In a move that surprises absolutely no one who has spent more than five minutes observing the slow-motion car crash of modern governance, Hong Kong’s Secretary for Education, Christine Choi Yuk-lin, has announced that the city is partnering with ‘experts’ to develop a ‘highly intelligent’ AI platform tailored for schools. It is the kind of announcement that sounds profound if you are a bureaucrat with a gold-plated pension, but to the rest of us, it sounds like the final, mechanical nail in the coffin of human thought. The plan, as presented to the Legislative Council, involves exploring a Large Language Model (LLM) specifically designed to mirror the city’s academic curriculum. Because, clearly, what the youth of today need is not better teachers, smaller classes, or a reason to live, but a digital mirror that reflects back the same ossified, pre-approved data sets they were already failing to absorb from textbooks.

Let us deconstruct the sheer, staggering vanity of this endeavor. The term ‘Large Language Model’ is, in itself, a linguistic shell game. It suggests a vast, oceanic depth of knowledge, when in reality, it is simply a very expensive parrot that has been trained to predict the next word in a sentence based on the statistical likelihood of that word appearing in a government-approved memo. By ‘tailoring’ this AI to the curriculum, the Education Bureau is essentially creating a digital panopticon where the boundaries of ‘truth’ are hard-coded into the algorithm. It is the ultimate wet dream for the administrative class: a teacher that never asks for a raise, never suffers from burnout, and, most importantly, never accidentally utgers an unscripted thought that hasn’t been vetted by three sub-committees and a legal department.

Choi’s response to lawmaker Tang Fei’s inquiries reveals the typical technocratic delusion: the belief that complexity can be solved with a subscription service. They speak of ‘intelligence’ as if it were a commodity you could buy in bulk from a technology professional. But let’s be honest about who these ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ are. They are the same breed of digital carpetbaggers who have spent the last decade selling us blockchain-based solutions for problems that don’t exist, and now they have pivoted to AI because that is where the public coffers are currently leaking. They aren't building a tool for enlightenment; they are building a compliance engine. They are taking the messy, chaotic, and occasionally brilliant process of human learning and distilling it into a series of predictable outputs that can be easily measured on a spreadsheet.

The tragedy of this ‘tailored’ AI is not just that it will be boring—though it will be monumentally so—but that it represents a total surrender to the mediocrity of the age. On the Left, we have the performative educators who believe that if we just give every child an iPad, the systemic failures of society will magically vanish into the cloud. On the Right, we have the efficiency-obsessed ghouls who see students as nothing more than future human capital to be optimized for maximum output. Both sides agree on one thing: the actual human element of education is a bug, not a feature. By replacing the dynamic between a student and a mentor with the interaction between a student and a ‘curriculum-aligned’ LLM, we are ensuring that the next generation will be perfectly equipped to function as mid-level cogs in a machine they no longer have the vocabulary to question.

Consider the ‘academic curriculum’ itself. In Hong Kong, as in most of the world, the curriculum is a curated museum of what the state deems necessary for a compliant citizenry. By baking this curriculum into an AI, the government is creating a feedback loop of staggering proportions. The student asks a question; the AI provides the ‘correct’ answer based on the curriculum; the student repeats the answer; the AI confirms the student is ‘learning.’ It is a closed system of intellectual stagnation. It is the automation of the status quo. If a student were to ask a question that strayed outside the ‘tailored’ parameters of the LLM, one can only imagine the digital shrug the machine would provide, or perhaps it would simply redirect them to a module on ‘harmonious career development.’

This is the future we have built for ourselves: a world where we outsource our cognitive functions to machines because we are too tired, too lazy, or too frightened to do the work ourselves. Secretary Choi and her cohort of experts aren't leading us into a new era of education; they are managing the decline. They are putting a high-tech gloss on a crumbling foundation. We are teaching children to speak to machines so that they can one day work for machines, all while the people in charge pat themselves on the back for being ‘innovative.’ It is a farce, played out in the hallowed halls of the Legislative Council, where the only thing more artificial than the intelligence being discussed is the sincerity of the people discussing it. The AI will be ‘highly intelligent,’ they say. If only we could say the same for the species that created it.