Are AI Teachers Next?

In the long course of my education, I have had all kinds of teachers: knowledgeable, dynamic, boring, informed, emphatic, cruel, you name it. I admired some and even emulated them and made fun of a few — one called me a menace to society and vermin! But they had one thing in common, they were all human. So, when I read Bill Gates’s prediction that robots — or AI — will teach our kids in the next 18 months, I was intrigued. How exactly do you treat a robotic teacher? Do you stand up when it enters the room? Do you bring them an Apple every morning? Do you trust its teachings?

But most importantly, can you play tricks on a robot teacher? And believe me, somehow classrooms evoke the joyful mischief of our childhood in all of us — I have witnessed major CEOs playing pranks on their teachers once they are in a class.

This is not the first time that technology is lauded as the cure for all that ills our education. Does anybody remember the “One Laptop per Child”, the brainchild of Seymour Papert — an AI pioneer — and Nicholas Negroponte? It turned out that manufacturing cheap — $100 — laptops was the easy part. The hard part was making it work in the real world. The program, mired in problems — hardware breakage and Software bugs, shortage of relevant content, lack of support for teachers — and general student and community apathy, contributed little to educating children. Unless you count porn — which was found on some laptops in the field — as educational.

Then there was “remote learning” fever. That actually started in the 1990s and was supposed to replace the classroom and lecture halls. Anyone can get whatever knowledge they need remotely. Well, after a slow start, blamed on everything from lack of broadband to unavailability of computers, the Pandemic finally forced the issue. The myth was debunked. Remote learning, even at the college level, didn’t work, at least not for most subjects. The students, especially those economically disadvantaged, lost enormous academic ground, and many developed mental problems. Even for this new generation of kids, brought up with digital media, remote education was boring and ineffective.

As for teachers, remote learning increased their workload rather than reducing it. The burden of preparing new lesson plans and delivering them without the benefit of real-time feedback from the audience contributed to their burnout.

The jury is still out on hybrid learning.

Why is Education Impervious to Technology?

How we learn and what we learn is complicated. We learn by observation, experimentation, and transfer of knowledge. In each case, we boil down what we have heard/read/observed to a few key points and retain what we judge — based on logic and our internal vision of the world — to be true and valuable to us. We discard the rest. After attending a lecture on the history of a battle, we may decide the dates are not important, but how and/or why the battle was fought, are. That is what we “retain”, or “learn”. Once we learn something, we add that to the repertoire of our experiences to enrich our inner world.

But what we learn is more than just data We take in the context. In a lecture hall, we “learn” about the lecturer’s demeanor. We judge him/her/their to be knowledgeable/emphatic/charismatic or not. Our reaction to the lecturer influences what we perceive. If we don’t like them, we may leave if we can, or tune them out if we can’t, or even rebel by making pronunciations. Make pranks.

We also take in the audience. Their reaction to the lecturer paints our judgment of what we hear and what we take away. Our own moods and circumstances also play a role. Are we happy to be there? Do we have some other urgency to take care of? How does this lecture compare with the one we have seen before?

Feedback is part of learning. We touch a hot surface, and we learn not to do that anymore. But it is especially essential when acquiring a new skill such as reading or a new language. But like the acquisition of knowledge itself, the acceptance of feedback must come from a “trusted” source, or be personal. You do not follow the prescription of a physician you don’t trust.

In short, learning is seldom — if ever — a simple transfer of facts, especially in a communal setting such as in school, and especially for the young. Good teachers give us their knowledge of not only the subject matter but also of how they see the world. They inspire us to go beyond what they offer, to explore and experiment, to think for ourselves. Studies at Harvard University show that even one inspirational teacher in middle school can alter the trajectory of a person’s life.

There is still magic in being in a classroom.

Can AI Be Part of Education?

Yes, but not for a long while, and even then, only along with good teachers and other tools. AI can provide information — hopefully reliable — and feedback. It can be a useful tool in skill-building such as writing or speaking a new language — as in Grammarly and Duolingo. But it needs to be ready, trustworthy, and relevant. For public consumption, it must be bug-free, reliable, user-friendly, and supported. Otherwise, it will languish in a warehouse forgotten, as cheap laptops meant for kids did.

Until we have properly trained AI tools, I take a human teacher — even a bad one — to instruct my kids. At least they can be made fun of!