Its advantage over a human teacher lay in its capacity to deal with each child individually. It tutored, rather than merely teaching. A teaching machine could handle up to a thousand pupils and yet never confuse one with the next; with each child its responses altered so that it became a subtly different entity. Mechanical, yes—but almost infinitely complex. The teaching machines demonstrated a fact that Jack Bohlen was well aware of: there was an astonishing depth to the so-called “artificial.”
