For one, a higher child-to-caregiver ratio. There may be others, but this seems to be the easiest lever to pull to eke out some productivity gains.

Personally, I’m completely fine with having this be the subject of regulation - even if it’s possibly an overly blunt instrument, this is not an area where I’d be comfortable letting the free hand of the market do its thing. Further, I suspect that universal, subsidized, high-quality pre-K would be a net economic benefit in the long run, but I haven’t done the research to back up this assertion.

In my city, the regulations specify a maximum # kids per adult. So if you were to devise a way to supervise more children per adult, using technology, you would still have to hire the same number of adults.

The regulations specify that teachers must have completed a certain number of units of a specific type of education. If you create an AI Assistant that means you can hire people with less training and have the same quality, then ... you cannot.

The regulations regulate inputs rather than outputs.