the feeling of pride in helping the younger generation, building empathy and understanding of what the younger generation is doing<p>2. The tutee is inspired to pass along their knowledge to others later in life; they learn how to tutor by being tutored, thus continuing the cycle<p>That last point is important. Even if a perfect Primer were created, how would it improve with time? If it truly replaced tutoring, then the art of tutoring would be lost forever, and it'd be up to software engineers to determine the metrics by which to measure the success of the Primer's tutoring algorithm.<p>Of course, that would never happen. Instead, tutoring by Primer would be reserved for poor people who didn't have tutors in their lives--or who had potential tutors who were scared off by the notion that they were not as effective the Primer. Then, in those communities, organic tutoring--an institution that has existed since literally the beginning of humanity--would be amputated and replaced by whatever tutoring the Primer's developers saw fit.<p>Real tutoring would, of course, be preserved for the ruling elite. Which I think is what happens in the book, come to think of it.<p>Of course I could be completely wrong. But this is the peril of MOOCs in general: students who go to first-tier schools like Harvard and Oxford get personalized instruction, while everyone else gets video lectures while glorified TAs proctor exams.[0]<p>0. <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Professors-at-San-Jose/138941" rel="nofollow">https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Professors-at-San-Jose...</a><p><i>'Professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University are refusing to teach a philosophy course developed by edX, saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to "replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities."'</i>
I'm a little troubled that this seems to be completely missing the point of the Diamond Age (aka, "the Fight Club effect"). The whole lesson of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is that you <i>shouldn't make</i> the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
An HN story about Croquet (Smalltalk framework) dropped a few years ago. Someone was like "So, Alan Kay is trying to build the Metaverse?" My response was, no, Alan Kay is trying to build the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age, and always has been. The Metaverse is one of the lemmas he has to develop in order to get there.
"based on ... (mumble) ...builds on ... learner's existing knowledge " (<a href="https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-young-ladys-illustrated-primer.html" rel="nofollow">https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-young-...</a>) is a key part of any such system. A hard part, since it requires building a map of the student's 'database'. Quizzing without being too intrusive. And secured.<p>(Easier than in a classroom. Typically faced with 2-dozen or more students, the teacher has little idea what curriculum each student has been exposed to. Assessing the group wrongly means having to go back and start all over. And the only possible solution still has to be general, not tailored.)<p>This has been and remains a wonderful dream application. If it's for all, not just for the privileged, bravo.
For mature learners, a prototype they might find useful would be a research assistant. The AI could work at making sure it understood queries better over time, then get better at finding answers, then get better at summarizing why its findings are useful, and finally work on explaining/teaching what it found.
I've been working on this for a year or so (unrelated to this article). I assume the AI will be available at some point in the future. The hard part is actually the teaching material.
Seems to me that among other things the writer has completely missed the point of the Primer was not to educate in the sense they mean it but to <i>build character</i>.
From a post above is<p>> I feel like the article is severely overestimating the state of the art and the current capabilities of the "big 5".<p>To me this is especially diplomatic!<p>From the OP<p>> Obviously we have the Primer,<p>WHAT?????? What do "we have"? Where is this "Primer" that "we have"?????<p>What here is "obvious"?<p>IMHO this might as well been written in Russian, and there I don't even know the alphabet!<p>For decades we've had multiple choice tests. Is THAT what she's talking about that "we have"?<p>So, could write a computer program that asks multiple choice questions and for wrong answers displays some background tutorial material. Is THAT what she has in mind?<p>She keeps saying "AI", that is, "artificial intelligence": Just what more specifically does she have in mind? Curve fitting with networks of sigmoid functions, with regression trees, with versions of regression?
So much of education when a child is young is made up of non-academic cognitive skills. How do you shape and react to a child's human interactions - and the associated cognitive skills - via any kind of media or device? It's hard enough for trained human beings...
Wow, for a mature mind :), that was a lot to absorb.<p>It’s interesting to see an overview of the current state of art. Still, its too bad the conclusion is that only the big 5 have a chance (Google, Facebook, ...)
Why limit it to a 'book'? I feel that the people behind the movie Her has hit it and it's the design that everyone is trying to make real.
One of those books i simply noped out of after the n-th time it diverged into lala-land.<p>Stephenson may know his technical stuff, but it does in no way make him able to write interesting books.