My review of Brave New Words by Sal Khan

The past few years have brought no shortage of words about AI, but I want to flash back to a 1999 Computerworld cover story in which a young product manager at Oracle shares his predictions for the coming decades:

“I talked about a future in which we would all have artificially intelligent personal agents to represent us in ‘cyberspace.’ The agents would purchase things for you and broker transactions, even match-make between employers and employees (or romantic partners).”

Those ideas came from a twenty-two year old Sal Khan , recounted today in Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing), his deeply insightful new book. 

Sal, founder of the revolutionary educational nonprofit Khan Academy , was impressive even back then; his photograph and predictions were prominently featured in the Computerworld story alongside the likes of Larry Ellison, CEO of the company he worked for. Sal saw technology as a transformative tool humans could use to usher in an age of AI. Twenty-five years later, and this vision seems remarkably prescient. 

In the years after Sal referenced for the record the power of agents to augment human abilities, he left his first tech job, and then his post-business-school job at a hedge fund, to found and scale Khan Academy.

If you want to listen to Sal Khan and me discuss the ways AI is transforming K-12 education: https://link.chtbl.com/2NJF9eQm 

In Brave New Words, he lays out a powerful new vision for humans to use AI to advance the power and availability of transformative educational opportunities—and to serve all the world’s learners.

Over the last 15 years, on an annual budget that rivals that of a large U.S. high school, Khan Academy has shared resources used by more than a 100 million people all over the world. 

Now he is building the future of education as he imagines it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Khan Academy launched Schoolhouse.world, a synchronous video tutoring platform that captures granular data to assess performance of both student and tutors. It’s been such a success that the University of Chicago, CalTech, and MIT are among the universities accepting these certification transcripts for students who master the material, as well as the tutors who have successfully volunteered to help others. Most recently, Khan Academy has worked with OpenAI and released a new agent, Khanmigo, an always available, infinitely-patient AI chatbot offering 1:1 tutoring and support for students. 

In the book, Sal charts the journey from his initial conversations with the OpenAI team, where he was first exposed to the ChatGPT. He maintains an optimistic stance on rapidly evolving AI tools and the ways we can use them to provide previously logistically impossible resources for learners, teachers, and parents alike. Still, he doesn’t shy away from exploring the complexity that comes with this potential. He devotes the right amount of real estate to grappling with questions around student safety, data collection, and our current educational frameworks in the context of what AI developments. 

He also reframes the AI revolution we are experiencing through a lens I especially appreciate, entrepreneurship, writing:

“When economists talk about the factors of production, they talk about things like capital, labor, land, and other resources such as energy. But they also talk about entrepreneurship. From an economics point of view, entrepreneurship is really the creativity of knowing how to put resources together in order to create value. So how do we prepare every student to be this type of entrepreneur?”

AI augments human abilities. Sal has long known this, and he uses the book to open everyone up to what a much broader set of people can accomplish in the age of AI. Previous skill required specialized knowledge or capital to hire such talent, instead we are entering a world in which vastly more people can realize their visions by working with AI resources. A world full of entrepreneurs doing what Khan Academy does: seizing a new era of resource abundance to expand and strengthen educational experiences at scale. 

Near the end of Brave New Words, Sal talks of our potential to “raise the ceiling in existing classrooms but also to raise the floor for kids who do not have access to world-class schools or certain courses.” He cites AI as learners’ newfound "guardian angel," and free online educational resources as “part of the education safety net for the world.”

While I agree with this trajectory, I might swap out “safety net” for “trampoline” with AI, as we can create infinitely more resources to not only catch those in need, but to also help launch all learners—and, in turn, society—toward the realization of our full potential.

Relatedly, I riffed on on the future of computer science education, and reflected on my own educational experiences, with Aria on an all-new Possible, released today: 

Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts: https://link.chtbl.com/58d-wQwF

YouTube: https://youtu.be/i56fJB5lMIs

Transcript: https://www.possible.fm/podcasts/riffs003/ 

And here’s where to subscribe to the show: https://link.chtbl.com/possiblepod