OOPS, GOOGLE DID IT AGAIN?

Google never stops and doesn't play around when it comes to new AI innovations. One of the latest is Learn Your Way. For those unfamiliar, Google has decided to reinvent the printing press, but in the opposite direction. If Guttemberg's printing press facilitated access to knowledge from books by enabling mass production and standardizing knowledge, now Google wants to facilitate learning through personalized learning.

With the printing press, not only have books become accessible to more and more people, but knowledge can also be standardized. Imagine a classroom with students who each learned through oral tradition or through handmade books made by their families. Guttemberg created the first means of mass communication, and this remains the foundation of education to this day, no matter how much technology has been incorporated into the process.

Google's "Learn Your Way" completely reinvents this process. The premise is simple: use AI to tailor the book's content to the student's interests. Obviously, we're not talking about personalized versions of historical facts, although that's likely to happen.

We're talking about teaching scientific concepts in a way that makes them understandable, personalized, and using AI. How? In Google's proposal, the book's content is provided to the tool, which searches for the student's areas of interest. From there, the AI ​​rewrites the teaching content using the student's areas of interest to explain the concepts. For example: Newton's Third Law, instead of simply being explained through illustrated postulates, is applied to a soccer game for one student and a skateboarding maneuver for another.

If we recall the meaning of knowing by heart, which is knowing with the heart, we'll remember that learning is easier the stronger the connection between subject and subject. And that's what Google wants to do: create connections that give an individualized, human dimension to learning. Ah, but using sports or music to teach isn't anything new, you might say. Prep school teachers have been doing it for years. And there's the technique of mnemonics, which is quite old.

That's not the point. Learning is nothing new, but customizing educational content, whether digital or printed, to the interests of each student is. Without powerful AI, this would be unfeasible or the results very poor. Because it requires rewriting and redesigning the book. And everything indicates that this won't be limited to books: video content can also be customized. After all, what matters is learning. Initial tests show that this path seems promising.

But this issue isn't just about customizing learning. Individualizing learning has consequences that are difficult to predict and will unfold over time. For example: what teacher can compete with an AI that speaks to each student in a personalized way, as if it were not only a private tutor but also extremely knowledgeable in countless subjects? What school can physically offer a compatible structure? What will this produce in terms of group behavior?

I attended elementary school and high school at Colégio Bandeirantes, which at the time was the leader in acceptance rates for major university entrance exams. Almost all of my friends and I actually managed to get into the best universities: most of us got into our first choice, which means we studied at Poli, IME, Pinheiros, São Francisco, ITA, FAU, FEA, and ECA (my case).

Being part of Bandeirantes, which for many people was a student grinder, created a group identity derived from the hardships we experienced together. Most of my friends are from that era. Even so, in addition to having different career paths, we have countless differences in political, economic, and social terms, despite all of us having drawn from the same source of knowledge.

So, what can happen to a generation already experiencing a process of massive individualization, with increasingly fragmented profiles? What will happen when the way we learn also becomes personalized, individualized, and solitary? What kind of society will we create?

If hundreds of thousands of Christians can't reach a consensus based on a single holy book, what will happen when these hundreds of millions have hundreds of millions of versions of the same fact?

There will be no bar table that can resolve these differences.