|
|
Hi, it's Dror Globerman here with Skip Intro, on innovation, technology, and you. This week:
1. Grades went up 18%. Then came the exam with no AI.
2. If the AI can do it anyway, why do I need to know any of this?
3. New York goes the other way: 600,000 pupils cut off from AI.
4. Only Israel Railways could manage something this daft.
5. A robot faster than Usain Bolt. Why are robots built to resemble people?
|
|
|
Chinese pupils are running rings around the rest of us. Their marks have climbed 18% over the past two and a half years, and the time they spend preparing for lessons has fallen by a third.
The researchers then set those same pupils an exam with no access to AI, and yes, you guessed right, their scores fell by 20%. Metacognitive laziness, as it is now called, has arrived. Technology charges its usual fee: dependence on one side, and expectations, mine and everyone else's, of easy wins on the other.
|
|
This was a huge study, covering nearly 27,000 pupils. Worrying? Possibly. But what does it actually tell us?
|
|
|
Know someone who would enjoy this newsletter? Send it on.
|
|
|
|
The Casio calculator watch was the obligatory accessory for every nerdy boy in my year, and I was thrilled the day I finally got one.
I spent entire nights multiplying and dividing on those pinhead buttons. Nobody imagined it would one day be plated in gold so that tattooed men in vests could feel fashionable. Only Ilan in my class insisted on doing the sums in his head, to "sharpen the mind". Today Professor Gronau is deputy dean of computer science at Reichman University, where I am barely a rank-and-file lecturer. It seems to have worked out for him.
|
|
|
But is long multiplication really a skill worth preserving? Summarising a long document? Translating between languages? Walking up to Jerusalem, which my ancestors presumably did (even 100 years ago), is no longer required either. Nor is memorising every phone number and every street name in Tel Aviv.
So which skills are we willing to surrender in order to free up time and attention for higher things? What has to be kept, and what will slip away whether we like it or not?
When change moves this fast there is no real time to understand or measure the human impact of using these tools, or of giving them up. New York has decided: game over for now.
|
|
|
For the demo video, click here.
"It is not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era" said OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman.
Whether that is accurate or just another marketing stunt remains to be seen.
But what did arrive is GPT-6 Astra, a model that operates your computer. It fills in forms, updates the CRM, sorts out a calendar, works through scientific data and draws the chart, installs software and then tests and debugs it. It produces presentations, spreadsheets and documents that come out looking like your company's templates rather than a generic draft, and OpenAI reports it gets through tasks around 47% faster than the model before it. Two quieter changes may matter more than the headline ones. It copes far better with vague instructions, holding on to the goal when the requirements shift halfway through, and inside Codex it now keeps its earlier notes searchable instead of compressing them into a summary and losing the detail.
Whether all this amounts to AGI is a conversation for people who enjoy definitions. What changed on my screen is how much of the work it finishes without me pasting things back and forth. I'm now using it extensively and will report in the coming editions of "Skip Intro".
|
|
|
New York's pupils have just gone back to class, only without access to artificial intelligence.
The city has decided to freeze the use of these tools for one school year, from age two right through to eighth grade, which is roughly Year 9 here. That covers 600,000 children.
High schools are heading the other way. Every pupil from ninth to twelfth grade will take AI lessons this year and may use the tools, though they too are barred from chatbots that simulate friendship or emotional support. A further 50,000 pupils will join pilots testing how to fold AI in sensibly.
Teachers face restrictions of their own. Approved tools are fine for lesson planning. AI may not be used for marking, for assessing pupils, for behavioural monitoring or for drafting special educational needs plans.
Why?
The official reasoning rests on protecting human contact, hands-on learning and independent thought, alongside an admission that the research on younger children is still thin. A paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research notes that little high-quality work exists on AI in education below eighth grade, and that outcomes depend heavily on age and context. It stops short of saying harm has been demonstrated, yet it points at precisely the worry the Chinese study surfaced: cognitive offloading, among teachers as much as pupils.
