Harvard Business Publishing Education: Since the widely acclaimed release of ChatGPT 4, generative AI has been touted by many as the savior of education. Case in point: British education expert Sir Anthony Seldon has predicted that by 2027, AI will replace human teachers on a global scale.
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Unfortunately, generative AI is not the be all answer for menial tasks. Maybe eventually when people have computers in their brains to download centuries of history and memorize all the information they ever need, learning will be easy. That time is not now though. With the invention and development of the internet, information has flowed from all corners of the earth. The problem is trying to organize, categorize, and make that information usable and accessible. With everything at your fingertips and a thousand pixels away it makes it hard to wrap your brain around. The hard part of learning is making the connections between facts to make your learning usable. This is hard. The work that has to go into this is long and grueling and seems to not be worth it before you’ve done it. After, it is great to be able to make connections and make meaning out of your surroundings and enhance your further learning.
Reading about the interaction of AI, technology, and early education makes me feel lucky to have been around just before these tools have significantly altered the way we learn from an early age. What concerns me at this point most about the arguments and evidence presented in the article is that technology is now progressing at a rate that is faster than our capacity to fully understand how it is affecting us and our learning. Obviously as AI has grown over the last few years, so too has AI awareness and those working to regulate AI to make it safe and effective, but the omnipresence of AI as a tool and the convenience it provides, it’s impact is sure to continue into the near future. As the technology changes, it will continue to become applicable to new industries in surprising ways, each with their own advancements and setbacks. When video-based AI improves, I wouldn’t be surprised if it became even more applicable to theater and live entertainment work in execution and design.
As a person who needed the hands on nature of a teacher to answer my questions and explain concepts to me in my early education. I can confidently say that if I had been taught AI I don't think I would have gone anywhere, I simply would not have been able to learn. The idea that in only 3 years we will be putting more teachers and educators out of work and positions to do the things they have dedicated their career to in order to have a computer do it because it will be more "efficient" is terrifying. I feel there are somethings that AI and machines will never be able to do, like the article says because a lack of empathy and ability to see a student a person and a mind to help flourish. If this is truly where we are going simply to make people richer by selling their AI programs without the consideration of what that will mean for these students 10 years down the line when they must pick a job or career and may pursue higher education, we are headed towards this only getting worse.
This is a pretty interesting article. It’s fascinating to read about why AI is and always will be fundamentally different from a human, e.g. why humans shouldn’t let AI replace them. I never knew how empathy plays a part in the learning process, and thus why AI would be a poor teacher due to its lack thereof. The second point the article brings up, knowledge, seemed strange to me. Their points didn’t at all seem invalid, but it seems like humans have already reached this point with services like Google and Wikipedia at our fingertips. I do understand, though, that AI can’t necessarily be trusted to ‘discover’ new information. I think we all know from the pandemic years that digital distractions are a problem to learning, so it would inherently be a mistake to switch to a method of learning that is entirely digital. Learning and teaching are intrinsically human processes, and AI just wouldn’t do as good a job.
It is impossible for me to fathom that these tools are actually helping these kids learn real things. There is no way they are actually learning from ai. A hige part of learning is social, social and emotional skills are learned from one another. Being taught academic subjects such as math and science are important to learn from an early age that is, in a social setting. This is because it teaches you how to hold, contain, and share space. Physical classrooms and real teachers do not only improve student’s learning in the subject but also their social skills and their ability to be well rounded emotionally sensitive people. Learning is and will always be in inherently social. Being explained something from multiple different people and perspectives is also a scientifically proven impactful way of learning. This simply should not be allowed and ill always say the same exact thing when it comes to conversations like these about AI, we need to make it illegal.
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