We had an interesting tipping point during Covid lockdowns when it came to education. Pre-Covid, technology in education was a luxury available to wealthy schools and wealthy children who started using iPads in school, maybe going on virtual reality field trips. Technology was a luxury for the few. But during the pandemic, we started seeing the opposite. We saw governments adopting technology to give mass, but not very high-quality, education to everyone. At the same time, we saw wealthier families reverting to hiring personal tutors and setting up little neighbourhood pods, or employing au pairs to educate their children, much like the wealthy Victorians used to do. Personal, human instruction suddenly became a luxury, and “mass personalised AI-bot tutors" became a working-class product to produce the future working classes.

This distinction between personal education versus personalised education is something to consider carefully as big companies, such as Salesforce, start putting out press releases stating they are not going to hire any more software engineers because anything they can do, AI can do better, or at least cheaper.