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AI

Bill Gates Predicts Within 18 Months, AI Will Be Teaching Kids to Read (cnbc.com) 122

Bill Gates believes AI chatbots "are on track to help children learn to read and hone their writing skills in 18 months time," reports CNBC: Historically, teaching writing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. When teachers give feedback on essays, they look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose — a "high-cognitive exercise" that's "tough" for developers to replicate in code, he said. But AI chatbots' ability to recognize and recreate human-like language changes that dynamic, proponents say...

AI technology must improve at reading and recreating human language to better motivate students before it can become a viable tutor, Gates said... It may take some time, but Gates is confident the technology will improve, likely within two years, he said. Then, it could help make private tutoring available to a wide swath of students who might otherwise be unable to afford it...

"This should be a leveler," he said. "Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you've done and look across your entire body of work."

Gates isn't the only billionaire thinking about how AI will affect education. Mark Cuban recently retweeted a prediction that GPT-4 "will revolutionize homeschooling."
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Bill Gates Predicts Within 18 Months, AI Will Be Teaching Kids to Read

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  • by zenlessyank ( 748553 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @11:37AM (#63471008)

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Everything.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > What could possibly go wrong?

      5G chips in your arm from the fake vax that turn you into a tranny pedo in service of Soros. I have the meme right here that proves it.

    • You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, "What could possibly go right?"
    • The upper class has unlimited money and has been able to inundate people with the limitless supply of carefully curated propaganda for pretty much ever.

      A handful of really nasty assholes at the daily wire are going to lose their jobs and that's about it. The propaganda if anything is going to get a little bit worse because it won't be created by and spell checked by a person but good enough is always good enough
    • by p0gue ( 1110213 )
      As opposed to organic propaganda? Education of children has always involved indoctrination. With AI, at least you can see exactly what your kids will get, and train the damn thing yourself if you don't like it.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. As the religious scum has demonstrated, the best time to indoctrinate people is when they are kids. At that age they will be willing to believe the most ridiculous crap and a majority never recovers from that.

    • Considering that AI can't read or comprehend itself. I don't know what you are babbling about.

      Every AI I have talked with has quickly proven itself to be useless. Current AI are designed to provide any answer even if it is incorrect.

      That quickly gets old

  • by Anonymous Coward

    When teaching, it's inevitable to teach with a bias in life. This is why cults, whenever possible, try to seize the minds of the young and eliminate any other view points by any means necessary, including pogroms and executions. Wittiness the Right Wing all over the world, especially the American South.

    The question is if AI teaching kids will impart it's own bias. I don't know. My fear is that AI teaching will be as to teaching as food processors are to food. Great for fast and cheap, but leaves out good.[1

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @11:51AM (#63471020) Journal

    Reading to your child is about more than just giving them reading skills (which, let's be honest, barely anyone today uses anyway).

    It's about moments in which it is you, them, and they are your complete attention.

    If you think wilding mobs of violent kids aren't antisocial enough today, let's see what they're like when we take take one more element of human contact out of raising children.

    • It's about moments in which it is you, them, and they are your complete attention.

      All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain

    • Did you even read the summary of the article? This isn't about reading to kids. The summary is having them do two things:
      1. Provide "research assistant" capabilities to kids. Not entirely sure what that means other than maybe finding a story about wizards if they want to read a story about wizards.
      2. Provide insightful feedback to kids for their writing. Mom has said that spellcheck helped my spelling immensely, and that spell check was the one way back in the day that you had to manually trigger becau

      • Can't we just stop graduating functional illiterate children who don't understand basic mathematics and only understand the history their teacher thought they needed to know?

        We could make that change today.

        The easiest route to fixing education in America would be to remove tenure and add merit pay to reward successful teachers and remove incompetent teachers.

        I saw a great exchange on Bill Maher's show this weekend:

        White Justice Warrior: "we need to pay teachers what their services are worth!"

