Working Paper 32

What happens if artificial teachers become better than ordinary human ones?

This paper develops a deliberately inverted future in which human tutorials survive not because they are educationally superior, but because they are scarce, expensive and culturally prestigious. Elite institutions sell face-to-face conversation, handwritten essays and rooms lined with books as an “accurate historical recreation” of twentieth-century education.

The scenario is comic, but its economics are familiar. Once scalable services become adequate, labour-intensive alternatives often return as luxury experiences. The paper asks whether the same reversal could occur in higher education.