I remember watching a YouTube interview with a highly intelligent and observant entrepreneur, who cheerfully predicted that the time would come when AI programmes would replace teachers, rendering their jobs obsolete. The commentator in question was an enthusiastic advocate of personal and economic freedom and a vocal critic of the excessive incursions of State agencies in our personal lives. Yet for some reason, he seemed relatively unconcerned at the prospect of machines teaching our children.
Of course, there are tasks that most would happily relegate to AI programmes to the benefit of humanity, such as certain forms of tedious clerical work, a large chunk of manual labour, and the synthesis of unwieldy amounts of data. However, there are other tasks that cannot be delegated to a machine without endangering invaluable dimensions of our lives as human beings.
One of those tasks is teaching and learning, through which people learn to think, interpret the world, make rational arguments, assess evidence, make rational and holistic choices, and reflect on the meaning of their lives. For better or for worse, teachers, from kindergarten right up to university level, form the minds of the next generation. The formation of the mind relies on apprenticeship, imitation of a worthy model, and intellectual practice and training.
Much as an athlete fine-tunes his motor skills and muscle memory playing sport, and finds inspiration in an exemplary athlete, the student fine-tunes his mental skills thinking, reflecting, studying, analysing, and generating ideas and arguments, in dialogue with an inspiring teacher. There is both an interpersonal and “hands-on” dimension to human learning, both of which are indispensable.
Yet Artificial Intelligence is reaching the point where it has the capacity to automate and mechanise certain aspects of teaching and learning, marginalising crucial aspects of the learning process, most notably the way a teacher can model intellectual activity for the student, and the intellectual tasks a teacher assigns to students in order to fine-tune their mental skills and imagination. Many tasks which, just a few years ago, had to be undertaken “manually,” by which I mean, through the laborious activity, imagination, and effort of a human being, can now be performed automatically by AI.
When I wrote papers for my university degrees, I had to wade through texts, synthesise their content, and build an argument from scratch, using my own mind. Now, AI technology is tantalisingly close to being able to create a research paper from scratch, with a few prompts and sources provided by the user.
Read More: Teachers Must Avert an AI-Facilitated Intellectual Dark Age
