The AI General Education Redbook is an academic work with very distinct features of its time and clear scholarly positions. Taking Harvard's 1945 Redbook as its historical reference point, it boldly puts forward cognitive autonomy as its core concept, and unfolds layer by layer from historical background and theoretical foundations to content framework and stage-by-stage implementation. The work has two important innovations:
First, it raises a question that calls for deep reflection and shows a very strong awareness of the problem: now that AI has become a cornerstone of society, cognitive autonomy becomes an important goal of AI literacy education, which offers important inspiration and reference for the goals and priorities of "AI literacy".
Second, it argues that AI general education courses are an important path for developing cognitive autonomy, providing valuable thinking on how such courses should be positioned. It is a highly innovative piece of work with real practical guidance value.
Third, cognitive autonomy itself is highly innovative and is indeed an increasingly important concern of our time. It is original and overarching, and the book also specifically emphasizes and distinguishes between "cognitive autonomy" and "the capacity for cognitive autonomy".
Fourth, by drawing an analogy with the classic Harvard Redbook, it reinforces the importance of cognitive autonomy and also makes it easier for a broad readership to understand.
Fifth, the internal structure of the monograph is fairly unified. Taken as a whole it presents five blocks — concepts, methods, applications, cross-disciplinary integration, and ethics — forming a complete chain from "understanding principles" to "participating in construction" to "taking responsibility". Chapters including those on ethics and cross-disciplinary integration all reflect a "general" rather than "specialist" positioning.
Overall it is all very good, but personally I would just raise two small points, more or less symbolically:
First, the text especially stresses that cognitive autonomy is only one perspective offered by the authors, but even from this perspective, shouldn't it be fairly comprehensive? As the goal of AI general education courses, might cognitive autonomy be a little narrow? After all, "cognition" is only one human capacity; beyond cognition, people also have emotions and attitudes, a humanistic spirit, ethics, and so on. One of the innovations of the OECD's AI literacy framework is that it treats "attitudes" as an important cornerstone of AI literacy too. In other words, could cognitive autonomy be understood as an important goal of AI general education courses, rather than the whole of it? Of course, if it were broadened, the book's original, very focused notion of cognitive autonomy might become diluted and blurred.
Second, the chapters are indeed written around cognitive autonomy, but the main thread does not seem very clear: what exactly is the internal logical relationship between the various parts? It is not very clear. Although in several chapters the second-to-last subheading mentions how that chapter relates to cognitive autonomy in its own way, raising that relationship in that position is not very explicit or clear, and readers do not see that key point. Moreover, each chapter has around ten subheadings, and the logical relationships among them also need further sorting out; ten or so subheadings feels rather fragmented, with no strong internal logic visible, and it is impossible to tell how they relate to the theme. At the very least, each chapter title should highlight how that chapter's content relates to cognitive autonomy.