Mastering the challenge of AI

Amid concerns one in five students entering year 7 at age 12 or 13 lacks foundational skills in reading, writing and maths, a new and more challenging education dilemma has arisen. Are students being taught to think, logically and creatively, to discern and to make wise decisions in employing emerging new technology, such as artificial intelligence, both now and in their future careers? And how will AI alter education as the current generation of students, parents, and teachers know it? On Saturday, Australia’s school curriculum chief, David de Carvalho, who heads the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, kicked off one of the most important conversations since the emergence of the internet. Contrary to some proponents’ expectations, the internet did not cancel the need for study and knowledge. It underlined their importance if audiences, especially students, were to discern the difference between words on websites and credible, factual information.

As AI advances as a tool for everything from report writing and accounting to musical composition and engineering design, discernment and judgment will be more important than ever. Many jobs in the so-called knowledge economy, Mr de Carvalho wrote in Inquirer, will be done much more effectively and cheaply by AI systems. “All those people studying and working in data analytics across multiple industry sectors should be worried.’’ In such a world, the job opportunities of the future need to be considered. And he posed a vital question for his own sector: “What is the new paradigm of education that will ensure that the economic, social and cultural disruption being caused by AI serves humanity rather than enslaves it?’’ On a practical level, how will teachers and university staff cope with tech-savvy students able to harness AI to produce better-written assignments? For many students, Mr de Carvalho says, if “cheating using artificial intelligence improves one’s chances of gaining the credential but reduces the actual depth of understanding, then many may make the calculation that the credential is more important and act accordingly”.

Watermarking tools to identify text with AI are likely to be invaluable, until someone finds a way to get around them. Yet bigger issues loom. British-Canadian AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, recently stepped down from Google. Advancements in AI, he said, posed “profound risks to society and humanity”. It “takes away the drudge work” but “might take away more than that”, he said, warning about potential spread of misinformation created by AI, to the point where the average person would “not be able to know what is true anymore”.

Children, Mr de Carvalho argued, were inheriting a dystopian brave new world and needed to be equipped for the knowledge, capabilities and attitudes required to renew and re-humanise that world. In addition to reading, writing, numeracy and digital literacy, the other four general capabilities in the Australian curriculum – ethical understanding, personal and social capability, intercultural understanding, and critical and creative thinking – are going to be more and more important, he believes. He is correct to emphasise that focus cannot come at the expense of factual knowledge and an emphasis on truth. “Rather, it has to come through the teaching of a knowledge-rich curriculum.’’

In the face of another technological revolution, the World Economic Forum is looking to tradition for answers. In a 2016 paper about the “fourth industrial revolution’’, including AI, the Forum argued that rather than technological expertise, the skills most valued in future workplaces would be those fostered by liberal arts education, which teaches students with an emphasis on Western tradition, philosophy, literature, languages and the great books. That approach, proponents such as Campion College, Australia’s first liberal arts college, argue, fosters critical thinking, good judgment and decision-making. In the emerging world of AI, curriculum quality and rigour will matter more than ever.