"The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-based early education is inevitable and even essential," said Mayor Zohran Mamdani. "We do not see it that way."
|
|
|
Elsewhere the instinct runs the other way entirely, towards training as many children as possible.
In the United Arab Emirates, which has had a minister for artificial intelligence for about a decade, AI is now a formal subject from kindergarten to twelfth grade. China requires at least eight hours of AI teaching a year, and Estonia gives sixteen and seventeen year olds access to the tools with an emphasis on critical thinking.
And the rest of us? I would happily take both. Children who grow up genuinely understanding what the tool can do, and who reach for it when it makes sense, with a sceptical eye.
An evidence-based set of recommendations is due next April in New York. The largest school system in America has bought itself a year in which to say "we don't know". The real question gets settled when that report lands. Or perhaps it doesn't.
|
|
One thing brought me back to public transport after two decades of boycotting it: the Moovit app. Not the buses or the trains themselves, but the real-time information that made it possible, for the first time in Israel, to stitch several routes and modes into one legible journey.
Moovit did the hard work. The gains went elsewhere: to me as a passenger, to a city with fewer cars idling in traffic, and to the transport operators who got my custom and my money.
Which is why I read with a mix of anger and disbelief about Israel Railways' attempt to shut down Better Rail, an app that serves up departure times rather more gracefully than the railway's own mediocre offering.
|
|
|
So, Israel Railways, step aside.
As a citizen who uses your service and pays for it, I want the railway's data open to anyone who wants it. It is not yours. It is mine, and everyone else's.
Better Rail is a free app built by a group of volunteers on top of the railway's own timetables. No adverts, no subscription, source code openly on GitHub. It does precisely what the official app is supposed to do, only faster and without raising your blood pressure.
In June the railway's head of passenger information contacted the developers and told them to stop using the data interfaces. In August came a solicitors' letter demanding immediate removal from the app stores. The claims: intellectual property infringement over the timetables, unauthorised access, and server damage running to hundreds of thousands of shekels. The developers call it bullying. The railway will not elaborate, citing legal proceedings. Evidence for any of it is nowhere to be seen.
A public railway timetable is nobody's intellectual property. It is public information paid for out of public money. When someone builds something better on top of it, for free and in their own time, the right response is to open a proper API and say thank you. Not to instruct a solicitor.
|
|
|
Or Segal asks:
"We recently watched a humanoid robot break Usain Bolt's 100 metres world record at the robotics games in Beijing. At the same time, companies such as BMW and Tesla are putting humanoids on their production lines. Is there any real logic in building human-shaped robots? Is this a practical direction that will actually serve us in a world of Physical AI, or a dead end, and would we do better to focus on functional designs built purely around the task itself?"
Excellent question, and there are several decent answers to it.
1. The human hand is a remarkable machine. Millions of years of evolution went into it. The thumb on its own is an extraordinary gripping instrument that changed everything, from branch to pliers to smartphone.
2. Attach that hand to a strong arm and a mobile body and you have a genuinely versatile machine. "Climb to the top of the hill and pick a flower" sounds trivial to a person, yet it draws on an enormous range of motor skills.
3. If we want robots doing jobs currently done by people, in a factory, a shop or a home, we will have to fit the robots to the environment rather than the other way round. For now, at least. Once robots do most of the work, rebuilding the environment around them starts to make sense. At that point you can design it for show, an open kitchen in a restaurant, or for efficiency, a dull but operationally excellent distribution centre.
4. And there are plenty of functional robots that look nothing like us. They are not as viral as a humanoid, which may make them feel less important, less advanced, less widespread. That is a mistake. Factories are full of them.
5. The humanoid is a superb marketing instrument for commercial and political goals. It stirs feelings that a machine shaped like a machine does not. It travels beautifully online. So you pay it more attention, which grows the market, which draws in more companies, which produces more robots and more videos and more attention, and round it goes.
Plenty of firms believe the human-like form lowers human resistance. My own sense is that it does the opposite.
In the Chinese case, this is propaganda for its own sake. China wants its technological power to reverberate, and just now this is the conversation and this is the way to have it.
More questions? Do reply to this email.
|
|
|
|
|
|
