AI could make the future role of education increasingly to be in support of human development

by Dennis Sale

IN most basic terms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses computer systems to accomplish tasks and activities that have historically relied on human cognition. These include such cognitive processes as visual perception, speech recognition, language processing and decision-making. Everyday applications of AI that are increasingly prevalent include self-driving cars, voice assistants, chatbots (e.g., Alexa), and voice recognition and translation systems.

AI has attracted much attention recently as its impact across society is potentially life-changing and often referred to as ‘the next electricity’ (e.g., Ilkka, 2018). It will impact many occupational structures, and teaching and learning will be no exception. AI evokes much debate around the capability (or otherwise) of technology to fully model all aspects of human intelligence, and maybe surpass it.

On the one hand, some writers (e.g., Gee 2017), see this as unlikely in the foreseeable future, and uses the following logic:

Since computers cannot have experienced, they cannot learn humanly. They start with facts and generalisations as strings of symbols they cannot understand.

Similarly, Luckin (2018) argues that AI lacks most of the human’s metacognitive regulatory capabilities.

In contrast, Harari (2018) paints a more sinister and worrying picture of the future of AI. He suggests:

AI not only stands poised to hack humans and outperform them in what were hitherto uniquely human skills. It also enjoys uniquely non-human abilities, which make the difference between an AI and a human worker one of kind rather than merely of degree. Two particularly important non-human abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updateability.

Harari’s inference and interpretation of this scenario are not one of a replacement of millions of human workers by millions of individual robots and computers – but being replaced by an integrated network, that is immensely more powerful. What we can infer and interpret from the consequences of this are unknown, and we may easily fall into the realms of science fiction, envisioning something akin to that of the Terminator film series, in which machines take control of the world. Is it possible that an AI-integrated network could possess a superordinate form of consciousness that could turn on humans? – we simply don’t know. As Harari (2016) states:

The rise of AI and biotechnology will certainly transform the world, but it does not mandate a single deterministic outcome.

In terms of impacting specific aspects of teaching and learning in educational institutions, there are some clear indicative possibilities, including intelligent tutoring customised to individual learning needs and the process of assessment. The two can be related in many ways to provide fully customised personalised learning. Likely, neural AI will potentially enhance the areas of learning diagnostics, analytics and data mining. As the Educause Horizon Report (2009) summarises (with a warning):

It is possible to imagine many exciting possibilities for AI in teaching. Without clear pedagogic principles, it is, however, probable that AI vendors will provide products and services that affect key-decision-makers’ perceived immediate problems, instead of more fundamental social and economic challenges.

AI may, therefore, mechanise and reinvent outmoded teaching practices and make them increasingly difficult to change.

The report highlights several challenges, the most salient being a redefining of what educational aims and goals educational institutions should best focus on; it highlights:

As AI will be used to automate production processes, we may need to reinvent current educational institutions. It is, for example, possible that formal educational institutions will play a diminishing role in creating job-related competencies. This could mean that the future role of education will increasingly be in supporting human development.

A potentially game-changing AI is ChatGPT. This is an intelligent chatbot that enables users to engage in human-like conversation to address a wide range of questions, find and summarise complex data, translate languages and create writing products such as essays and poems. Elon Musk, a global pioneer in AI, sees the further development of ChatGPT as ‘Scary Good… we are not far away from dangerously strong AI’.

What is the Singularity?

The Singularity, a term not familiar to many, is also now gaining greater global attention. Highly popularised in Kurzweil’s epic work, ‘The Singularity is near’, specifically refers to a future scenario in which AI becomes capable of exponential self-improvement making it vastly superior to human intelligences – even having ‘consciousness’, which could be also heightened. There are some who believe that the Singularity could lead to a potential utopian future of unlimited experience and the end to much human suffering. Others are less optimistic, seeing it as an existential threat to the very nature and future of humankind.

Kurzweil (2005) argues that Radical Evolution (e.g., the coming together of genetics, robotics, information-communication technologies, and nanotechnology into a singularity) will, apart from significantly increasing the human lifespan, also increase human capability through bionic enhancement, transforming physical health and cognitive capability through the connectivity of IT and brain neural networks. Just as map applications have largely made redundant the painful task of years of learning (memorising) the names and locations of all London’s roads (which was the case to acquire a taxi licence for driving the famous black taxicab in London), downloading a full language system straight into an organised set of neural networks in the brain would take the drudge out of learning a foreign language.

The futurist writer, Harari (2016) makes an interesting assertion:

In the twenty-first century, humans are likely to make a serious bid for immortality. Struggling against old age and death will merely carry on the time-honoured fight against famine and disease.

In terms of modern science and modern culture, he goes on to suggest that:

They don’t think of death as a metaphysical mystery, and they certainly don’t view death as the source of life’s meaning. Rather, for modern people, death is a technical problem that we can and should solve.

Well, what are the curriculum implications of such radical evolution events? Off the bat I don’t think this will happen for the next 50 years or so and, in the meantime, we are living with a stone-age brain and dealing with a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) world. Hence, I will continue writing these columns.

Dennis Sale worked in the Singapore education system for 25 years as Advisor, Researcher, and Examiner. He coached over 15,000 teaching professionals and provided 100+ consultancies in the Asian region. Dennis is author of the books Creative Teachers: Self-directed Learners (Springer 2020) and Creative Teaching: An Evidence-Based Approach (Springer, 2015). Visit dennissale.com