NO MORE CLASSES, NO MORE BOOKS...

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BETTER THAN TEACHERS?

School ended for the summer in France this week, which brought to mind my far distant and not entirely lamented school days. “No more classes, no more books,” kids of my time used to sing at the end of term. “No more teachers’ ugly looks. No more Latin, no more French. No more sitting on a hard wooden bench.”

Classroom conditions have improved since then (and who any longer teaches Latin?) but apparently even the present comfort is soon to be a thing of the past. According to today’s Manchester Guardian, “AI [is] likely to spell end of traditional school classroom, leading expert says. Prof Stuart Russell says technology could result in ‘fewer teachers being employed – possibly even none’. Home schooling will become the norm, with each child having an electronic tutor. (Here’s the full report. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/07/ai-likely-to-spell-end-of-traditional-school-classroom-leading-expert-says.)

It reminded me instantly of a story by Isaac Asimov called The Fun They Had. Science fiction proved hopeless at predicting the future - it went for babies in bottles and food in pill form but missed the personal computer and feminism - but this story strikes a nerve. In it, kids in the future lament computerised home teaching, and long for the days of which they’ve only read; when children gathered at school to learn from a living teacher, used paper books, and then played together. Gosh, the fun they had…

You can read the story here. http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/funtheyhad.html

Alright, all together now. “This time next week, where shall I be? /Not in this academy. /For I shall be far away./ Tara ra ra boom de ay….”