> with off-shored real-time tutoring providing most of the value
Yes, a critical part of the Illustrated Primer was that it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human, and turned out to be most effective when the remote human was regularly the same person who cared for the child on the other end.
> it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human
That is not really true. The remote human only provided the voice. Miranda the character who ended up reading up the lines for Nell most definietly had no input into the direction the fictional story she read up had, nor she had the sophistication or the situational awerness to be considered the tutor.
The fictional technology has this strange twist that the AI in question can do the hard job of individualised training and emotional support, but can’t do local voice synthesis.
Just an example of what I mean to those who didn’t read the book: The fictional AI tutoring technology was manufactured for the educated grand-daughter of the CEO of a tech company. A copy of this AI gets to a poor, illiterate young girl who is physically abused by his step father. The AI manages to deduce this situation on its own and adapts to the changed circumstances (a situation which is lightyears away from the one it was developed for). It starts to teach the girl to read while also teaching her elementary martial art and survival skills. The AI on its own also decides when it is time for the girl to run and escape from the troubled home, knows how to evade security drones and etc. These are all conveyed through story beats in the fictional story read up to the girl by a remote actress true, but the remote actress (Miranda) is just a passive voice. In fact she suspects through the lines she has to read up that there is a girl somewhere out there who is in trouble, but she doesn’t know anything about her or how to even find her.
So no, in short this is nothing like “remote tutoring” as one would understand that.
But, returning to the subject of the article, this is interesting.
Among my peers in the U.S. right now (upper middle class, tech heavy), live-in nannies and full time tutors are unheard of, as the article says. But friends who have families in lower labor cost areas (Mexico, Thailand) often do still have live-in help. Even though they're no higher on the relative income ladder in their countries than I am, the floor cost of labor is so much lower that this is still a reasonable -- and quite common -- option.
Meanwhile, early education is (to my extremely limited knowledge) not an area where one-on-one off-shoring facilitated by technology has really been explored. Seems like an interesting space.
Full time tutors would have been an interesting solution to schooling, in the pandemic. Totally and utterly unscalable of course, but still kind of interesting.
Yes, a critical part of the Illustrated Primer was that it was paired with real-time tutoring by a remote human, and turned out to be most effective when the remote human was regularly the same person who cared for the child on the other end.