Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano Nightmare Is Here
AI school expanding reach, schools without teachers are here
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano predicted a world run by machines - supercomputers. An artificial intelligence that rendered work unnecessary for most.
Humans in this world fill their time watching paid college athletes grind it out on the football field.
The football part has been here for a while now.
Now, an expanding network of schools where the teachers are AI programs promises to solve the teacher shortage by making human teachers obsolete.
Katya Schwenk takes a deeper dive into this horror-scape.
Academic instruction in Price’s schools is delivered via a suite of online education apps for two hours per day, leaving the afternoons free for Cybertruck construction and tech CEO make-believe. This is the brand around which her work revolves: 2 Hour Learning, which is billed as an “AI tutor” that can entirely replace all classroom teachers via a few hours spent glued to a laptop screen.
Not surprisingly, former Trump fan and resource-hoarder Elon Musk backs this venture - no doubt due to his own interests in advancing AI and the need he’ll have for an AI-trained workforce:
Price, armed with growing online fame, is the face of an expanding web of private and charter schools that are deploying 2 Hour Learning tech across the country. Backing the effort is a secretive tech billionaire in Texas, as well as Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, which, the Lever found, is providing programming and transportation to a school near the company’s main campus in South Texas. These benefactors are emblematic of the powerful special interests behind the new wave of “alternative education” models that have brought Price so much success.
It’s not just in Texas - this nightmare is expanding, even grasping for public dollars via AI charter schools:
Buoyed by the hype, 2 Hour Learning is seeing rapid expansion. In January, Price was approved to launch a virtual charter school in Arizona, 2 Hour Learning’s first foray into public education. The company claims that this fall, seven new brick-and-mortar private schools, from New York to Florida to California, will open their doors to students.
How does it “work?”
The central premise here — across all the various schools — is the claim that students learn between two and three times faster when they use their laptops, with the assistance of 2 Hour Learning’s technology. “No teachers, only AI apps,” Price says on her Instagram, again and again. In one recent viral video, students sit curled up in desk chairs in phone-booth-sized pods, staring at their computers.
I wonder if these AI-based schools encourage kids to read books like those from Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, among others. Texts that predicted an advanced, tech-driven society - one where fulfillment was tough to find, but distraction was readily available.
Perhaps the future is the plugged-in kid who grows up to plug in to work - pointing and clicking, Severance-style.