His prophecy must be called what it is: a horror disguised as progress, the crowning insult of a technocratic age that dreams of perfect control but births only deeper alienation.
Poor Bill Gates struggles to find himself relevant and interesting. I can imagine myself sitting down for a beer with Elon Musk or even with Jeff Bezos. I cannot imagine how insufferable it would be to have to spend even a few minutes with Gates. His money can buy him attention; understanding, compassion, empathy and all of the things that differentiate us from robots and mainframes are priceless, and can never be bought except through experience and personal effort. I suspect that 100 years from now Gates will not even merit a footnote in history books.
So apt, and so beautifully expressed. There is an incalculable value in proper communication between human beings. The inexpressible wonder of a child relieved of intolerable burdens by the correct knowledge sensitively given as well as the joy of the teacher who was able to provide acceptable truth cannot be overstated. Perhaps these AI pushers have never experienced true communication between a teacher and a pupil at the most human level and are the poorer for these life changing lacks.
This is brilliant and beautifully written. After a mere few hours of phonics and cursive work with first graders, I can only laugh at how Gates thinks an AI robot could replace this. Like to see him handle a full classroom! He will have peed in his pants before the day is over.
I get that you don’t want AI to replace teachers (neither do I), but I don’t think the relevant question from Gates’ comments is whether it’s a good idea so much as whether it’s an accurate prediction. Do you believe it’s an accurate prediction that teachers will have been replaced by AI in ten years?
Side note: there may be some people/neurotypes who learn better from AIs than others. I don’t know that much about Gates’ education, but he strikes me as someone capable of learning a lot on his own and maybe that’s why he would see AI even as an improvement. Communion may not matter that much too him but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t learned a lot.
To read Gates’s pronouncements as predictions is already to fall under the spell of the magician who pretends to divine the weather while seeding the clouds himself. His utterances, glinting with the antiseptic sheen of techno-utopianism, are not prognostications in the classical, sibylline sense, but promotional artifacts—subtle propaganda disguised as futurist insight. What is advertised as inevitability is in fact a desire, a preference dressed up in the lab coat of neutrality. One does not merely wonder if AI will replace teachers in ten years; one should instead note that Gates, whose philanthropic ventures in education have long treated human development like a software problem, wants it to be so.
Gates, after all, is the man who pumped hundreds of millions into Common Core with the assumption that cognitive development could be standardized like Excel spreadsheets; who once opined that good teaching could be captured on video and optimized like a codec. He’s the engineer who keeps mistaking the soul for an algorithm, a conversation for a data set, the classroom for a dashboard. In interviews, his gleeful invocations of AI tutors reveal more than strategic optimism; they betray a kind of ontological illiteracy, a failure to grasp that education is not the transfer of information but the slow ignition of wonder through human presence, conflict, silence, error, mercy.
So no, one cannot accept the terms of the question—whether the prediction is “accurate”—without conceding too much to a worldview that sees the child as a user interface and the teacher as a buggy feature soon to be deprecated. The deeper truth is that Gates’s forecast is less meteorology and more marketing; it’s not about what’s coming, but about what he’d like to sell us next.
I think the distinction between a prediction and a wish (or the wish masquerading as a prediction) is an important one and also very Sibylline: the Sibyl in Aen 6 prophesying Augustan Rome seems like a case in point. Probably all predictions should be vetted for latent desire.
I suppose the answer lies in what the purpose of education is. Most people believe it is earning a living; in which case, AI is a possibility to be considered.
If an education is something more than vocational training, is it even possible for humans to be replaced? I don’t believe so.
I started jotting down paragraphs from this essay into my notebook, until I realised I was writing out the whole thing. For the next month, I know I'll be punctuating all conversations/debates about AI with, "Hold on, I have to read you this line from this essay..."
Yet, Gates is the canary in the coal mine. I have been reading AI essays in order to evaluate its ability. Vacuous. The smell of deathly decay.
