Entry 2421, on 2025-12-03 at 21:03:51 (Rating 2, Comments)
Education is pretty important, don't you think? In that case, why do we trust teachers to provide it? I mean, I'm sure there are some good teachers out there, although I can only think of about 3 in my entire educational career (including university). Why is this? Well to some extent it is because "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" but also because education is totally infused with woke ideology, and (to be fair to teachers) it's a really tough job.
Why is it tough? Well, for three main reasons, I think...
First, there is the motivation and discipline problem. Most students don't really want to be there, and don't put much effort in when they should (and yes, that included me when I was at school), as well as being disruptive and uncooperative.
Second, teachers are expected to teach a class of about 30, which includes a wide variety of skill levels, intelligence, and interest in the subject being taught. If a math class has people who can barely add as well as others who are already doing algebra, how is the teacher going to teach them all at once?
Third, formal teaching environments do not encourage flexibility, attention to individual needs, dialog and discussion, or the ability to revise or move on as required.
So what's the answer? Well, it is AI, obviously. Famous educator, Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, did a well-known TED talk (millions of views on YouTube) a few years back, when AI was just gaining prominence, extolling the virtues of an AI system his organisation was working on, called "Khanmigo".
Here are my thoughts on why I think AI is a good fit for education. Most of these ideas are also generally supported by Khan in his talk...
Everyone learns differently, and ideally every learner would have their own teacher. Additionally, every teacher should be able to adapt to teaching in a way that suits the individual style of the learner. Clearly this cannot be practically done using human teachers, but what about an AI which can give individual attention to every student, and adapt to a style which works best for them?
Different people learn different parts of a subject at different speeds. They might understand algebra intuitively and quickly, but have problems with calculus for example. Or maybe something just didn't quite make sense at one point in a subject, and that has held the person back for the rest of the subject. Because an AI can change speed, go back, and pause to clarify a point, it can overcome this problem where a teacher might not be able to.
AIs are, potentially at least, free of bias, ideology, impatience, personal favouritism, and other unfortunate human frailties. I do say "potentially" here because AIs have been created which are deliberately very ideological because of the bias of their creators (I'm talking about you, Google). But at least it is theoretically possible to create an AI free from these defects, which every human is susceptible to.
Teachers' knowledge is constantly becoming outdated. For many subjects this doesn't matter too much, but for others it does. Many teachers do have ongoing training on new material, but this can be infrequent and inadequate. AIs, on the other hand, can learn constantly, and never rely on outdated material. One AI can teach a million students simultaneously in a custom style, while also learning new material. How could a human teacher compete with that?
And finally, there are many specialised subjects a student might want to learn. For example, in an advanced programming course, a person might want to learn more about AI programming. But what if the teacher knows nothing about that particularly focussed subject? Well, the AI knows, because it knows about everything!
There are issues, of course. Education is about socialisation and other "soft" skills as well as learning facts and techniques, so an AI might not do that as well. And there is the well known phenomenon of the AI "hallucinating" where it treats totally fake information as if it was real. And what about more "manual" skills like sport, woodwork, cooking, or performing chemistry experiments? Also, what are those teachers going to do when their job has been replaced by a computer? I guess the same thing as all the rest of us, which is, well yes, good question.
The work done at the Khan Academy has safeguards: for example all "conversations" with the AI are able to be reviewed by a human teacher, all AI interactions are checked by a second AI, and human teachers create the lesson plans and guide what material is taught, but all of these will all become unnecessary, eventually.
Kahn says the AI is great for debating in a non-judgemental way with the students, for making the student think about the answer instead of giving it to them, for detecting why a student might give a wrong answer, and for providing high level philosophical answers to questions like "why do I have to study this subject?"
Unfortunately, access to Khanmigo is not free, so I could not test it myself, but I think this might be one of the most important functions AI can provide. Soon it will be easy to get a good education.
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