Brave New Words

Why it’s on the list: The first book-length case for AI in education, from the person who already rebuilt one layer of it.

Where I saw it: Own Kindle library — highlighted in progress but not finished. Surfaced in the 2026-08-18 Kindle notebook export.

Connections

• Salman Khan — author.
• Khan Academy — the institution the argument is written from.
• Disrupting Class — Christensen made the disruption-of-education argument sixteen years earlier; read together they bracket the thesis.

Highlights

7 highlights captured while reading. Kyle has not finished the book — this is an anti-library entry, not a read-library one.

• Long before Khan Academy, decades of research (and intuition) pointed to the idea that kids could learn much more if the pacing adapted to the student and allowed each one to truly ace a subject (that is, mastery learning). This contrasts with the status quo, where a class of thirty students often moves on to the next concept even when a good portion of the students haven’t yet displayed proficiency.
• The science fiction writer Neal Stephenson wrote about the potential influence of technology on education in his novel The Diamond Age. The book is set in a future world that introduces the concept of using AI, in the form of a highly advanced interactive book and app called A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, to provide personalized education to its young users. The Orson Scott Card novel Ender’s Game imagines a battle school that employs advanced AI technology to test and train students’ strategic thinking and decision-making skills through a personal AI tutor called Jane. Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities.
• What it lacks in real-world sensory experiences of the human brain, it compensates for by having exposure to more language than any human might hope to read, watch, or listen to in multiple lifetimes.
• We’ve also shown that rather than somehow being a substitute for the teacher, videos can off-load pieces of a lecture, freeing up more time for personalized learning, hands-on activities, or classroom conversation. This arguably makes the teachers more valuable, not less. And now it was time to see if generative AI could do the same—support students and let teachers move up the value chain.
• In the early 1940s, Claude Shannon, a brilliant mathematician, produced several consequential theories. Among them, he mapped out a theory of electronic communication that would become the basis of digital technology. In 1948, while working for Bell Labs, he started dabbling in the field we now know as artificial intelligence. Shannon decided to play with how an algorithm approximates language. He published a paper in The Bell System Technical Journal called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” It was the early days of digital computers—well before the advent of the internet—and Shannon’s information theory first made the case that a series of probabilistic processes could approximate the English language. By keeping track of how many times words appeared in a text, he devised an algorithm where he was able to predict what word was most likely to come next. Eventually, this small language model generated a sentence. The better this process got, the more natural the sentence sounded. It’s an oversimplification, but the likes of GPT-3 and GPT-4 are essentially far more complex large language models based on training a neural net in very specialized ways, and the underlying idea can be traced back to this early work by Shannon.
• This technology had the potential to revolutionize how we communicate, create, and consume information the same way that, twenty years earlier, we marveled at the educational possibilities of the internet, and twenty years before that, the personal computer, and twenty years before that, the calculator.
• We had to show AI’s real value to students as a Socratic tutor, as a debating partner, as a guidance counselor, as a career coach, and as a driver of better outcomes in their academics. So, alongside OpenAI, we created a rapid prototyping team that began to build an AI-infused education platform we would come to call Khanmigo.