Comment by havercosine

I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.

Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.

Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.

This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.