Structural economic models, while parsimonious and interpretable, often exhibit poor data fit and limited forecasting performance. Machine learning models, by contrast, offer substantial flexibility ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Benjamin Wolff covers leadership insights from the world of the arts. Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer ...

Useful publications on teaching machines, especially those of B.F. Skinner, include: L.T. Benjamin, "A History of Teaching Machines," American Psychologist, 43, 1988 ...

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 ...

Salesforce’s latest agent testing/builder tool and Jeff Bezos’s new AI venture focused on practical industrial applications of AI show that enterprises are inching towards autonomous systems. It’s ...

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 ...

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 ...