Education Abundance is the regime in which every learner on Earth has continuous access to a patient, expert, responsive tutor; in which mastery is verified directly rather than signaled by the institution attended; and in which formal education ceases to be a bounded stage of life and becomes a lifelong service. The combination of foundation-model tutors, open credentials, and cheap Autonomous Mobility collapses the geographic and cost moats that have defined education for a century.
The Bloom problem, revisited
Benjamin Bloom's 1984 "two-sigma problem" observed that one-on-one tutoring raised average student performance by roughly two standard deviations over group instruction, but no society could afford to provide it. AI tutors are the first plausible answer. Early studies on GPT-class tutors in Khan Academy's Khanmigo and in Nigerian edtech trials show effect sizes consistent with the Bloom result at marginal cost approaching zero. The scale is newly achievable; the quality tail remains the question.
Credentialed mastery
If the tutor is free, the choke point becomes credentialing: how does a prospective employer, collaborator, or citizen verify mastery? Open credentials (verifiable, portable, cryptographically signed) and direct assessment — demonstrate the skill, get the badge — break the bundling of teaching, testing, and signaling that universities have held for a thousand years. This is where Education Abundance intersects Verifiable Identity in a load-bearing way.
Risks and open questions
The obvious risk is that AI tutors fossilize existing curricula rather than expand them, and that unbundled credentials become dominated by a few private platforms. The less-obvious risk is that the socializing functions of school — friendship, citizenship, the shared civic frame — do not survive their decoupling from instruction. The wiki treats the social function as a peer problem to be designed for, not a legacy to be shed.