Poor Bill Gates struggles to find himself relevant and interesting. I can imagine myself sitting down for a beer with Elon Musk or even with Jeff Bezos. I cannot imagine how insufferable it would be to have to spend even a few minutes with Gates. His money can buy him attention; understanding, compassion, empathy and all of the things that differentiate us from robots and mainframes are priceless, and can never be bought except through experience and personal effort. I suspect that 100 years from now Gates will not even merit a footnote in history books.
Gorgeously written. Gates serves his cult.
So apt, and so beautifully expressed. There is an incalculable value in proper communication between human beings. The inexpressible wonder of a child relieved of intolerable burdens by the correct knowledge sensitively given as well as the joy of the teacher who was able to provide acceptable truth cannot be overstated. Perhaps these AI pushers have never experienced true communication between a teacher and a pupil at the most human level and are the poorer for these life changing lacks.
This is brilliant. Especially like the phrase second rate Delphi oracle.
What can replace Bill Gates? And the sooner the better!
This is brilliant and beautifully written. After a mere few hours of phonics and cursive work with first graders, I can only laugh at how Gates thinks an AI robot could replace this. Like to see him handle a full classroom! He will have peed in his pants before the day is over.
I get that you don’t want AI to replace teachers (neither do I), but I don’t think the relevant question from Gates’ comments is whether it’s a good idea so much as whether it’s an accurate prediction. Do you believe it’s an accurate prediction that teachers will have been replaced by AI in ten years?
Side note: there may be some people/neurotypes who learn better from AIs than others. I don’t know that much about Gates’ education, but he strikes me as someone capable of learning a lot on his own and maybe that’s why he would see AI even as an improvement. Communion may not matter that much too him but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t learned a lot.
To read Gates’s pronouncements as predictions is already to fall under the spell of the magician who pretends to divine the weather while seeding the clouds himself. His utterances, glinting with the antiseptic sheen of techno-utopianism, are not prognostications in the classical, sibylline sense, but promotional artifacts—subtle propaganda disguised as futurist insight. What is advertised as inevitability is in fact a desire, a preference dressed up in the lab coat of neutrality. One does not merely wonder if AI will replace teachers in ten years; one should instead note that Gates, whose philanthropic ventures in education have long treated human development like a software problem, wants it to be so.
Gates, after all, is the man who pumped hundreds of millions into Common Core with the assumption that cognitive development could be standardized like Excel spreadsheets; who once opined that good teaching could be captured on video and optimized like a codec. He’s the engineer who keeps mistaking the soul for an algorithm, a conversation for a data set, the classroom for a dashboard. In interviews, his gleeful invocations of AI tutors reveal more than strategic optimism; they betray a kind of ontological illiteracy, a failure to grasp that education is not the transfer of information but the slow ignition of wonder through human presence, conflict, silence, error, mercy.
So no, one cannot accept the terms of the question—whether the prediction is “accurate”—without conceding too much to a worldview that sees the child as a user interface and the teacher as a buggy feature soon to be deprecated. The deeper truth is that Gates’s forecast is less meteorology and more marketing; it’s not about what’s coming, but about what he’d like to sell us next.
I think the distinction between a prediction and a wish (or the wish masquerading as a prediction) is an important one and also very Sibylline: the Sibyl in Aen 6 prophesying Augustan Rome seems like a case in point. Probably all predictions should be vetted for latent desire.
I suppose the answer lies in what the purpose of education is. Most people believe it is earning a living; in which case, AI is a possibility to be considered.
If an education is something more than vocational training, is it even possible for humans to be replaced? I don’t believe so.
I agree: https://open.substack.com/pub/sandridge/p/the-professors-most-powerful-teaching?r=4acxal&utm_medium=ios
I’d be satisfied if AI replaces Bill Gates.
Thank you for this! So well said.
I started jotting down paragraphs from this essay into my notebook, until I realised I was writing out the whole thing. For the next month, I know I'll be punctuating all conversations/debates about AI with, "Hold on, I have to read you this line from this essay..."
Hard disagree.
https://open.substack.com/pub/brokenhand/p/tacit-knowledge-and-life-in-the-swamp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=105e3