The first time I saw the movie Her, I thought OMG, this scene is describing the imminent end of almost all teaching jobs. If you don't understand why the AI is so attractive in this film then you might be quick to dismiss this idea. The AI is highly engaging and motivating because she cares so deeply and intimately for the man's feelings and his needs. We have all had one or maybe two teachers like that at some point in our lives. What if every teacher was like that? Personal, caring, attractive, and engaging.
In late 2021, Chinese President for Life, Pooh Xi made it illegal to teach Chinese people English online. Overnight more than 200,000 American, English, Scott, Irish, Canadian, and Australian online teachers "lost" their "jobs". At the time I suggested publicly that China had likely collected all of the lesson data they needed and therefore were now confident in shutting down the online teaching portals.
If you read the Terms of Service for the now obsolete online teaching portals, you can see that everything the teachers and students said during their millions and millions of online lessons became the property of the Chinese companies that were "employing" foreign teachers and selling lessons to Chinese people. All of that lesson interaction data was recorded. All of the lessons; at all levels of ability, covering all issues related to the smooth acquisition of English language, are now on Chinese hard drives. All of it has been transcribed into text. The text can be organized, ranked for lesson quality, packaged as "AI" lessons, and sold to the Chinese public. Bot voices and persona, like the beautifully-voiced ScarJoh, will become our near-future AI teachers. Robot AI teachers can be male, female, whatever... They can all work off the same database. Once developed, they cost only electricity to operate and they never get grouchy, or tired, or think about forming a union. The attractions of robot AI teachers are far too many to ignore and so it will happen.
The need for human English language teachers is almost over. China will be first to release robot "AI" English teachers. (They aren't really AI, but that's another story.) The Chinese have the biggest demographic need to teach English and also the biggest need to control how it is taught. I suspect that the need for almost any type of standard knowledge teaching in grades 3 to 12 is at risk of being replaced by so-called AI. On the plus side, home schooling is about to take a giant leap forward. Parents will be able to rent an interactive "AI" tutor who adapts to their child's specific needs and moves at their optimal pace. I've been working on this kind of technology for over 10 years but not the delivery component; I am focused on the adaptive science that allows a system to adjust the content flow to each student in an optimal "i+2.5" type pace (Krashen's i+1 estimate was way too pessimistic. The optimal pace for most normal brains is i+2.5, or 75% nomena / 25% phenomena.)
I had planned to make this video months ago but only finally got round to it yesterday. I think my message was going over many people's heads so I added this overly complex description. I apologize if it seems a dark message. I wonder about myself sometimes... is it me looking for problems, or do I just keep seeing problems in a world gone mad? Did you notice my salute to Free Guy in the last part of the video?
Jan 2023 Update:
ChatGPT has been released. The future is now. We are working on adapting ChatGPT into our learning systems. Exciting.