AI won’t replace teachers — but a classroom revolution is coming
I recently asked Bard, Google’s conversational chatbot, if artificial intelligence would replace teachers. Here’s what it said: “AI is unlikely to fully replace teachers in the foreseeable future.”
I Agreed.
During a poetry night, I remember joking with a friend that it takes a broken heart to nurture and heal another heart. I added, “Until AI experiences heartbreak, we must trust human teachers to nurture the hearts and minds of the next generation.”
Still, it’s hard to ignore the growing questions and concerns arising from — and about — the education community about the impact of AI on their jobs, their classrooms, and their calling.
Governments, foundations and companies have funneled billions of dollars in recent years to research, develop and deploy AI systems that can broadly perform intelligent tasks normally associated with humans.
For example, Bard and fellow chatbot ChatGPT can write essays, provide feedback on computer code, and even write elegant poems. AI is also used to control voice assistants such as Siri, recommend products on e-commerce sites and detect deadly diseases, among other things.
At the moment, AI still lags behind humans in most disciplines, especially complex tasks that require a combination of technical competencies and social-emotional skills. Many experts even agree that in the short term, AI will mainly complement people rather than replace them.
Importantly, even as AI progresses, we shouldn’t give up all cognitive stuff to machines. This would not only exacerbate technical dependence, but also undermine critical thinking and reflection, which are essential aspects of the human experience. We must continue to teach children to think.
However, AI forces us to rethink education as a means to democratize thinking and knowing. That cannot be denied. About 40% of the world’s population is under the age of 24. If schools fail to prepare this generation of young people for the age of thinking machines, the consequences for social and economic peace could be disastrous.
AI has the potential to support positive transformation in education. For example, AI-powered computer vision and speech-to-text apps can significantly improve the accessibility of schools for students with visual and hearing disabilities. AI can also reduce teachers’ workloads, especially in environments where teacher capacity and staffing levels are low. However, human educators must remain at the center of teaching and learning.
On the other hand, the technology also has a high potential for damage. Generative AI can help students cheat on exams In addition, AI chatbots often produce results that are sexist, racist and factually incorrect.
So what should teachers do?
Prepare students to ask better questions
A young university official in Cameroon recently told me that he and his colleagues are “trying to see how our classes will prepare students for technology and AI”.
In the future, more teachers and education officials will have to think this way. On the face of it, this requires a review of curricula, syllabi and professional development programs for educators, and the inclusion of objectives and content on AI literacy, risk, ethics and skills, among others.
On a deeper level, as machines get better at answering questions, teachers should guide students to ask better questions. This goes beyond writing good conversational AI prompts. Today’s schools must inspire students to be curious, as this is an essential ingredient for conducting primary research, including in frontier areas, where humans have an edge over AI.
Moreover, as AI heralds rapid transformation and change in the labor markets, social-emotional skills such as adaptability must become central to curricula. Educators should strive to plant the seeds of adaptability in the hearts and minds of students.
When change becomes the only constant, we must not only help students to learn, we must also inspire them to love lifelong learning.
Help avoid echo chambers
AI will almost certainly exacerbate the problem of disinformation. Soon anyone with an internet connection will be able to make solid arguments on any subject simply by entering a prompt into an AI platform.
Echo chambers could grow exponentially if we don’t train today’s young people to find common ground and have peaceful conversations with people they disagree with.
In the absence of action, AI can fan the flames of extremism and polarization.
Addressing the most pressing challenges of our time – climate change, pandemics, migration – requires unprecedented collaboration at global, regional and national levels. While AI will unlock new capabilities for analyzing, organizing, and processing information needed to solve these problems, it will be potentially useless if we can’t talk to each other.
That is why it is so important to teach students the ability to find common ground.
Use AI as a teaching assistant
We’ve known for decades that students learn better when teaching is personalized. However, limited teacher staffing and rapidly growing student populations, especially in low-income countries, have prevented tailor-made teaching approaches from fully taking off.
AI could change this.
Adaptive learning technologies powered by AI are already showing promising results in reading and writing. AI-powered adaptive learning solutions typically assess students’ current knowledge and competencies, identify gaps, deliver content and quizzes at the appropriate level, and provide feedback to improve learning outcomes.
A World Bank judgement has reported promising results from adaptive learning pilots around the world. AI can therefore complement teachers’ efforts and support significant improvements in educational outcomes.
To be clear, human educators will continue to be critical to learning. In the same way that libraries and search engines don’t take instructional responsibility away from teachers, human educators must remain central to the age of educational AI.
Among other things, teachers will still set ambitious learning goals, provide instruction and motivate and inspire students.
AI needs education
Importantly, when using educational AI solutions, issues such as privacy, inclusion, bias, and accuracy should be considered. Currently, generative AI often produces inaccurate, biased, racist and sexist responses.
Academic institutions can help with this. They can serve as spaces for debate, research and experimentation to make AI more secure, inclusive, accurate and obedient. Universities can also apply a rigorous research lens to separate hype from reality and ensure the technology serves, rather than harms, shared human development.
Academics can also play a vital role in helping governments anticipate and manage the disruptive effects of AI. For example, as AI disrupts sectors and professions, replacing old jobs and creating new ones, tertiary education institutions will be vital for the skill, upskilling and reskilling of today’s workforce for the future.
The future
Innovation works in mysterious ways and we are barely witnessing the first moments of AI’s Cambrian explosion.
No one knows what the era of AI will bring.
However, we know that the pace of change will accelerate. The skills landscape will shift. Education will have to evolve. Therefore, we can adapt our curricula and instructional techniques to a world where machines think.
We can teach students to find common ground and have peaceful conversations even when they disagree with their interlocutors. We can empower our teachers and educators not only to use AI for adaptive learning, but also to make AI solutions in education and beyond safer, more inclusive, confident and obedient.
The journey will be long. We can trip. We can fall. But we have to get up again. We must keep walking to ensure that AI contributes to creating a world where knowledge is democratized and used for the common good.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author himself and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.