AI, Education, & Jobs. We Need To Scrap Everything.

FUTURE

Few times in my AI analyst career have I seen the future of AI so clearly in my mind as after studying its impact on education.

AI’s capacity to transform education has long been considered one of the supreme use cases, not only for its potential to improve us, but also because, well, you might want to teach your kids how to use the technology that allegedly changes everything; it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Knowing this, one would expect that, by now, we should be seeing transformative results; however, the reality is quite different. But not because AIs aren’t good.

We are the problem.

Today, we look at:

The state of AI and its impact on education, based on studies from around the world, from Nigeria to MIT,

unique experiments being done to give birth to ‘AI-native’ schools,

My personal guide to using AIs for learning (which is, and will always be, my primary use case for these models).

Finally, we will use our conclusions to demonstrate why not only is the current education system flawed, but so is our labor market.

Enjoy!

State of AI Education

To start, let’s cover what the research is saying about the use of AI in education.

From Nigeria to Texas

The first thing to understand is that research reveals a mixed picture regarding the impact of AI in education.

As this article explains, a test in a school in Nigeria using GPT-4 allowed kids (especially women) to progress the equivalent of two years in just six weeks. The premise was to utilize Generative AI tools as tutors for students to assess whether they improved their English grades.

But not only that, they improved in all categories. As shown below, the probability mass shifted toward higher scores, meaning that the overall grades increased.

Moving on, another piece by the World Economic Forum describes a particularly successful use case by Squirrel AI in China. At a rural primary school in Hubei province, students began taking lessons with an AI tutor from the company Squirrel AI.

After just one month, the school observed “significant improvement in students’ grades, engagement, and confidence”. Squirrel AI’s adaptive learning system diagnoses each student’s knowledge gaps and delivers tailored lessons and practice.

Such AI tutors are helping to fill teacher shortages in remote areas; Squirrel AI now operates in over 2,000 learning centers, serving 24 million students across China. Notably, the company has provided millions of free accounts to low-income families, showing how AI can expand access to quality tutoring.

But in some places, they are taking it a wild step further. In Texas, we have what may be considered the first “AI Native” School, in which kids start leveraging AI from the get-go.

The school, called ‘Alpha School’, has a revolutionary approach: it utilizes personalized artificial intelligence to teach an entire day of core academic lessons in just two hours.

And what do they do the rest of the day? Non-academic activities, such as public speaking and financial…

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