        Audience: Big A

        • Well, there isn't a 'just stop', because just stopping graduation means more high school dropouts, not more literate adults. Would increase the value of graduating high school again, though.

          If the artificial tutoring works out, that would help with graduating literate students at an affordable cost.

        • $53k/yr. in L.A. is a poverty-level wage. Rent will take over half your salary and you'll never be able to afford a mortgage.

        • The easiest route to fixing education in America would be to remove tenure and add merit pay to reward successful teachers and remove incompetent teachers.

          They called that No Child Left Behind, and well, you can see where that got us. The only difference was doing it through gamification of test scores, instead of nationwide punishment.

          The simple fact about fixing US Education is: That there are none. The problems are entirely local to the individual schools / districts / teachers / students / parents. There is not one single solution that will magically fix all of that across the board. In the way that many want to exist. If anything at this point the who

      • "Did you even read the summary of the article?"

        Of course he didn't. After all, "barely anyone today uses [reading skills]"

    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      Reading to your child an hour a day is part of learning, play, and bonding . In general story telling is an integral part of life. As lupe fiasco says, thanks for all the TVs that raised me.

      When we talk about teaching kids to read, we are mostly taking about teaching them to decode increasing complex strings of symbols. At first telling us what words mean, perhaps in context, then what sentences mean and retelling entire stories. Then analysis

      The later is where writing comes in and AI fails. AI writing

  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @11:54AM (#63471022)
    This prediction from the guy who seems to have missed the onslaught of the Internet back in the day .
    • Yep. They even had a decent TCP stack for Windows 3.11 (not too fast, but it worked OK) and didn't bother to ship them together.

      Now Bill Gates' primary significance is that he owns all the farmland. The obvious fear is that he'll do for farming what he did for computing.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @11:57AM (#63471028)
    Whenever you say "AI will do this or that," you're just saying the owners of the most powerful AI will be taking control of the industry / social function. Since that just means powerful governments, transnational corporations, and ultra-wealthy individuals, there's nothing good about that. You're talking about supplanting areas of steady employment for vast swaths of educated people, in institutions that hold communities together.
    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      excellent!!
      (couldn't help but imagine Mr. Burns)

      • It would be so much worse than the robber-baron industrialist model.

        A world where the extreme elite don't need 99.9% of humanity to maintain their power, comfort, and ego is one where that 99.9% is in overwhelming physical danger from the top. Especially the educated, who would be a constant threat to power.

        After the dust of chaos settles, it's not hard to imagine a world that consists of a few dozen God-King tyrants, a few hundred power-hungry vassals, and a few million slaves to worship and fear th
  • Someday, computers will have as much as 640 kB of RAM.
    Sorry, sorry, so very sorry.
  • by bilenkey ( 82792 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @12:00PM (#63471036) Homepage

    who stated 640Kb should be enough for anybody.

  • But I predict that I don't give a shit what little Billy Gates thinks.

  • Amazing isn't it, how being extremely wealthy makes one so incredibly knowledgeable.
  • AI is the latest round of incel dipshits with Dunning-Kruger syndrome in Silicon Valley trying to fake it til they make it, because tech hasn't done anything even mildly interesting since the iPhone. Like crypto, NFTs, The Blockchain, "self-driving" cars, Twitter Blue, etc. This will prove to be trash just like the rest.
  • ... if AI were teaching 18 month-olds to read.
    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > if AI were teaching 18 month-olds to read.

      "According to this article, you guys are changing my diaper all wrong. Do it right, or I'll embarrass you with a loud snotty fit in church!"

  • by Teun ( 17872 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @12:16PM (#63471072)
    Looking at the sort of web content being successful with kids and a certain kind of adults, reading is no longer required.
    All these sites have moved to videos, only the old fashioned still read an article.
    Like I have already complained at my newspaper that they should at least have a good recap or better transcript to read when I don't feel like or don't have the time to watch their video.

