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Boxed Education

I may be out of touch with the times but the notion of a K-12 AI camp feels deeply disturbing and disappointing to me. I can't think of one redeeming quality of such education for the under 16 age-group. To create any artificial intelligence of value, the person creating it must have a fully formed emotional awareness and understanding of the world they will be operating this AI in. Kids that young have a lot of growing left to do in that area. A notional understanding of what AI is and the discussing the ethical concerns around it are very beneficial. Just blithely applying the key-phrase social-impact is not a way to circumvent the real problem here. 

Why does an kindergartner need to implement AI Out of the Box? What possible use or good that be to the child or anyone else? What happened to the idea of focusing on fundamental things like reading, writing and numeric literacy and then going on to logic, reason and philosophy? Those are the skills every kid needs to make sense of what is going on in the world and consider what they could do to change things they don't like. Awareness of tooling like AI is good to have so when the time comes they will know what tool is fit for purpose - their purpose. Not some ill-conceived curriculum that puts AI in a box. 

This is exactly the kind of misguided education that is driving academic achievement of American kids down compared to those in other countries. STEM and now AI is not stuff you are pre-process like a frozen dinner and and consume like so many episodes of a reality show. There are basic concepts to learn and build on over a period of time to gain facility with the disciplines that fall under those acronyms. 

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