Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humans

Over the past few decades, experts and amateurs alike have predicted the internet would have large-scale impacts on education. Many of these hopes have not lived up to the hype. Some respondents to this canvassing said the advent of AI could foster those changes. They expect to see more options for affordable adaptive and individualized learning solutions, including digital agents or "AI assistants" that work to enhance student-teacher interactions and effectiveness.

Barry Chudakov, founder and principal of Sertain Research and author of "Metalifestream," commented, "In the learning environment, AI has the potential to finally demolish the retain-to-know learning (and regurgitate) model. Knowing is no longer retaining – machine intelligence does that; it is making significant connections. Connect and assimilate becomes the new learning model".

Lou Gross, professor of mathematical ecology and expert in grid computing, spatial optimization and modeling of ecological systems at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said, "I see AI as assisting in individualized instruction and training in ways that are currently unavailable or too expensive. There are hosts of school systems around the world that have some technology but are using it in very constrained ways. AI use will provide better adaptive learning and help achieve a teacher's goal of personalizing education based on each student's progress".

Guy Levi, chief innovation officer for the Center for Educational Technology, based in Israel, wrote, "In the field of education AI will promote personalization, which almost by definition promotes motivation. The ability to move learning forward all the time by a personal AI assistant, which opens the learning to new paths, is a game changer. The AI assistants will also communicate with one another and will orchestrate teamwork and collaboration. The AI assistants will also be able to manage diverse methods of learning, such as productive failure, teach-back and other innovating pedagogies".

Micah Altman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and head scientist in the program on information science at MIT Libraries, wrote, "These technologies will help to adapt learning (and other environments) to the needs of each individual by translating language, aiding memory and providing us feedback on our own emotional and cognitive state and on the environment. We all need adaptation; each of us, practically every day, is at times tired, distracted, fuzzy-headed or nervous, which limits how we learn, how we understand and how we interact with others. AI has the potential to assist us to engage with the world better – even when conditions are not ideal – and to better understand ourselves".

Shigeki Goto, Asia-Pacific internet pioneer, Internet Hall of Fame member and a professor of computer science at Waseda University, commented, "AI is already applied to personalized medicine for an individual patient. Similarly, it will be applied to learning or education to realize 'personalized learning' or tailored education. We need to collect data which covers both of successful learning and failure experiences, because machine learning requires positive and negative data".

Andreas Kirsch, fellow at Newspeak House, formerly with Google and DeepMind in Zurich and London, wrote, "Higher education outside of normal academia will benefit further from AI progress and empower more people with access to knowledge and information. For example, question-and-answer systems will improve. Tech similar to Google Translate and WaveNet will lower the barrier of knowledge acquisition for non-English speakers. At the same time, child labor will be reduced because robots will be able to perform the tasks far cheaper and faster, forcing governments in Asia to find real solutions".

Kristin Jenkins, executive director of BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, said, "One of the benefits of this technology is the potential to have really effective, responsive education resources. We know that students benefit from immediate feedback and the opportunity to practice applying new information repeatedly to enhance mastery. AI systems are perfect for analyzing students' progress, providing more practice where needed and moving on to new material when students are ready. This allows time with instructors to focus on more-complex learning, including 21st-century skills".

Mike Meyer, chief information officer at Honolulu Community College, commented, "Adult education availability and relevance will undergo a major transformation. Community colleges will become more directly community centers for both occupational training and greatly expanded optional liberal arts, art, crafts and hobbies. Classes will, by 2030, be predominantly augmented-reality-based, with a full mix of physical and virtual students in classes presented in virtual classrooms by national and international universities and organizations. The driving need will be expansion of knowledge for personal interest and enjoyment as universal basic income or equity will replace the automated tasks that had provided subsistence jobs in the old system".

Jennifer Groff, co-founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign, an international non-governmental organization dedicated to redesigning education for the 21st century, wrote, "The impact on learning and learning environments has the potential to be one of the most positive future outcomes. Learning is largely intangible and invisible, making it a 'black box' – and our tools to capture and support learning to this point have been archaic. Think large-scale assessment. Learners need tools that help them understand where they are in a learning pathway, how they learn best, what they need next and so on. We're only just beginning to use technology to better answer these questions. AI has the potential to help us better understand learning, gain insights into learners at scale and, ultimately, build better learning tools and systems for them. But as a large social system, it is also prey to the complications of poor public policy that ultimately warps and diminishes AI's potential positive impact".

Norton Gusky, an education-technology consultant, wrote, "By 2030 most learners will have personal profiles that will tap into AI/machine learning. Learning will happen everywhere and at any time. There will be appropriate filters that will limit the influence of AI, but ethical considerations will also be an issue".

Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University's School of Planning and Public Policy and the Eagleton Institute of Politics, said, "It takes 'information' out of the category of a commodity, and more information makes for better decisions and is democratizing. Education, to me, has always been the status leveler, correcting, to some extent, for birth luck and social mobility. This will be like Asimov's 'Foundation,' where everyone is plugged into the data-sphere. There is a dark side (later) but overall a positive".

However, some expect that there will be a continuing digital divide in education, with the privileged having more access to advanced tools and more capacity for using them well, while the less-privileged lag behind.

Henning Schulzrinne, co-chair of the Internet Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, professor at Columbia University and Internet Hall of Fame member, said, "Human-mediated education will become a luxury good. Some high school- and college-level teaching will be conducted partially by video and AI-graded assignments, using similar platforms to the MOOC [massive open online courses] models today, with no human involvement, to deal with increasing costs for education ('robo-TA')".

Joe Whittaker, a former professor of sciences and associate director of the NASA GESTAR program, now associate provost at Jackson State University, responded, "Huge segments of society will be left behind or excluded completely from the benefits of digital advances – many persons in underserved communities as well as others who are socio-economically challenged. This is due to the fact that these persons will be under-prepared generally, with little or no digital training or knowledge base. They rarely have access to the relatively ubiquitous internet, except when at school or in the workplace. Clearly, the children of these persons will be greatly disadvantaged".

Some witnesses of technology's evolution over the past few decades feel that its most-positive potential has been disappointingly delayed. After witnessing the slower-than-expected progress of tech's impact on public education since the 1990s, they are less hopeful than others.

Ed Lyell, longtime educational technologies expert and professor at Adams State University, said education has been held back to this point by the tyranny of the status quo. He wrote, "By 2030, lifelong learning will become more widespread for all ages. The tools already exist, including Khan Academy and YouTube. We don't have to know as much, just how to find information when we want it. We will have on-demand, 24/7 'schooling'. This will make going to sit-down classroom schools more and more a hindrance to our learning. The biggest negative will be from those protecting current, status-quo education including teachers/faculty, school boards and college administrators. They are protecting their paycheck- or ego-based role. They will need training, counseling and help to embrace the existing and forthcoming change as good for all learners. Part of the problem now is that they do not want to acknowledge the reality of how current schools are today. Some do a good job, yet these are mostly serving already smarter, higher-income communities. Parents fight to have their children have a school like they experienced, forgetting how inefficient and often useless it was. AI can help customize curricula to each learner and guide/monitor their journey through multiple learning activities, including some existing schools, on-the-job learning, competency-based learning, internships and such. You can already learn much more, and more efficiently, using online resources than almost all of the classes I took in my public schooling and college, all the way through getting a Ph.D".

A consultant and analyst also said that advances in education have been held back by entrenched interests in legacy education systems, writing, "The use of technology in education is minimal today due to the existence and persistence of the classroom-in-a-school model. As we have seen over the last 30 years, the application of artificial intelligence in the field of man/machine interface has grown in many unexpected directions. Who would have thought back in the late 1970s that the breadth of today's online (i.e., internet) capabilities could emerged? I believe we are just seeing the beginning of the benefits of the man/machine interface for mankind. The institutionalized education model must be eliminated to allow education of each and every individual to grow. The human brain can be 'educated' 24 hours a day by intelligent 'educators' who may not even be human in the future. Access to information is no longer a barrier as it was 50 years ago. The next step now is to remove the barrier of structured human delivery of learning in the classroom".

Brock Hinzmann, a partner in the Business Futures Network who worked for 40 years as a futures researcher at SRI International, was hopeful in his comments but also issued a serious warning. He wrote: "Most of the improvements in the technologies we call AI will involve machine learning from big data to improve the efficiency of systems, which will improve the economy and wealth. It will improve emotion and intention recognition, augment human senses and improve overall satisfaction in human-computer interfaces. There will also be abuses in monitoring personal data and emotions and in controlling human behavior, which we need to recognize early and thwart. Intelligent machines will recognize patterns that lead to equipment failures or flaws in final products and be able to correct a condition or shut down and pinpoint the problem. Autonomous vehicles will be able to analyze data from other vehicles and sensors in the roads or on the people nearby to recognize changing conditions and avoid accidents. In education and training, AI learning systems will recognize learning preferences, styles and progress of individuals and help direct them toward a personally satisfying outcome. However, governments or religious organizations may monitor emotions and activities using AI to direct them to 'feel' a certain way, to monitor them and to punish them if their emotional responses at work, in education or in public do not conform to some norm. Education could become indoctrination; democracy could become autocracy or theocracy".