I asked the “general AI agent” Manus to design and create an online course. There were some glitches, but the result shows what advanced AI could be capable of in the very near future. From the Future of Being Human Substack.
If you read my post from a few days ago you’ll know that I’ve been experimenting with Manus — the new general AI agent from Chinese company Monica. Having asked it to simulate a research study (along with a bunch of simulated students) I thought I’d scale things back a bit and set it the allegedly easier goal of designing, developing, and deploying, an online course.
Of course, people have been using generative AI to build courses for the past couple of years — me included. But what agentic AI platforms like Manus can do, which hasn’t been possible before, is to take on the whole workflow from ideation and conception to implementation — all while while making their own decisions.
And this is a potential game changer for how online educational content is developed and deployed.
It was, I must confess, not a completely smooth process working with Manus — as I explain below. But I was impressed enough with the final course that it’s one I’ll be recommending that people actually use!
A short course on navigating advanced technologies
Before I get to describing the process, I wanted to provide the opportunity to check out the resulting course itself:
(The course is also available here: https://fvture.net/courses/tech-transitions/)
This is a short introductory course on navigating advanced technology transitions. It’s the result of just a few minutes of Manus’ time — along with several hours of mine (I’m a little slower than an AI).
Close to 100% of the ideation, concept, design, flow, and content, is based on autonomous decisions that Manus made. I had to step in at the end with some final design tweaks and debugging. But this was largely cosmetic …
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