Found on metafilter, along with this excellent comment:
Learning will be increasingly self-directed, says Liz Gerber, co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design at Northwestern University. The future classroom is “going to be hyper-personalized.” AI tutors could help with one-on-one instruction or repetitive sports drills.
No it won’t. Learning has been going to be “increasingly self-directed” since before I was born, but it turns out, in fact, that you need to have a certain amount of maturity and focus before “self-directed” means anything more than “goofing off as much as possible” or possibly, just possibly, “intense focus only on those things that interest me intensely”. What will happen is that the children of the poor and the less-involved middle class will have shitty digital “tutors” in chaotic classrooms or goof off in isolation while the children of the rich are taught the old-fashioned way, by talented individual humans with only such technology as supports focused, human-centered learning. “Learning will be increasingly self-directed” will be used as a justification for treating everyone but the rich badly.
Furthermore, if people do have digital spy tutors looking over their shoulders, they will either be janky and kids will devote a lot of time to fooling them or they’ll be creepy surveillance that will fuck the kids up, or probably both. At best, these will be simulations of people and kids will learn to have “relationships” with fake people that don’t exist, don’t think or judge and do not love them, and IT optimists will somehow spin this as great and helpful. (I suppose there is some possibility that we will create and enslave actual conscious AI, which will be a nightmare in its own way).
