Online platforms, such as Coursera and Khan Academy, are already giving a personalized, free education to millions of users. Diamandis claims that the continued development of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) will be key players in the education revolution. AI will have the capability of delivering instruction at the appropriate pace for each individual learner and VR will allow students to travel far beyond their wildest dreams as they experience concepts like relativity, the aftermath of World War II, or hurricanes firsthand. I can only imagine how much more interested my students would be in learning about lessons such as the construction of the Roman Coliseum if they were led on a virtual tour by an AI-driven avatar of Julius Caesar himself versus reading about it in a textbook. It is so important for students to think of learning as a lifelong, fun, enriching process, and in the fast paced world we live in today, it is getting harder and harder to accomplish this goal with traditional classroom instruction. I can only hope Diamandis is correct when he says, “We are headed toward a future in which education is much better, more robust, and widely available than we can possibly even imagine. A future in which the poorest child on Earth and the wealthiest child are both getting access to identical opportunities, orders of magnitude beyond what we have today.”
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