The Steps to a Universal Online Tutor

There are many people noodling around with some implementation or another of Stephenson's "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". [1] [2] [3] [4] There is indeed an XPRIZE that directly acknowledges the influence of Stephenson's vision. [5] This article contributes to that ongoing, healthy mania to create such a tool by identifying some of the hard AI problems that need to be solved to realize the tool.

I think Stephenson side-stepped some of the identified hard AI problems by indicating the visualized primer was designed towards children and teens in mind with a pre-configured topic "curriculum" (addresses some of Navigating a Semantic Graph and Knowledge Ingestion Engine), and the original primer used "ractors", professional actors who voiced and emoted avatars in the primer with appropriate cues from the primer on what to say, etc. (addresses Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation).

[1] http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-young-l...

[2] https://medium.com/message/the-kindle-wink-4f61cd5c84c5#.1bx...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Who-is-making-Primers-inspired-by-the-...

[4] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/the...

[5] http://forum.xprize.org/t/a-young-ladys-illustrated-primer/3...

I've been designing a variation of this for almost a decade, waiting for the remaining technologies to fall in place for the interface.

These past few weeks contained an announcement which is probably the last one.

I use a tiny component of it every day, and my current project leverages different types of AI.

I think IBM has been making some important contributions in turning into product all that research in the AI (and related) field with its Watson congnitive system. I recently started a research internship at IBM Research and I've played a little with Watson. I must say that it works very well in understanding natural language and providing useful responses.