Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer to that question is clearly “yes,” a perspective that has dominated our conversation about artificial beings ever since the word “robot” was ...

Microsoft is rallying behind a new buzzword as it tries to sell businesses on artificial intelligence. It’s called “machine teaching,” and it’s loosely defined by Microsoft as a set of tools that ...

From the 1920s American psychologists experimented with teaching using machines. Inspired, in part, by the expansion of schooling, especially at the secondary level; the success of paper-and-pencil ...

One of Audrey Watters’s observations in her deeply researched Teaching Machines is that ed-tech evangelists seldom make an effort to learn the history of educational technologies. For those ...

With machine learning (ML) at the heart of much of modern computing, the interesting question is: How do machines learn? There’s a lot of deep computer science in machine learning, producing models ...

Digital systems are expected to navigate real-world environments, understand multimedia content, and make high-stakes ...

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1] This is a landmark book. It is ...

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal ...