One of the secrets to China’s engineering success is its young people. In 2020, more than 3.5 million of the country’s students graduated with degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths, better known as STEM.
That’s more than any other country in the world - and Beijing is keen to leverage it. “Building strength in education, science and talent is a shared responsibility,” Xi told party leaders last week.
Damn, I opened this post bracing myself for BS comments praising AI slop but this was actually interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you have any references (in English ideally) where I could read about such trends there, not propaganda & tech marketing like that BBC piece?
I have no good references that aren’t boring propaganda from state media… Search China Daily for stories about ed tech
Or more broadly, search for “Ed tech” or “educational technology”
I think our “AI” was mostly BS, but I guess it had its niche.
Oh that reminds me… When I worked at state media, we ran stories about AI facial recognition at the winter Olympics. The stories claimed that they could identify more than 99 percent of people wearing COVID masks (I suspect this may be an exaggeration, as airport immigration officials and train station officials would make people remove masks and smile for cameras)
Also, just remembered: During my time at state media, I recall reading some Xi Jinping quote along the lines of “Whoever has the best AI will control the future”
IMHO that’s the linchpin, what’s the gap between what a leader (political or business) would claim to be true versus… what’s actually working, and beyond that, what’s actually useful then used in practice.
Working in innovation we called this the “marketing gap” and it’s quite a funnel, from broad claim that AI or any other emerging technology will “change everything” to what people, workers and consumers alike, actually use frequently and are wiling to pay for.
One needs bold claims, even if false, to get votes or funding money.
Ah yeah, well… At least in America, the marketing gap is pretty wide I think! (mostly based around LLMs)
Our “AI” courseware was pretty basic outside of the facial recognition (which I found impressive, if not TOO useful). It would keep track of student responses and tailor some questions based on previous performance, but that’s pretty basic (I think it would have been better if our content developers knew how to work with the software)
About the marketing, we were actually a multimedia educational materials maker. Textbooks, courseware, video series , etc etc
The founder/CEO liked to pretend we were a tech company, but our bread and butter was VIPKids-style English lessons and textbook series with long shelf life. (I often felt like he was cosplaying as Jack Ma, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, if you know what I mean)