In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a young girl is given an interactive book called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It looks like a tool for learning to read, but it's far more. It adapts to her completely, and through stories tuned to her life, it teaches her not just to read but to think, to reason, and eventually to grapple with the hardest questions of ethics, meaning, and character. She returns to it day after day for years, and as she grows, it grows too. Continually reshaping itself around who she is becoming and the life she is living. For the first time in history, something like the Primer is starting to feel possible. The best education has always come from one-on-one tutoring. Aristotle taught Alexander. But that privilege has been reserved for the few. AI can bring it to every child. And great tutors do more than drill facts. Over years, they learn a child's mind, and with it how to teach what can't be drilled at all: thinking, reasoning, even wisdom. In Stephenson's story, the Primer is an AI tutor that never runs out of patience or time. We're a long way from building one, but we can start today. What we'd love to see now is a product that adaptively teaches young children to read, write, and do arithmetic, at the quality of a devoted private tutor and at consumer scale. Not a replacement for teachers, but a supplement that makes them more effective.
While we think this begins as something a parent buys to help their child learn basic skills, it is also the entry point to far greater ambitions. A company that gets it right could build toward something like the Primer, and even a fraction of that vision would have a profound effect on society.
If you're building this, we'd love to hear from you.