AI and Education
All around the world, we seem to have silently adopted the following principle as the ultimate aim of any educational endeavour:
Prepare students to join the workforce.
This is implicitly followed even in schools. Do well in your board exams, only then can you join a good college. While you are at college, make sure you do lots of projects and internships. Most importantly, make sure you know that latest piece of tech that is doing the rounds in the industry.
There are other guiding principles for education. Following the lead given by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, one of the aims of education is to:
Help an individual discover his true potential, develop it to the maximum extent possible, and deploy it for the benefit of himself and humanity.
I like to call it the three Ds:
- discover
- develop
- deploy
Altman and Dario have created a shiny new toy. We want to play with it all the time. We take it with us everywhere we go. The toy gradually morphs into a friend, counsellor, and God. We no longer own the toy. The toy owns us. We need to pause and ask if we should encourage this excessive dependence on the toy.
Each of the faculties of the human mind – observation, memory, imagination, judgement, reasoning – are being threatened by our excessive reliance on AI. The aim of education ought to be the strengthening of these faculties. Instead we are busying ourselves thinking about what we can do with this technology. AI can be made useful if we start asking how it can serve in making us reason better, judge better and remember better. There is no point allowing the AI to judge for us, reason for us, remember for us. Rather than steering the discourse in the direction of the intelligent use of AI we are busying ourselves with using it to get things done quickly. Don’t get me wrong. We need to get things done at the workplace. But with what attitude and at what cost? When employers primarily focus on getting the job done in the shortest possible time, aren’t they viewing humans as replacable cogs in some huge machine?
I am not suggesting that we have to abandon the first principle. We still have to prepare students to join the workforce. Skilling is a part of education. But how best to do it? How to ensure that other principles, equally vital for the well being of our societies do not disappear in this process?