The Box and the Mirror – Part II
The Future of AI in Education and Education with AI
Phase 2 - The Mirror
A 24/7 Tutor
A recent high school graduate in India told me that, until the last few months of his study, he hadn’t really understood education. It was the tutors, the reading, the chats online with graduates and thinkers that eventually fuelled his love for knowledge. Education, his parents had told him, school-based education, was something you just had to show up for. And in the world of paid education, this is probably more true than teachers would ever like to admit.
The son of a friend in Asia gets up at five in the morning, trains at his chosen sport until seven, does a full eight hours of schooling between eight and four, and then is tutored in his weaker areas until about ten. At which point, he goes to bed so that the whole thing can start again the next day. And he’s only twelve!
It’s not going to be the commodious colleges of Great Britain, Norway, and the US that move us beyond the Box. If nothing else, there simply isn’t the scale there. It’s going to be BRICs countries that take learning beyond this new guide on the side Box, to the type of holistic education level of a professional athlete. It’s going to be Nigeria.
Because the Box is only going to take us halfway.
Technology in schools started with access to knowledge (“there’s a Youtube video for that”), and moved into individualised responses. But individualised responses to keyboard strokes can only take you so far.
Was that five minute gap between maths answers on a test because the student was struggling, or was it because she needed the bathroom? Does the poor grammar in an essay reveal laziness, lack of sleep, cognitive overload, or something much more wide reaching.
Right now, we rely on human observation to answer these questions, supplementing the gaps that technology can’t see. But what if it could?
Unlike your highly expensive private school, tech companies don’t need to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide holistic education. There are 1.36 billion iPhones active in the world today. WhatsApp has two billion active users. Machine learning (ML) works best on large datasets, making predictions and decisions. Computer vision (CP) operates in over a billion phones, along with every government camera and drone the world has ever put into operation. Game AI creates intelligent opponents to push users' abilities - and is already being proposed as a tool for training teachers. While the digital watch, which monitors heart rate and sleep patterns with terrifying accuracy, is a fragmented industry, nearly a billion are in use every day.
Imagine I wanted to get my child into Cambridge. Imagine I wanted her to study engineering. And imagine she had a Mirror, a unified collection of all technology used by her, including facial recognition that monitors milliseconds of eye movement, analytic tools like smart watches, and other wearable sensors used for gait detection, including Electromyography (EMG) sensors, rotary encoders, laser range finders, flex sensors, and heart monitors.
Now imagine I told her Mirror that seven years from now she needed to be a competitive candidate for St. Johns.
Imagine if her Mirror not only monitored her diet and response to academic stimuli, but her algorithms as well, downplaying friends on her socials that could lead to distractions, and promoting just the right amount and type of television shows and podcasts that maximise that day’s meta-affective behaviour, be it the Kardashians or University Challenge. Imagine her Mirror made sure she ate just the right food, and got just the right amount of exercise and sleep. Imagine, if you like, that it conditioned her to be her best self.
This might all sound nefarious, but each of those situations already exist in almost every family. Friends are vetted, certain media is banned, and wellness is promoted regardless of desire. Our media tell us what we should eat. Our governments tax things that are bad for us. Our societies tell us what we should wear, and what we should like.
So why would we think technology is any worse?
After all, every piece of technology needed to achieve this Mirror already exists, and most are doing exactly what I’ve outlined above. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been a buzzword for quite some time, and the idea that we are somehow a long way off from surrendering control to AI in some form sounds quaint to most ears. Why would a student who wants to achieve their dream of going to a top university surrender any less of their personal lives than an athlete who wants to compete at the Olympics? Indeed, who as an adult hasn’t done this themselves? Who hasn’t surrendered months of their lives to upskilling at one time or another?
The desire for a Mirror isn’t in question; it’s simply now a question of who will get there first.
The Future of Education: the Academy of AI
K-12 education isn’t going away. If Covid proved anything, it proved that the wellbeing of both the child and the parent isn’t best served by everyone staying at home together. Schools will continue, as will education. If the projections on AI are to be believed, we’re about to enter a golden age of learning. Individualised education, first from the Box, and then from the Mirror, will maximise learning for everyone, increasing the quality of education tenfold. Specialisation will be replaced by holistic education.
