Midweek Quick Take: what about AI learning?

A reader wonders what I think of Alpha School

Relieved to find the world still here when I woke up this morning. So on the basis that the End Times might not be Happening Right Now after all (phew, and let’s hope it stays that way) a quick post to share something that’s been on my mind about AI and learning.

A reader messaged me to ask what I think of the Alpha school, where children reportedly get amazing results by spending two hours a day being tutored by AI and the rest doing other, more active stuff.

Doesn’t this argue against the need to re-humanise learning, he wonders? Couldn’t we perhaps use AI to replace annoying, inefficient human teachers?

Ok, so: I don’t know a huge amount about this school, but from what I’ve seen it seems on the face of it not crazy to try and tilt kids’ experience back toward social formation. Especially if the parents aspire for the kids thus formed to become tech-elite adults, rather than factory workers. Even so, I reject out of hand the implicit assumption that knowledge is an inert substance that can be delivered by robots. This is a predictable category error for tech people to make, but a category error nonetheless.

Knowledge can be codified to an extent, but making it your own always requires movement toward knowledge by the learner. Classically, that happens in relationship. To illustrate: in our home, we use Duolingo to support my daughter’s language learning, and there are clearly some benefits to digital tutors of this kind. But from my observation there’s an additional stage to learning, where the material must be metabolised and then applied in a human-to-human context. By definition the robot can’t supply that.

In our case, for example, metabolism doesn’t really happen until our summer visit to family friends in Italy, where she gets to practice what she’s learned. From observation, an impressive level of Duolingo proficiency doesn’t map straightforwardly into the same level of proficiency in the wild, talking to other humans. But this isn’t to say AI-assisted language learning has zero effect. She clearly has more of an intuitive grasp of the structure of Italian now, than she would have done without the Duolingo practice.

Is this overall any better than the same amount of time spent in industrial-type classrooms, sitting through Italian lessons taught by a human? Hard to say. Certainly, I don’t know that classroom-based Italian lessons at school over the same period would have delivered more understanding. My hunch, though, is that either would pale into insignificance next to the same amount of time spent learning Italian one-to-one from a human tutor. I loved Will Orr-Ewing’s recent post on this topic:

Why we need a new era of old-school tutoring

All of this is to say I think it’s a mistake to infer, from the results achieved by a small cohort of carefully-parented offspring of wealthy, high-IQ tech-world parents, that AI education can be beneficially scaled to everyone. At best it suggests there might be smart ways it can be used as an extension to existing systems, if employed judiciously alongside the indispensable relational component of learning.

My gut feel, though, is that if we assume that knowledge is inert, and can be delivered by robots including to the less able and those unsupported by good home environments, the result will be no better, and perhaps worse, than even the current obviously sometimes sub-optimal industrial, classroom style of teaching. As for how such education contributes to overall formation of persons, even elite ones, it’s probably best to withhold judgement on the Alpha education model until we can see its adult fruit.

What do you think? Are you rabidly anti-AI in all respects? Suspicious of it in learning? Cautiously supportive as a tool? All in on replacing teachers? Tell me what you think in the comments.