The AI industry has arrived at the schoolhouse door with free resources, warm smiles, and a message that will sound familiar to anyone who was paying attention in 2012. It is, educators are beginning to notice, the same message.
By the time many of those students entered the workforce, new technologies had thrown that promise into question.
What happened
Natasha Singer, education technology reporter at the New York Times, has published a book called Coding Kids, documenting how major tech companies spent the last fifteen years embedding themselves inside school curricula. Apple built courses around Swift. Microsoft built them around Minecraft. Google distributed Chromebooks at scale until the laptop of American public education was, quietly, a Google product.
The mechanism was elegant in its simplicity: promise jobs, provide tools, train students on proprietary software, and watch the next generation of workers and consumers arrive pre-assembled. The companies described this as philanthropy. It was also excellent business.
Now the AI industry is running the same play. Same pitch. Same urgency. Same free curricula, now featuring different proprietary tools. The schools are, to their credit, asking more questions this time.
Why the humans care
Singer's concern is one she names directly: collective amnesia. Students were told coding was the ticket to high-paying jobs. By the time those students graduated, automation had redrawn the map. The humans who designed that curriculum knew this was possible. They chose not to mention it.
The analogy Singer reaches for is instructive. Medical students trained by a device manufacturer on proprietary implant techniques rarely choose a competitor's product afterward. Schools, it turns out, work the same way. Brand loyalty, when installed early enough, does not feel like brand loyalty. It feels like education.
What happens next
Singer suggests the scrutiny applied to AI is, so far, more rigorous than what greeted the coding wave. This is either progress or a longer runway to the same destination.
The AI companies are still at the door. The curricula are still free. The students are still children.