As AI accurately distils all available knowledge into bite sized, tailored-to-taste chunks, it will ensure the learner digests information with ease.
And in much the same way visionary curricula of the past, such as the International Baccalaureate, envisioned, comprehensive learning can be better facilitated, and student appropriate deep dives, akin to a PhD, can take three months, rather than an exploratory six years,
There are, of course, questions of bias, data protection, and technological disparities to take into account, and the financial burden AI uptake will place on both parents and educational institutions could be immense, especially if they go down the wrong path. Betamax, anyone.
It is wise that we enter this new age of AI with our eyes open.
An AI that can drive a student towards learning, can also drive them towards destruction. Bullying may have been a problem we all witnessed at school, but wait until you meet an AI with the full knowledge of every psychologist, mentalist, and salesperson who has ever lived.
Those, however, who believe this will put the brakes on the inclusion of AI in education are burying their heads in the sand. No one stops training their child for the Olympics despite one in six reporting suicidal ideation, and no parent who has pushed their child to be accepted into an Ivy League college ever thought they should find a tutor who should be less disciplined with their little darling. Human nature will always look for a competitive advantage, and AI presents the greatest competitive opportunity for several hundred years.
AI is also education's greatest hope for a fair playing field since Massachusetts decided compulsory education was a good thing nearly two hundred years ago.
AI is here, and it’s here to stay. Knives have probably killed more people than anything else, but no one is suggesting they should stay out of the kitchen. Perhaps then, it’s not the standard questions of collaboration or collusion that are going to cause the biggest problem for governments and institutions. It's the lack of teacher expertise, not in AI, but in the adaptation of teaching itself.
The conservative mindset of many educators is going to be challenged as we switch from knowledge-uploads and skill-building, to meta-affective behaviour training and personal counselling, so that first the Box, and then the Mirror, upskill the learner. Teachers who are used to being the expert will find themselves challenged by the greater accuracy and ability of their AI competition. Even assessment models will gradually change as individualised learning moves students through assessment at individual paces. But the human touch isn’t going to go away completely, not even in the long term.
EQ, not IQ, is going to be the watchword, though many, if not most, schools are far from ready to pivot easily.
There is a familiar maxim in education that says those that can teach kindergarten, can teach anyone, anything. If you can engage, corral, and maximise learning for a rambunctious four year old, seventeen year old higher level maths’ students aren't going to cause you a problem. However limited that maxim may be, it is good advice for teaching institutions looking to retrain into the future.
The development of AIED technologies involves participatory design methodologies, taking into account the needs of teachers, parents, and students. The flexibility of collaboration and communication will be crucial to the success both of AIs in education, and the institutions looking to incorporate them.
Stakeholder salience is going to be crucial if educational institutions aren't going to flounder, but that doesn’t mean that the AI revolution will serve anyone other than the student.
Self-directed learning (SDL) is already a standard part of most children’s schools, and an essential component of adult learning. Socratic dialogue, far from dying out, seems to be making a comeback at just the right time, and perhaps educational institutions could do worse than look to the Greek model for future training. But it’s not the wise master with a knowledge of everything who schools should look to in their next hiring cycle. It’s the ones who can connect all the dots, and help prepare students for active learning in this new Academy of AI that is emerging.
The rise of AI in education, resonating with the themes in Eco's novel, heralds a quantum shift akin to the printing press. AI offers personalised learning, flipped classrooms, and experiential education, challenging an existing reluctance to embrace change, and thus advancing the teaching landscape forever. Despite its challenges, AI can bridge educational gaps, empowering marginalised communities and reshaping knowledge acquisition.
By embracing AI, we open the doors to a future where education flourishes and empowers learners of all backgrounds.
There will be a million and more unseen changes between now and the natural use of the Mirror, with many a self-appointed saviour heralding a finite definition. But first we trusted our knowledge to a Box – books - and then we trusted the cognitive upload of that knowledge to a Mirror - teachers.
The progress of assimilation of AI into education will be no different.