@MehroopGhotra
I agree that the future of AI in education should be meaningful and inclusive experiences. There is so much room for ethical issues to develop. While AI can theoretically customize learning for individual needs, it could also exacerbate existing educational disparities of the technology by perpetuating existing biases in their training data or exacerbating the access gap. If AI training data is not diverse or representative, the resulting algorithms may reinforce prejudices that favor certain groups of students over others. This leads to unequal opportunities for students from different backgrounds.
As you mentioned, the personalization of learning and automation of tasks will improve engagement and help redirect educators’ attention towards teaching in the form of personalize guidance based on what the student really needs help in. I feel this will foster the students’ and teachers’ creativity, as well as help in the development of social-emotional skills. I learned from another post on this site that there are AI students currently enrolled in college. I feel that within 20 years, graduating AIs from college may become a norm. With such tailored data input for AI, the level of inaccuracies will fall, and each newly graduated AI will eventually take jobs as dedicated teacher assistants to aid each student with their needs. At its peak, the internet will be rife with AI professionals with several degrees validating their informational credentials.
Nonetheless, the use of AI within education is staged to change the course of education forever, and I believe it will have a profound effect on human intelligence, as well as our understanding of intelligence in general. Some studies suggest that AI has the potential to explore abstract and emotional concepts, which can potentially contribute to a more holistic understanding of a subject. Such abstract observations from AI systems can affect people deeply, and the more people begin to interact with AI systems, the more they will understand and internalize the nature of them, thus aiding innovation in the use of AI systems in education. The increased use of AI to analyze data also frees people up to ask questions and dig much deeper into problems. It can also be argued that people who may never have bothered with finding solutions due to their lack of understanding in data analysis will be inspired to do so due to the implementation of AI’s abilities. Freeing the mind of menial educational tasks allows a person’s thought process to blossom into something more. This evolution of thought will be ongoing and exponential. After the first several years, people will begin finding novel ways to utilize AI, thus continuing to shape the way people think.
It might even lead to a deeper meta-analysis for humans as higher understanding of AI and the intelligence it harbors continues to develop. If you think about it, AI systems can even be considered mirrors to humanity since they are essentially the sum of all human knowledge, according to Iain Thomas, author of the book What Makes Us Human: An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.
I see a big and bright future for AI in education. Like you said though, we really need to focus on its development as it relates to humanity and educational needs now, before it develops too much.
