Sramana Mitra: This is interesting. It’s a little bit of a diversion, but I recently had an experience with a very close friend of mine who very readily condemned Joe Biden for pardoning his son. I don’t feel so strongly about that pardon because this is a father who has lost two children and a wife, and this is his only surviving son. Given that power, he is bound to make that choice. In my opinion, I don’t know any parent who would not make that choice. If I do the theory of mind experiment, I don’t see any father or any parent making any other choice given that power. The real question is, should a president have that kind of pardoning power?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Now, the equation starts to change as we get to higher education, right? There’s the big experiment that came out of MIT and Harvard edX, which started putting all the lectures online. It was the beginning of these massive online open courses (MOOCs). Today’s technology can go much further with all this personalization and Generative AI stuff. However, the same model of children being able to learn more with that personalized, infinitely patient teacher or professor in college still holds.
>>>Sramana Mitra: There is one other vector we need to consider in this – the human centric element. The history of education is that the human provides all the content. For a rural India teacher to teach English as a second language, he or she has to know English as a second language from that particular vernacular in the region first. But in this model, we are eliminating that requirement. Or are we eliminating that requirement? Does the teacher need to not know, know? What is the role of the teacher in this?
>>>Sramana Mitra: I want to double click on English as a second language. In March last year, we were in India, and my father took us to see a school in rural West Bengal, quite far from Calcutta, which is the main metropolis in that region. These rural Indian towns and villages are not places where fluent English as a second language is that common. We were blown away by these ninth grade kids who were giving us tours of their labs and their learning process, and they were so enthusiastic, and the whole thing was in fluent English.
>>>
Gus Tai, Investor, Board Member and Retired General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses ideas and opportunities in Education with an AI-augmented framework.
>>>Gus Tai, Investor, Board Member and Retired General Partner at Trinity Ventures, discusses ideas and opportunities in Education with an AI-augmented framework.
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