India, Aug. 22 -- There is a particular kind of anxiety that now accompanies education in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). It is not merely the old anxiety about examinations, competition or jobs. Those fears belonged to a familiar world in which education, however unequal, was still understood as the acquisition of capacities that machines did not possess. A student learned to write, calculate, compose, analyse, design or argue, and these abilities were valued because they remained recognisably human.

That assumption is now difficult to sustain. Saikat Majumdar's Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial begins from this unsettled moment. The book is neither a celebration of AI nor a lament for a vanishing human wo...