Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer to that question is clearly “yes,” a perspective that has dominated our conversation about artificial beings ever since the word “robot” was ...

From the 1920s American psychologists experimented with teaching using machines. Inspired, in part, by the expansion of schooling, especially at the secondary level; the success of paper-and-pencil ...

One of Audrey Watters’s observations in her deeply researched Teaching Machines is that ed-tech evangelists seldom make an effort to learn the history of educational technologies. For those ...

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal ...

Are you tired of telling machines what to do and what not to do? It’s a large part of regular people’s days – operating dishwashers, smartphones and cars. It’s an even bigger part of life for ...

Is the “teaching machine” an ugly ogre? Does it promise new blessing or new burden for the Church’s task in the world? Whichever your answer, the arrival of the teaching machine for auto-instruction ...

With machine learning (ML) at the heart of much of modern computing, the interesting question is: How do machines learn? There’s a lot of deep computer science in machine learning, producing models ...

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1] This is a landmark book. It is ...

Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them ...