This October, anyone can take an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class, taught by professors at Stanford, for free.

This is great. But it gets better. In order to expand the scope of the class from the 200 people they’ve been teaching in person, the instructors will be using AI software to grade homework, aggregate discussion questions, and generally mediate interactions with students. Why bother? Because, to date, over 100,000 people have signed up for this course, and the enrollment is showing no signs of slowing.

The use of the software to scale allows students to get feedback on their individual homework assignments and quizzes, to interact with the instructors, and to get a ranking in the course compared to both other online attendees and the students enrolled at Stanford — feedback that would be utterly impossible to provide to that number of people if the instructors didn’t have the help of AI. It will be fascinating to see how the concepts taught in the class are used to administer it.

I’ve been intrigued by AI ever since reading Gödel, Escher, Bach way back when I was a teenager (and before I was really equipped to follow all of it). More recently, I’ve been increasingly interested in robotics and the applications thereof, which rely pretty heavily on some of the AI concepts that are in the syllabus for this class. And, of course, I have an enduring interest in games, which are probably where AI is used most often in modern computing.

So am I signing up? You betcha. And I hope some of my nerd friends will too, so that we can compare notes along the way.

This is one of the reasons I love living in the future: we have access to information and learning that is unparalleled in human history, opportunities to sit at the feet of experts that we could only have dreamed of even a decade or two ago. And wonderfully, access to an amazing education is increasingly being divorced from access to money, creating remarkable opportunities for people who are ready to work at their own learning, regardless of their backgrounds. I fully expect to be bested in the course rankings by smart 14 year olds in India and China, and will be excited to see it happen.

I’ll post some updates and reflections along the way, and possibly homework assignments too if they turn out to be interesting. This should be a fun ride.

(Thanks to Singularity Hub for the tip-off.)