Bill Gates Predicts AI Will Be Teaching Literacy in Eighteen Months. What Are We To Make of That?

Last year, when talk of a teacher shortage was topical, I took up the question of teaching's possibly being automated in the near term. Considering the matter it seemed to me notable that Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne's Future of Work study, which I thought overly bullish on the prospect of automation as a whole, rated teaching as one of those jobs least likely to be automated within the coming decades. Indeed, given their evaluation of the automatability of various tasks, far from seeing computers replace teachers, I pictured a scenario in which the disappearance of a great many other "knowledge worker" jobs worked by the college-educated had more people turning to teaching to make a living.

Of course, the months since I wrote that piece have been eventful from the standpoint of developments in artificial intelligence research. The excitement over progress in chatbots specifically surged with the releases of the latest iterations of OpenAI's GPT--experiments with which, in fact, convinced the authors of one notable study that "artificial general intelligence" is no longer an object of speculation, but, if only in primitive and incomplete form, a reality.

Now the cofounder and former CEO, president and chairman of the very company whose scientists produced that very study tells us that in eighteen months AI, on the way to becoming as competent as any human tutor.

Reading that statement I wondered whether it was worth remarking.

As a commentator on public affairs I have consistently found "Bill" Gates to be fairly banal--his views pretty much the standard "Davos Man" line whether the matter is poverty, intellectual property, or, as in this case, education--with Gates, one might add, far from being the most articulate, rigorous or interesting champion for his ideas. However, even if one is not impressed with his claims, or his arguments for them, the fact remains that in this culture where billionaires are so often treated as All-Knowing, All-Seeing Oracles by the courtiers of the media, and those who heed such unquestioningly, even Gates’ most unconsidered statements are accorded extreme respect by many, while Gates’ very conventionality means that what he speaks is apt to be what a great many others are already thinking--in this case, that the technology will be doing this before today's toddlers are in kindergarten. Moreover, even if they are wrong about that (Gates has been extremely bullish on the technology for some time now, rather more convinced than I am of its epoch-making nature), what he is saying and those others are thinking is apt to be what a great many will be acting on, or trying to, especially given the matter at hand. There is many a person for whom even the pretext of AI capable of even fractionally replacing the human educators they see as an expensive annoyance could be a powerful weapon--such that as the fights over math, reading, history and all the rest rage across the country's school districts, I increasingly expect to see the issue of automation enter the fight.