To learn from an AI like this, you have to have an intrinsic desire to learn something new. You want to know something, so you ask the ai. You care about what it has to say because you actively want to know the answer.

In general, the majority of students k-12 in the US so not possess this intrinsic desire to learn for all or even most of their courses. Good teachers find ways to build relationships with the students and build connections from the content to the students' lives in order to help foster that intrinsic desire.

That's a piece that will be extremely difficult to recreate because of how individualized it is.

Take for example a student who wants to know more about physics. They ask an AI to explain some concept. If the explanation is too high level, they'll then need to ask the ai to explain the pieces of it to them and break it down until they can build up their understanding. This requires a kind of meta cognition that most students don't develop easily. And at each step where they don't understand and need it broken down further, it's another block causing them to reconsider how much they actually care about learning the information in the first place.

For upper level students or very motivated individuals, I think ai could potentially get there. But for the majority of schooling at primary and secondary levels, I think we are going to need teachers for a very long time.

Have you tried to teach before? Every student learns so differently, and the best teachers are learning while they teach (think of professors who both research in their field and teach, but it applies to other teachers). Students ask fascinating questions. Feynman talks in many places about how much teaching helped his research. Also, office hours are for befriending students because elements of their home life affect how they learn, and you really need to get an idea of how they think.

There’s lots of ways AIs could assist learning and self-education: I’d love to have something that could pre-read books and papers with an eye to subjects I’m interested in and bring those to me. It would also be great if students had something at home that could direct them to parts of a textbook that were relevant to a homework problem they didn’t understand and suggest supplementary materials like videos, but you’re always going to need a human teacher in the mix. Maybe you could save that teacher a lot of stress by having an AI build rough lesson plans and materials that they only had to tweak (teachers can spend all vacation writing a lesson plan), and then the teacher could focus their time on helping students one on one.

So the AI would be educating and training people?