30% of South Korean schools have adopted AI-powered digital textbooks since the country's education ministry began a full-scale rollout in March 2025
AI for the teacher: 30% of South Korean schools wield digital textbooks
I think the future's back in specialized devices. You give me a tablet that shows only textbooks, I read textbooks. You make it also access the internet, and I will immediately and exclusively use it for porn.
The first thing I do with any new device I buy is run porn on it lol. It's the initiation ceremony for my gadgets
I did that too, until things got weird with the new cat feeder
I fear for the near future. Hell I fear for the present.
I wouldn't mind if online textbooks had a button on the side that is just a looser search (like what Google was a few years ago).
It'd be handy if I could type in "gravity problem with the bunny" instead of having to either search for "bunny" and flip through all the results, or try to remember/guess the exact wording of the problem.
You probably could still call it AI too, since there's likely some small machine learning model involved in that search.
That's something I think AI could do really good for education. "I've been learning combinatorial theory - these are my notes - where would I look to understand how that relates to the Standard Model?"
I work in the data center industry—my company designs them.
Traditional IT server racks typically draw about 12 kW of power. Most of this power is converted into heat, so we must provide an equal amount of cooling. These servers must never experience a power failure or overheat, so we use massive generators, battery farms, and chilled water buffer tanks to ensure redundancy.
Now, with the rise of AI, many data centers are undergoing major overhauls. IT racks have gone from drawing 12–15 kW each to 40–100 kW. This represents a huge increase in both weight and power density. As a result, most cooling and electrical systems need to be completely redesigned. Much of the older equipment is being replaced with new infrastructure.
Even a simple Google search now uses up to 10 times more power than before, as AI has been integrated into their search function.
The environmental impact of AI is pretty devastating—I don't think many people are aware of this.
I would say we need to adopt more nuclear power but cooling is a massive concern too. For both the power plants and the data centers. Water is often used and idk how much pollution we're increasing.
There has been talk of some data centers being built with their own small moduler reactors. I haven't hear of any actually being built yet and Im sure there would be all sorts of bureaucracy. Would be interesting tho
Wow, thank you for the insight. I guess this would be helped somewhat with some of the lighter models being designed, and used locally.
Power consumption before and after AI searches is the same as power consumption for monetary transactions before and after Bitcoin and the likes.
Both technologies suck donkey balls and still haven't done remotely what they've promised and have made everything net worse.
Yeah. I work for a company that builds the electrical systems for cooling Amazon's AWS servers in data centers and we are trying to keep up with orders as best we can. They just want more more more, so much that we're storing them in another warehouse because we don't have the room here.
They're projecting orders all the way into 2035 currently.
Everyday we get closer to the book The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson where the main character has stolen from him a book he created called, “A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer” The thief turns out to be a hacker and mass produces copies of the book for orphans.
The book itself is an AI that assess the users surroundings and intelligence level before creating stories that are relevant to the user that also educates them.
I can see this being a net positive if done correctly. But I don’t think the tech is there yet.
Interestingly the AI stories are voiced by real people, ractors. That would now be one of the first things cut, see James Earl Jones
Lol, Interestingly enough. The hacker who steals the book realizes that each copy he makes can’t have a ractor so he substitutes it with a computer generated voice. I distinctly recall him acknowledging that it’s not as personal as a ractor but is adequate enough for the purpose.
one of my top 3 books. This doesn't add to your comment but I find it interesting: An important part of the story is that the Primer was originally intended to train a billionaire's granddaughter to become a powerful CEO. One equity-lord's attempt to hoard knowledge that backfires is what catalyzes the story.
I mean say what you want, but thats legit how new tech is being developed right now. My favorite book is Cryptonomicon. It came out in 1999, But the premise was that the main characters were going to build a currency backed on cryptography. There was even a side story in the book where one of the man characters is looking for a specific investor who is obsessed with trading cards. The main character sells the investor on the idea by saying how the technology could easily be adapted for distributing digital trading cards.
The dude basically predicted Bitcoins and the rise of NFTs in 1999.
The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson
sounds interesting. Noted
I'd say given the current tech environment that book would "educate" based more on a Brave New World caste and less on ideal knowledge to raise someone up but to keep them in a certain assigned position.
Sounds like an interesting book
Thank you for sharing!
Ain't nobody got time to read. Send an AI generated summary.
And what exactly are AI textbooks? Does AI generate a quiz? Or generate the facts? I feel there is quite some bandwidth there and the article doesn't say a lot.
This is what I want to know also. "AI textbooks" is a great clickbait/ragebait term, but could mean a great variety of things.
Here's a way around the paywall: https://archive.md/ZDs6S
But the article doesn't really make it clear how much AI is involved in the textbooks, just that "Digital textbooks that make use of artificial intelligence are being adopted throughout South Korea.", emphasis mine.
Other text from the article, relevant to your question:
South Korea, the 2025 APEC chair, held the group's first education ministers' meeting in nine years, the theme of which was innovation in digital education. Education ministers from 21 countries and regions participated.
[...]
Private companies and government-affiliated organizations set up booths at the APEC venue to promote their efforts. They exhibited software in which generative AI writes student evaluations on behalf of teachers or assigns homework and applied problems tailored to each child's level of understanding.The road to implementation was not a smooth one.
The government's original goal was the world's first rollout of AI digital textbooks to all schools nationwide. But teachers worried about the burden that making full use of the technology would place on them, while parents questioned whether the textbooks would actually improve student performance and whether they could lead to digital dependency.
After heated debate, lawmakers made last-minute changes, including requiring continued use of paper textbooks for subjects such as Korean and home economics and delaying implementation for other subjects. The government also made plans to provide advanced training to more than 160,000 teachers as well as dispatch 1,200 digital tutors as support staff.
Hmmh, I feel the paragraph with what they saw at some booth at a fair might not be connected to the textbooks, though. Or it's just a different way of phrasing it, I'm not sure. I just hope AI does a good job for the Korean students. I remember we once had a math textbook which was the first run/edition and it still contained a handful of errors. And those were super annoying as a student. I feel that could happen more often with AI.
The picture shows OCR, which is AI. Maybe it's just that.
And what exactly are AI textbooks?
A grift.
Well, I heard in some countries all textbooks are a grift, and cost like $120 each and you have to buy like 5 of them... Not so much in other countries... I had hoped to get a bit more background information from an article... I really have no clue about the education system in Korea.
Maybe someone should let them know how often AI is wrong?
No, we must move fast and break things, then ask for forgiveness later on.