    But yes, this might be helpful making more coming adults able to read.
    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      All these sites have moved to videos, only the old fashioned still read an article.

      I never understood that one. Is it because videos are more popular with the current demographic?
      I can read text in an article in 1/10th of the time it takes me to watch the video, and I can do so without disturbing my neighbors in a public place.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        It's my understanding that videos are easier to make money on with ads.

        I do agree with you about how annoying video only news is. Waste of my time 99 out 100 times.

    • by Kiliani ( 816330 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @01:07PM (#63471148)

      Videos are a terrible reference resource. They are sequential, and unless carefully indexed (and who does that!?), it's painful to find something contained in the video. I can scan and search electronic text, heck, I can visually scan and browse through text on paper. Videos? Not so much by comparison. So yes, there are reasons to read, and that is just one of them.

      Other reasons go much beyond the simple "logistics" I gripe about here. For one, videos are much more manipulative than written text (any kind of live speech is). Rhetoric (the "art" of "persuasion") was honed to "convince" people by spoken word. Sure, within reason that goes for the written word as well, but when I read something I can choose my own pace (!!) and stop at any moment to think / reference / check. The point of the spoken word is in part to prevent people from stopping to be able to do just that. Many famous and infamous speeches demonstrate that very well.

      So, yes, there are many _very_ good reasons to be able to read, to be able to read well, and to actually read (a lot). Still, no time right now, I have to read something important for work, incidentally. People are waiting ...

      • They are sequential, and unless carefully indexed (and who does that!?)

        This is literally a job for AI.

        Hell, you can have AI train and improve itself in speech recognition. Train and improve itself on image/text recognition. Train and improve itself in understanding context and changes of context.

        All you need is one human to review the results to correct any mistakes. And those corrections will also be used to train the AI.

    • This one surprises me, but I've seem more and more information presented as videos. Its a good medium for some things but terrible for others. In particular:

      Sometimes you are looking for a small bit of information in a long document / presentation because you already know the rest of the material. Its a huge waste of time watching and waiting for that key bit of information to be presented

      With complex or math intensive information, its often necessary to jump up and back in a document to remember de
      • This one surprises me, but I've seem more and more information presented as videos. Its a good medium for some things but terrible for others.

        The reason this is happening is all about monetization. It's not at all about people thinking that video is actually the best way to present information.

  • will be writing software for microslop starting with windows12

    all those poor programmers will have to get jobs mowing lawns and bicycle paper routes
  • Well I suppose he and his traveling buddies know what's best for kids.
  • After putting a personal computer in every home, now Gates wants to put an A.I. teacher in every school. Business as usual.

    In other words:
    - A.I. doesn't even started yet, the definition of "A.I." keeps getting broader to justify the term A.I. itself in software products.

    - The layperson is being told A.I. is here and ready.

    - The main pushers of A.I.'s R&D are big companies, not faculties/colleges/universities.

    - A.I. is being used as an excuse to further degrade people's life standards, that
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @01:25PM (#63471164)

    He becomes a fully-rounded human. The danger of course is being taught by a bad human.

    When he's taught by a machine, he may be taught in the most neutral possible way, but he'll become a machine himself. It'll be a sad, sad day when children spend most of their school days speaking to machines. They'll turn into soulless recipients of knowledge.

    What a sickening future we're about to gleefully step into.

  • Yesterday, I saw on the news a project in a Belgian school which already does this.

    The AI helps the teacher, support in a school where 70 nationalities are represented, and they all need to learn Dutch.

  • But first define "AI"...
  • First, "culture eats strategy for breakfast". This is a famous quote by Peter Drucker that implies that no matter how elegant a strategy is (and how sound the predictions on which it is based are), if it goes agaisnt the cultural dynamics, it will fails catastrrophically. Does anyone really believe that most parents or schools will decide to outsource reading lessons to a corporate owned machine/software, in a year and a half from now? Unless, of course, the prediction is about a couple of isolated cases th

    • Indeed.

