AI tutors are not the answer, say parents and educators. What they want instead.

Key points

• Critics say AI tutoring tools benefit technology companies more than students or teachers.
• The letters respond to a Guardian AI article published 6 September by economist Daniel Susskind.
• Writers say student protests about AI reflect concern over labour conditions, not just graduate job prospects.
• The carbon and resource cost of data centres is raised as a direct harm to children's futures.

When Daniel Susskind wrote in The Guardian AI that "human tutors are too expensive to provide to everyone", he probably meant it as a gentle statement of fact. Educators Pil and Galia Kollectiv and philosopher Jane Roland Martin read it very differently.

Too expensive compared to what, they ask.

What is actually being argued here?

The framing is backwards, the letter writers say. Tax concentrated wealth more heavily and you could fund human tutors for every child. Calling AI the only option is a political choice dressed up as economic inevitability.

Parents are regularly told that AI learning tools, software that adapts lessons to each child's pace and gaps, can democratise one-to-one attention that private school fees once bought. The letter writers say this gets the story the wrong way round: wealthy, screen-sceptical parents are already choosing human teachers for their children. Everyone else gets an algorithm.

What do protesting students actually want?

Critics often frame student AI demonstrations as anxiety about graduate jobs. The writers say students understand something broader: that pushing AI into education shifts money and power toward a small number of technology firms while making teaching work worse and less secure. We covered the walkout at Stanford's graduation in our 21 July story, and those students made the same point about labour conditions.

That's a harder argument to dismiss than simple job-market fear.

What about the environmental cost?

Data centres, the vast warehouses of computers that run AI systems, consume enormous quantities of water and electricity. The letter writers call AI automation "environmentally catastrophic" for exactly this reason.

This isn't a fringe position. No lifecycle figure is cited in the original letters, but the concern maps onto real and growing research. If the goal is a good future for children, building more power-hungry infrastructure to replace human teachers may not be the straightforward win that education technology companies advertise.

Should parents be more sceptical of ed-tech promises?

Yes, and pointedly so. Ask what the evidence base is, how large the trials were, and whether those trials involved children like yours. Press releases aren't peer review. It's also worth reading our 5 August report on the American Federation of Teachers taking $23 million from big tech to fund AI training for its members, because who pays for the rollout shapes what gets rolled out.

The writers stop short of saying AI has no place in a classroom. What they're saying is that "too expensive" is a budget choice, not a law of nature, and children deserve the political argument made plainly rather than hidden behind a technology solution.