At the beginning, when teachers taught in a physical classroom, we knew nothing. Most students in a course, who we had not met before nor we had been talked about, was completely unknown to us besides their general characteristics of being young and inexperienced. I know it is hard to imagine.

Then the pandemic came, and we learn to do online teaching using an educational platform—an old-web based application—and to visit a student profile to learn about them along the first week of a course, so we knew about them a little bit more. However, they were very inventive, and filled their profiles with the products of their imagination, and we needed the help from psychologist to better interpret them; but we were lazy to do that.

One day, everything changed. For the first time, we had a system were we could fine a detailed picture of our students competences, constructed automatically on the basis of evidence gathered here and there, mostly from the educational platform, without the intervention from students. The system was intelligent enough to give us the big picture, or a detailed one, depending on our interest.

From there, the system grew smarter, so that it could use that information to deliver personalized teaching to each student, and many of us got fired—while the ones with tenure got their salary adjusted to the quality of their research, measured by other systems. A few of us stayed to provide the “human touch” to education, mostly online, as the system is still improving.

As you well know, you are pretty transparent to the system now. It knows everything about you, wherever you are, as it gathers information about whatever you do along the day. So, it gives you exactly what (it calculates that) you need, in order to satisfy the needs of society. Of course, you have access to everything else; it just get registered, and you may get some remediation material if the system considers it necessary. Of course, you can always ask to see what the system thinks about you, and you would get a presentation of it that meets your needs; that is, the needs of society.

Yes, I miss the old times. It is like people who like fixing things, and they would love to earn their living from that, but robots are just much more efficient. I loved teaching, watching the bright in a teenager eyes when something was learnt due to my effort to make it clear. That now is very rare, at least for me to see it, as the system does not know me as well as it knows you, quantum natives, and gives me only tasks that it considers innocuous.