AI Can Provide Genuine Benefits When Applied To Education

Much of the discussion around artificial intelligence (AI) has been around the negative effects of greater AI use. As AI can perform more and more tasks better than humans it will result in fewer people in professional jobs.

This is a real danger, but the media usually overstates it for effect. The reality is that most professionals – including IT professionals – are finding ways to use AI to make them more productive, rather than replacing them entirely.

One area where it looks like AI could have a very positive effect is children’s education. Traditional supporters of teacher-led education will argue that you can’t improve on a human teacher with deep knowledge of a subject, but the reality is that in many parts of the world there are children without access to teachers, or with only access to a very basic education.

Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, believes that AI could democratize access to personal tuition for children. The Khan Academy has been making online videos to help kids for almost twenty years now. Their free to access service now has over 10,000 video lessons online in many different subjects.

The Khan Academy recently launched their Khanmigo Ai tutor. This is an app that can interact with teachers, children, and parents and answer questions in a personalized way that suits the child. It learns where they are strong or where they are weaker in their knowledge and can focus on helping them in these areas.

Even teachers appear to be supportive of tools like this because they can structure lessons in the app, the app can personalize the lessons for each student, and the student can interact with their app or their teacher when they need help. It’s like a teacher with a class of 25 students having 25 digital assistants.

The interesting thing is that people have been writing about this idea for years… one day we will eventually have robot teachers that can deliver individual classes to students. Now it really exists, but in a way that supports both parents and teachers.

Neal Stephenson is the sci-fi writer who created the term “metaverse.” His books also suggest that we might be able to create cryptocurrencies. There is a long list of his ideas that have become a reality.

He recently talked to the Atlantic magazine about one of his books from the nineties called The Diamond Age. This features a magical book that acts as a personal tutor and mentor for a young girl – adapting to her learning style and personalizing lessons based on where she needs to focus.

The incredible thing is that Stephenson was suggesting these ideas three decades ago and now we have Khanmigo.

However, one of my favorite predictions of AI and education is Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘Robbie’ from 1940. It was the first story in Asimov’s famous series of stories about robots.

To summarize it, a family has a robot tutor called Robbie to help teach and guide their daughter. The family grows concerned that their daughter is too attached to the robot so they replace it with a dog. The daughter grieves for her robot friend and searches everywhere for him. Eventually the father decides to take his daughter to a robot factory so she can see that robots are just machines – not people you can become attached to.

The daughter sees her friend Robbie working in the factory – he has been assigned a job on the production line. She runs to see him and steps in front of a moving vehicle. Robbie saves her from almost certain death. The father realizes that an emotional attachment with a robot can be real and allows Robbie to come and live with them again.

That’s a powerful message about AI and something we need to consider as more and more tasks are undertaken by AI assistants. It’s even more impressive that it was written so long ago.

The Robbie story demonstrates that AI can add value to our life, we just need to understand how and where it should be applied. We are seeing this with tools like Khanmigo. If AI can be deployed as an assistant that helps real teachers then it can be an extremely valuable tool, but nobody is calling for an end to the human wisdom of a real teacher – at least not yet.

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