China has started a grand experiment in AI education

Of course I don't think you need AI for this. You just need something that is slightly interactive so you can modify the learning path to be more efficient. You could even do it with a book. That is the real win of adopting technology, that it can change your mindset. Presumably that is also why the mindset sometime come before the technology, with things like sci-fi. Unfortunately I think in many markets people are focusing on just adopting technology, but not the mindset. So you don't get all the benefits or even make things worse. You get fancy proof of concepts that don't do much at scale.

One problem with AI in education is that it promotes magical thinking. That is, if you rationally understand what the AI is doing, it seems awfully simple. And then the disappointment comes: if it is simple and understandable, it isn&#x27;t really AI.<p>That&#x27;s why you see a race for obscurity -- lots of jargon to describe the complexity of the system.<p>In reality, good educational software is about good design, good goal alignment, good assessments, good sequencing, good intervention material -- it&#x27;s all based on classic instructional design, not a superior algorithm. Has the software been set up to support data driven continuous improvement? That is more important than an algorithm.

I was in China few months ago. My general impression is that parents are crazy generous toward their children&#x27;s education. There are whole department store building devoted to extra-curriculum classes for all different ages - and they ain&#x27;t cheap at all.<p>My impression of Squirrel AI is really just using more advanced analytics for education, which is good in concept; but really they are selling parents&#x27; the fear that &quot;if you don&#x27;t buy our services, your children WILL be left behind.&quot;

Adaptive learning is great but you still need to develop content using instructional design principles or else you can&#x27;t adapt anything.<p>You can&#x27;t just dump content in and hope for the best.

One step closer to &quot;a Young Lady&#x27;s Illustrated Primer&quot;

This article could be interesting, given the depth and breadth that one could explore given the topic. Unfortunately, it quickly turns into fluff marketing for the Chinese company they focus on. Is Technology Review accepting money for articles?

&gt; The 13-year-old decided to give it a try. By the end of the semester, his test scores had risen from 50% to 62.5%.<p>If you make having a high percentage at a standardised tests the point of education and use software to make you drive those numbers up, negative externalities are going to come back to you in a few decades in crazy ways... And the article does note this: &quot;Earlier this month, the government also unveiled a set of guidelines to focus more on physical, moral, and artistic education&quot;. How much that&#x27;s going to be gamed as well is going to be interesting I guess.

anecdote, if you will.. in a major University setting, for natural sciences, a mixed-level study-group is listening to a presentation on a model of a forested ecosystem using remote sensing and &quot;AI&quot;, though the emphasis was on ML with certain inputs. An American with a liberal-arts background and good CS training, asks &quot;in this model, how can we find the limits of the validity of these assumptions. A real world is more complex than what is being modeled, so how can we describe that and find &#x27;blind-spots&#x27; in the work here&quot; .. Meanwhile, a serious student who may have been born in China, asks &quot;how can the model results be cross-checked to eliminate human bias in the result interpretation?&quot;<p>Now this same exchange could have happened between any two students with the basic alignments of &quot;objective science&quot; versus &quot;natural sciences&quot;, but it did seem telling of a certain pure-science tilt on the part of the student from China. To push that further, one could say that the &quot;objective science&quot; angle lacked a certain &quot;intellectual humility&quot; in the inquiry, with an emphasis on the correctness of the machine results, and an assumption that better math will produce &quot;winning&quot; output. No real evidence, but that was an impression at that moment.

Interesting article but I think this is really a broader topic: not just how AI can transform tutoring&#x2F;education but also how AI will impact all areas of work, how human productivity and job satisfaction can be increased, and how we will deal with “not enough work for people to do.”

I foresee when more people get AI educated, the nation will be more likely to have free speech and a real legal system, because there will be less people easily get brainwashed that is, so this is good news.

There are us companies that do this too, on a limited scale. In my opinion, there is no real reason you can&#x27;t learn this way.<p>Teaching math this way is likely perfectly fine for middle school

I&#x27;m really excited for ML analysis of education, problem solving, and information retention on various pupils.

Year 2110. Citizen Interface is a mandatory implant into newborns brain.

The criticisms quoted in this article are rather poor. First the contention that AI is better for rote tasks. Not true -- this is an old and outdated view. Also the pooh-poohing of mere knowledge. You know, our democracies could benefit from more people understanding statistics and&#x2F;or chemistry. If you understand first year physics + chemistry + biology + math + econ + psych, you get a pretty useful model of how the world works. If you really get those subjects, you&#x27;re able to make all kinds of inferences and guesses that turn out to be right surprisingly often.<p>As a game developer, I have a lot of exposure to the art-school types, and it&#x27;s amazing how poor their grasp is of how anything works, other than EDIT: s&#x2F;humans&#x2F;human emotions&#x2F; and human-centric narrative.