Superficial Intelligence

Silicon Valley has been like a whole Naked Emperor nudist colony for years now, packed to the rafters with delusional buffoons demanding admiration as they yabber on about colonizing Mars, coffee with butter in it, the “Singularity,” the “Dark Enlightenment,” Bored Apes, sentient AI, one-drop hematology, “the metaverse,” tiny submarines, and other daft notions. They may not get up on stage at TED or at Davos in the nude, but with all their preening foolishness and self-consequence, they might as well be.

When you consider the power these people have over everyone’s lives, though, the buffoonery very rapidly stops being funny at all. Today’s topic is Sal Khan, former hedge-fund analyst and founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform offering free video tutorials and quizzes on a broad range of subjects. The company’s 990 IRS tax-exempt filing describes its mission as, “A free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” 

Since its founding in 2008, Khan Academy has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic funding, brought fame to its founder, and developed a significant influence on the schooling of millions of kids. 

Last spring (and yes, at TED), Khan announced the development of Khanmigo, an “artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.” 

“We’re at the cusp of using A.I. for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he burbled TED-ishly, rabbiting on about how Khanmigo will provide not only video math drills, but also “Socratic” debate, guidance counseling, and literary analysis. Then he launches into the testimontial of Saanvi, a high-school student writing a book report on The Great Gatsby. Saanvi just wasn’t getting anywhere with regular old web searches (why, Khan doesn’t say)—but then she realized that using Khanmigo, she could text with the protagonist of the novel, Jay Gatsby himself!

Khan plays back a video of Saanvi’s screen as she clicks over to “Chat With a Literary Character” and summons up the Khanmigo version of Jay Gatsby. Here is what Khanmigo-Gatsby has to say (from about 5:45).

Ah, splendid choice, old sport! I am now Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic millionaire from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby.” My life is a tale of ambition, love, and tragedy, set against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties. So, what brings you to my extravagant mansion today?

Saanvi (having somehow failed to notice that Gatsby bought the house across from the green light because his ex, Daisy, lived there) types in a question:

Why do you keep staring at the green light?

Ah, the green light, old sport! It’s a symbol of my dreams and desires, you see. It’s situated at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, across the bay from my mansion. I gaze at it longingly as it represents my yearning for the past and my hope to reunite with Daisy, the love of my life. The green light is a constant reminder of the elusive nature of the American Dream and the distance between reality and our aspirations. Now tell me, have you ever had a dream or desire that seemed just out of reach?

Yes. I for one have a powerful dream or desire that this tech bro will stay in his extravagant mansion, and keep his fatuous audioanimatronic salad of words far far away from any kids studying literature.

But you best believe the TED audience gives Sal Khan a standing ovation at the end.

We can already see that this thing is nowhere near world-class, old sport, and it’s not entirely free, either: Khanmigo currently costs individual users $4/month, or $44/year. Furthermore, Khan Academy may be a nonprofit, but it’s manifestly a business, too. Sal Khan has no formal training in education; he is a Harvard MBA who spent years as a hedge fund analyst. Nevertheless, in a wildly fawning opinion piece in the Washington Post, tech journalist Josh Tyrangiel described Khan this way: “Multiply Lin-Manuel Miranda by Habitat for Humanity and you get some sense of his sincerity and virtue.” So virtuous and sincere is he that Khan’s base salary, according to IRS filings, was $762,140 in 2020, $855,189 in 2021, and $1,174,897 in 2022. 

Pretty good salary for a teacher. 

Tyrangiel is not bothered about the money-making angle of Khanmigo, commenting that “to make [Khanmigo] sustainable, Khan needs to sell to the whales of the education market,” which would include, inevitably, suppliers to taxpayer-funded schools. (“Needs to”!)

Google, a top-tier donor to Khan Academy, is the operator of Google Classroom, a product already in use by more than 150 million students around the world—a product for schools, with tiered pricing. One might be forgiven for seeing Khan Academy as just a potential way for Big Tech to further expand and tighten its tentacles over public funds, or as they might prefer to put it, “the whales of the education market.”

A lot has already been written about the defects of Khanmigo, notably in a February piece in the Wall Street Journal (“We Tested an AI Tutor for Kids. It Struggled With Basic Math”). So I’m not going to get into the unreliability of every LLM and AI-based product I’ve seen, nor the insane environmental costs of using them, except to note my absolute incredulity at the way grown people make the weirdest excuses for this obvious and total bullshit. Suffice it to say that Khanmigo makes a ton of mistakes, is gross, and, if they were still in school, I wouldn’t let my own kids anywhere near it. 

My own biggest objection is something else entirely, viz., that nobody who respects and values learning could describe what Khan Academy is offering as “an education.” This too is surprisingly easy to show.

Khan Academy’s website invites you to “Meet Our Leadership Team.” Of the nine people listed as running the company with Sal Khan, not one appears to have had any meaningful experience in the classroom. They are MBAs, like Khan himself, and engineers; there’s an architect, and a onetime McKinsey consultant. The “chief learning officer” came to Khan Academy from Pearson, the standardized testing firm. She is charged with “driving and communicating the learning strategy for Khan Academy’s programs, content, and product to realize deep engagement and better learning outcomes,” a series of phrases apparently designed to make people who love good English feel that their brains have been sauteed. There is no mention, from the Chief Learning Officer, of delight in learning, imagination, reading, books, happiness, or anything that makes life good or fun.

This really is so baffling. Every good teacher I ever had myself spoke so fondly of their own favorite teachers, the ones who’d taught them. That’s what culture is, to me, the continuation and reinforcement of good ideas, books, values. At Khan Academy, there’s no sense of being part of a culture or a literary or intellectual tradition at all. It’s just a machine, looking to turn kids into widgets that can pop out a good score on a test. 

And make no mistake, the cost to society of the widget approach to teaching is going to be catastrophic. Whoever thinks this isn’t a big deal ought to read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, a memoir written by the legendary bongo-playing physicist, Richard Feynman. There’s a famous story in there about a group of physics students in Brazil, whom he’d been invited to lecture. They were attentive and well-prepared, but then things started to get weird; bit by bit, Feynman discovered that not just some but all of them were unable to apply or connect the theories they’d memorized to the real world. The teaching itself had prevented them from learning anything.

He tried to explain to them how memorization, learning only from the book, was worse than useless; he opened a textbook at random, and read it aloud:

“Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed…”

I said, “And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told anything about nature – what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can’t.

“But if, instead, you were to write, ‘When you take a lump of sugar and crush it with a pair of pliers in the dark, you can see a bluish flash. Some other crystals do that too. Nobody knows why. The phenomenon is called “triboluminescence.” ‘ Then someone will go home and try it. Then there’s an experience of nature.” I used that example to show them…

I said that I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.

You can’t teach literature or history with this intellectually barren, cheap, sloppy approach, either. I recently watched a Khan Academy video for 7th-graders, “Citing evidence in literary analysis,” which is meant to show students how “to successfully build an argument about a text.” This lecture about literature—about literary analysis—does not mention one single book. I am not kidding, it discusses no literature. The “text” under consideration is some kind of incoherent drivel about a pirate ship, as the lecturer himself admits (“I made it up 20 minutes ago.”) 

I’ve yet to see a Khan Academy lesson in which the “teacher” seems to love or even vaguely enjoy the subject at hand. Their brisk, impatient approach is as glossy, friendly, and empty as a TED talk, and it is sending children straight down the path of vintage Brazilian physics instruction. Kids trust us to teach them, they will follow instructions obediently, and accept the fake understanding for the real one; Khan Academy gets them to memorize as perfectly as possible so they can spit it back out and then… what??