He invested heavily in a small schools initiative. It failed, because he doesn't understand how schools work.
He tried fixing teachers and playing with merit pay. He inflicted Common Core on the nation, because again, he doesn't understand how schools and teaching and education work. He has tried a variety of other smaller fixes, like throwing money at teacher professional development. He has made an almost annual event out of explaining that NOW he has things figured out (spoiler alert: he does not) and with the new tweaks, he will now transform education (spoiler alert: he does not).
I remind you of all this because nobody should be freaking out over the recent headlines that Gates has predicted that AI will replace teachers and doctors in ten years and humans will, just in general, be obsolete. The Economist called this prediction "alarming," and I suppose it might be if there were any reason to imagine that Gates can make such predictions any more accurately than the guy who takes care of my car at Jiffy Lube.
AI tutors will become broadly available and AI doctors provide great medical advice in an era of "free intelligence." It's all “very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Harvard professor Arthur Brooks (the happiness research guy).
Meanwhile, tech companies still won't make and market a printer that reliably does what it's supposed to as a reasonable price.
Ed tech is always predicting terrific new futures, because FOMO is a powerful marketing force, and making your product seem inevitable is the tech version of an old used car sales technique (called "assume the sale," you just frame the conversation as if the decision to buy the car has already been made and now we're just dickering over terms).
I'm not here to predict the future of AI. I'm sure it will be good for some things ("Compare Mrs. Smith's knee MRI image to a million other images to diagnose what's going on") and terrible for others ("ChatGPT, please answer this email from Pat's parents for me").
I'm not sure what the future holds for AI in education, and I am sure that Bill Gates has no idea, either. I am also sure I know which one of us has a better understanding of education and schools and teaching (spoiler alert: not the one with all the money).
Ed tech bros are, like Bill, putting a lot of their bot bets on AI tutors--just sit a kid down with a screen set to "Teach the student grammar and usage" and let it rip. The thing is, we've been playing with education-via-screen for decades now, and it has still not proven itself or taken off. You may recall we ran a fairly large experiment in distance learning via screen back in 2020, and people really hated it-- so much that some of them are still bitching about it.
I'm not sure what is going to be "free" about the AIU when it is so expensive to make, and I'm not sure how obsolete Gates imagines humans will be. It may be that he just dreams of a world in which he doesn't have to deal with any those meat sack Lessers.
But the thing to remember is that the Gates track record in education is the story of a lot of money burned to accomplish nothing except choking a lot of people on the smoke from the fire.
We will never escape our culture's tendency to assume that if someone has a bunch of money, they are expert at anything at which they wish to pretend to be expert. So people are always going to ask Gates what he thinks about education and its intersection with technology. I'd love to see the day when he says, "You know, I don't really know enough about education to make a comment on that," but until that day comes, we don't have to get excited about whatever he says.
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