Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
Bias, privacy, and security issues are challenges that we already face in our very human lives, and they are mirrored in the development of AI. Strangely, it might give us a small degree of comfort to know that, although we don’t know exactly what AI will bring, it exhibits risk characteristics with which we are already familiar and against which we already strive to stay ahead of the game. Such risks will need to become part of risk management in schools, which includes the governance level as well as the senior management team.
Control of Combinatorial Explosion
One of the things I appreciate deeply about impactful school communities is how we treat knowledge and knowledge structures. Roger C. Schank once wrote that, “[k]nowing what particular knowledge structure we are in while processing can help us determine how much we want to know about a given event; that is, contexts help narrow the inference process” (AI Magazine 8.4). Continuing to focus on how we, as humans, engage in the intelligent process that we call inference, he says “[m]any possible ways exist to control the combinatorics of the inference process: deciding among them and implementing them is [serious].” (63)
The Siren Song of AI
The siren song of artificial intelligence (AI) is absolutely mesmerising. Witness a recent posting in Chief Learning Officer magazine by the managing director of learning science platforms at a large publishing house, who, in a passionate plea for the place of AI in learning and development, states the following: “There has never been so much knowledge in the world. […] Content is proliferating at an astronomical rate” (23 Oct 2017, “Artificial Intelligence Comes to Learning”). At such words, heads typically nod and everyone allows for how wise this person must be, to see things so clearly.
School in an Age of Autonomous Agents With Free Will
Despite the jargon-laden title of this post, the content is about a simple matter: do we, as human beings (as educators, in our case), really know ourselves as well as we think we do? As David Mattin, head of trends and insights at trendwatching.com shares in the September 2017 issue of Business Life, “contemporary science reveals [that] we know ourselves far less well than we think, and that our choices are largely dictated by unconscious brain processes.”
Whither AI in Education?
Often underestimated severely is the notion that what we’re really talking about is not technology…but culture change. If all these AI promises outlined and/or hypothesised by the authors are to come to be, they will be realised only when we consider culture change. The authors offer us the nut to crack when they state on p. 11 that artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) is an “essentially human endeavour.”