This Salman Khan book shows how AI can transform education systems globally

'Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)', by Khan Academy founder, is a valuable read for those puzzling over AI's role in education and society at large

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing)

Author: Salman Khan

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 234

Price: Rs 899

When I picked up this book to read, I fully expected the usual tirade against artificial intelligence (AI) and the great damage that it would do to the educational system, and this was because the “tutorial college” that the author had founded and run since 2008 looked the kind of online academy that would be vulnerable to the AI wave. After all, as Wikipedia says, the Khan Academy serves 137 million students over 190 countries, of which 80 per cent-plus are in the United States.

As I made my way through the book, I found myself surprised. The author spells out in a rational and persuasive manner the variety of ways AI is going to improve the world’s education systems.

The book starts with an account of how the field of AI came to be. It started out as early as 1948, when Clause Shannon, the famous mathematician then working at Bell Labs in the US, started experiments that allowed him to predict, by looking at a sequence of words in a sentence, what word would come next in that sequence. Mr Khan then describes the work of Alan Turing, who during World War II used mathematical techniques to decode German codes and thus helped the Allies gain advantage over Nazi Germany.

He then points out that in our current era, because most well-paid entry-level jobs are in software engineering and data science, there is an almost universal anxiety in the US and Europe that these jobs may be eliminated in western countries because of outsourcing such work to countries such as India. Mr Khan points out that using AI tools (called co-pilots) by programmers could increase the productivity of programmers and software engineers to such an extent that such outsourcing may not be as rampant as it is now. These professions (and even others such as copyrighting) will find new strength if these practitioners master the use of AI in their creative work. He quotes studies done by the Wharton School that show that using AI saw a 30 to 80 per cent performance improvement in many high-powered white-collar analytical tasks.

Mr Khan’s socially driven viewpoint becomes clear when he points out that in school and college education so far only a minuscule few who were exposed to high quality education could potentially become outstanding geniuses. But he asks, “For every person born with the raw material to be Albert Einstein or Marie Curie, how many get the education and support to do so?” He concludes that an educational system that uses the right AI teaching tools “could increase by a factor of ten or one hundred the number of people capable of making the next major scientific, artistic, or entrepreneurial leap”.

When talk about “AI and Education start,” the immediate response very often is :“Will AI and online Education not make our teachers unemployed?”. Here, the author (correctly, in my view) points out that school teachers are (he speaks of American ones, but I know for sure this is true for teachers in India as well) “overworked and overstretched, their emotional and mental exhaustion is untenable, with the average teacher working fifty-four hours a week”, and consequently, AI as a teaching assistant can help make a school teacher’s life more productive and enjoyable. He then gives many examples of how this works.

I started wondering how a “tutorial college” owner could espouse such idealistic ambitions for students and decided to check out more facts about Mr Khan and his Khan Academy that I had so quickly tagged a “tutorial college”, a name that is used pejoratively, at least in India.  It turns out that Khan Academy is a non-profit. And about Salman Khan, the founder, here is what Wikipedia says: “Salman Amin Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana ,on October 11, 1976, but his mother is from Calcutta, India, and his father is from Barisal, Bangladesh. Mr Khan is an alumnus of MIT and Harvard Business School and has degrees from both institutions”.

Khan Academy apparently sustains itself with funding contributions from the likes of Bill Gates, Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix) and Elon Musk.

Because of the extensive discussion about the issue in the book and because of the writer’s easy-to-understand language, this book will be a valuable read for all of us puzzling over the role of AI in education and in society at large.
Email: ajitb@rediffmail.com