The School That Replaces Teachers With AI

Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to “mastery-level” (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in ‘workshops,’ learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone.” Founder MacKenzie Larson’s dream that “kids must love school so much they don’t want to go on vacation” drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson’s school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. “When GenAI hit in 2022,” Liemandt said, “I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to be able to take MacKenzie’s 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.’ It’s going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they’re going to love it.

“I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that’s my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I’m like, I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don’t think I’m going to lose. We’re going to win.”

Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: “Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child’s teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child’s academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless…. Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they’re just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child’s deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.

“If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?”