A commentary by the author of the 2022 book Artificial Intelligence and You. He lives in Victoria and has hosted the since 2020.
In his recent column, Geoff Johnson described reactions to artificial intelligence that I have encountered among teachers throughout the world.
I have been preparing people for the impact of AI for more than 10 years, and the capability of ChatGPT still caught many insiders off-guard.
Education is at Ground Zero of this revolution, for many reasons. For instance, by its nature, generative AI is superbly optimized for passing standardized tests, which disrupts the traditional homework model.
But there is far more potential on the upside for those that are willing and able to reinvent their educational process.
A professor in the U.S. called me for advice last week and I asked him to imagine how he would change his teaching methods if all of his students were suddenly granted 24/7 access to expert tutors in every subject.
He couldn’t imagine how he would deal with such a fantasy. “But that’s what you have now,” I told him. “Your students already have that.”
Education Week published a survey showing that 58% of teachers still have received no professional development on using generative AI in the classroom, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage to their students, 100% of whom, by my rough surveys, do understand GenAI.
I asked Sir Anthony Seldon, founder of the U.K.’s AI in Education initiative, to characterize the magnitude of the impact of AI on education for my podcast listeners, and he compared it to the invention of the printing press.
Let that sink in: This is not a once-in-a-lifetime change: this is once in a millennium. Equivalent to how teachers had to pivot from passing on oral histories to using books.
Most schools will fall far short of an appropriate adjustment to AI. Many will fail or become irrelevant. The number of areas where they must overturn traditional thinking is breathtaking.
Yet education reflects only a concentrated microcosm of the wider impact of AI on the future of work, a moving target that schools have to aim students at so that they reach a transformed workplace ready to help.
Ministries of education are simply not constructed to react to this much change this quickly. Few people have a practical understanding of how AI works and what it can and cannot do; it therefore appears to be magic, and so it scares them.
The leadership vacuum on this matter — which, to be fair, is paralleled across every sector and industry — leaves schools needing to work out much of this individually.
Even when central authorities publish guidelines for teachers, they are necessarily so broad as to leave pressing questions unanswered at the point of implementation.
I’ve been privileged to work with schools here in the capital region and beyond to align and empower their staff for AI. The urgency of this work cannot be overstated: the current Grade 12 and senior class are going to graduate into a world already tilted by AI.
We cannot afford a year of dithering over how to grade homework or whether to ban large language models.
The common thread among all the different people I’ve worked with is that AI is such a fundamental force that it holds up a mirror to us, in which people’s beliefs — and fears — are reflected.
Last month, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, wrote an essay about how AI could transform the world for the better, eliminating disease, poverty, and strife, saying, “Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well.”
Our children will be the ones who build that future. They need the best start we can give them in this brave new AI world.
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