That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!

A lot of projections for future trends are made using isolated contexts, as if the world around them is not moving or changing.

Second, there exists a basic "least common denominator" existence that has held since farming was invented: we are born, we live and work, we die, and between that time we live in a house, go to school, fall in love, eat, sleep, and (more recently) read. These features of human life don't change much since they are tied to our biology, which is in turn tied to the time and place of our emergence. Books are wonderful inventions - they are low cost, require no power to operate, have a very high information density, can be shared and reused over many generations of humans. They fit us so well, we will probably never "transcend" them, just like we'll probably always have diapers and pillows, no matter how far we go. And honestly, what's wrong with that?

For the past year or so, whenever I’ve wanted to learn something from a book, I’ve downloaded the Kindle edition, converted to plain text, given it to Claude, and asked it to tutor me chapter by chapter.

Modern kids can have access to a wealth of information. AIs doing what teachers don't have time to do might actually be an improvement. I had some great teachers that went above and beyond, and also quite a few burned out not so great ones too. Modern schools weren't created to enlighten people but to turn kids into productive factory workers meeting bare minimum standards. Historically, there always was a big difference between the rich and the poor on this front. And whisking away the few smart kids and training those up properly was something left for higher education.

Modern tech creates potential for more bespoke and tailored teaching but also lots of challenges for teachers.

Physical books can be totemic symbols of learning. Just having them around is a reminder of what you've learned, or what you've been putting off if they remain unread.

Physical books are also wonderful gifts that digital can never replicate. A wise old man once gave me a book that he cherished and had been given to him in commemoration of his contribution to its production (it was a very important book). Every one of the hundreds of pages was filled with many of his annotations. Whenever I read from it, I am connected to him and his study. What would be the equivalent for digital? Giving someone a used phone?

Are LLMs actually capable of re-producing a good-enough simulation of the Oxford model? Will this simulation of the Oxford model produce better educational outcomes at scale - something that has been theorized but was of course far too expensive to prove - when deployed to the masses through public education? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell.

For what it's worth - I don't think books will become obsolete, either in schools or anywhere else. Paper books might become obsolete, but there is no option on the table that proposes to completely replace the art of science of having life experience and committing it to longform. As long as copyright protects its commercialibility, it will continue.

Anyone who's had the misfortune of graduating college in the past ten years and experiencing the detritus from Pearson students are forced to pay hundreds of dollars for knows this is actually a massive regression.