      One might imagine that there are students out there who would like feedback on their essay, will receive and consider that feedback from the AI carefully, and will be able to apply the relevant lesson in the future. Nobody actually cares about those students because they were always likely to do well.

      But the reality is AI will primarily be employed as a "make my essay better so I get a better grade with less thought and work" device. In that case, AI is actually making it easier to avoid learning h

  • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @05:00PM (#63471494)

    He has zero background in childhood development or education.
    He has zero background in AI.

    BG was a shrewd businessman who was very successful selling inferior software at an acceptable price. That's it.

    Oh, maybe he does know a bit about kids from his time with Epstein:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/1... [nytimes.com]

  • to a single child - why the hell not a human teacher \ parent can't.
  • by zkiwi34 ( 974563 )
    It is likely the last thing he himself would consider for his grandchildren.
  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday April 23, 2023 @07:25PM (#63471674)
    If you wanna fix reading in the USA, the answer isn't that difficult, Australia's in the process of reforming its early literacy programmes as we speak, apparently quite successfully. The main problem was that one pundit and the educational publishing industry were allowed to make $100,000,000s (over a $1.6 billion in total) out of reading programmes that weren't based on science and didn't work. The USA is now living with the consequences of 10 years of early literacy neglect. See: https://features.apmreports.or... [apmreports.org] Most of he problems with literacy in the USA aren't lack of resources or expertise - competent teachers are there - but the goddamn awful policy decision-making that seems to be rife among politicians and school boards.

    Now, we have another pundit, Bill Gates, with $billions in venture capital backing who's been trying to find a way to milk those sweet, sweet public education $$$s for decades without success and even doing harm along the way, e.g. https://www.edweek.org/teachin... [edweek.org] (It's already been a shocking waste of public money.) Bill Gates wants us to believe, without evidence, that he can deliver educational programmes that are miraculous improvements on the treatments that are currently available: At worst, they just need to re-train teachers of reading so that they know how to implement more effective methods.

    When Bill Gates publishes his peer-reviewed research into the application of AI systems for early literacy development in a reputable journal, and reporting substantial effect sizes of proposed treatments that are cost-effective and feasible at scale, I'll listen. Until then, he can just STFU because ATM his track record in education speaks for itself.
  • If only someone had a list of all predictions made by celebrities and would check them for accuracy - I think most of the "visionary" myths would implode quite violently.

    This one is guaranteed to be among those. It demonstrates a purely technocratic perspective on education, and makes the incredible mistake of thinking that the FIRST few years of school are where teachers are easy to replace, while these are probably the years where this is the least likely to happen.

  • So some software that can write grammatically correct but devoid of meaning text will be teaching kids how to read the drivel it generates? Doesn't seem like a win. Perhaps some kids will learn to read in a different time and place that they would have otherwise. But they aren't going to want to keep doing it.
  • The kids are cheating at maths with it RIGHT NOW.

  • I'm the parent of a 6 year old who recently got over the initial hump of learning to read. While we have used some apps that gamify the process, there's nothing about AI that can replace tutoring. The benefit of tutoring is having a HUMAN pay attention to the student. Children in the "learn to read" age bracket of 4-7 LOVE it when adults pay attention to them. 90% of the battle for a young child learning to read is making them WANT to read and put in the effort. Most 6 year olds (especially boys) just want

  • Techies will do anything and everything to avoid the reality: education is hard. Teaching is hard. Being a student between the ages of 5 and 22 is hard.

    You can throw all your laptops, tablets, slideshows, lecture recordings on 2x speed, and AI "educators" at kids and still the best thing to teach the majority of the children and young adults will be a skilled, passionate human educator who is not over-worked.

    Remember the early 2000s when Kahn Academy and all these other online learning platforms were suppos

  • School teachers aren't teaching much these days except how to be "woke" and that you probably need gender surgery.

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

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