artificial intelligence in education: a boon too soon?

By now, Chacha, the tea seller has heard a lot about Artificial Intelligence, popularly (mis)understood by many as AI.?Chacha calls it EI. Nobody had ever bothered to correct him. The other day, some of his repeat visitors like me were also at his stall gossiping over sweet, sour, and bitter-sour AI anecdotes. It was obvious that not all were factually correct. Yet gossips are gossips. Though, at times it can be mind-blowing. For instance, the long retired Captain Sengupta with his slurping sips remarked “we do not know much about AI, yet we are co-passengers in the journey to the future, while the AI who knows much about us are setting the destinations”. Thanks to him a question was born. Like, what would matter the most to a common person who is sighting the AI horizon in awe – ?the journey or the destination? ??

Borrowing the format from one of my articles here, namely, ‘Curtain raiser- a case for another kind of social responsibility’ and by relishing my ginger-cardamom tea, I imagined three complete strangers who were united by AI on a stage of education. They were in a role play titled ‘artificial intelligence in education: a boon too soon?’

AI Business B:?Hi, we have the world’s most popular AI tool that can assist teachers in bridging the knowledge gap between teaching and teaching materials. That way teachers can create personalized courses and can educate better!

Student S: Good Afternoon, everyone. B, I have been using a similar AI eLearning tool like yours. Learning is now fun with my choice, my adaptability, my pace, and space. Wonder why do we wholly need physical classrooms and teachers?

Teacher T: Nice to be here. Hearing you both, our audience can have a premonition that teachers shall soon get redundant or left doing the non-teaching roles or exist only to assist the AI and the tutoring machines of the future?

B: With due respect to you T, may I say that you are not a digital native. And that our machines learn more from the S community because of their digital footprints and enormity of data dust that are massively higher than the digital immigrant community of yours. The only way you can start helping the future of education is by living more in the digital spaces. And guess what, we shall soon provide suitable identities outside the native or the immigrant types. Happy?

T: Happy? My dear, how can we be happy when a good portion of academic rigor is getting unnoticeably outsourced? Anyways we all have right responses to make against stimuli with or without the help of tech. Few years back, many had chosen killer challenges like ‘Blue Whale’. And similar such situations in myriad of enticing tech settings shall always arise before us, in one form or other. Where an option to return will be always better than facing a point of no return. ?If there is a problem of plenty, then has to be a precise choice of solution as well. But then one has to be educated enough to make the right choices. Those have to be ethical in the first place.

B: We have ethical solutions for educators to identify outsourcing too. If only they care to buy.

S: On behalf of our generation, we only have a limited point to make. That the continuing old pattern of regimented education even in new policy bottles is seriously not satiating our wants the way the technologies do. I mean, that is very clear by now. Is not it?

T: May I ask, how can one thrive without creative and intellectual faculties that are cultivated involving different states of matter and through LIVE interactions in -- labs, classrooms, libraries, discussion groups, experiments and projects in physical spaces including the green and the brown ones? Real education is about involving all the real human senses in the real world. Is not it?

B: Sorry to interrupt, if you feel that we are separating students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders from each another, why not accept us as a bridge for enjoying the educational ‘journey’ together!

T: Pardon me, perhaps, you are unjustly bringing this ‘separation’ thing from nowhere. In my years of Professorship, I have valued the human bonding over technology and innovation. That way, we have been enjoying the ‘journey’ together in pursuit of a ‘destination’ with either the known unknowns or the unknown unknowns. ?

S: Hard for me to grasp that destination concept. Aside that, we do not want any separation per se from our teachers. Rather, what we want is that respected people like T should also promote newer forms of educational engagement with technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all supported by technology. Today it is anytime and anywhere education in continuous and in multiple modes. We expect it elevates to the next level soon. That’s it and That’s all.

B: That’s it and That’all …my quick alert says that you had watched Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary last Sunday afternoon. There are succeeding data sets around that as well. Anyways, returning to your point, we are seriously working on taking education to its next version.

T: If you ask me, the best version of education has to be pure and rich. It has to continue in that fundamental form as the elixir of sustainable civilization. You may know that brands longest in existence are all educational ones. Some dates back to more than 600 years older than any non-educational brands. However, you may or may not agree that effective education is non-linear, unpredictable, inventive, unstructured, and unsupervised human-human chemistry that is beyond the instant comprehension of soulless machines, even with its massive intelligence prowess. Sorry guys, I have to attend the evening huddle with my research scholars at the Lake Club. Presently, we have been exploring a novel Quantum pathway to the next version of AI. Bye!

Abruptly, the role play was interjected by Chacha’s question… Chai? I could clearly hear the gossips – germinating from a connected, disconnected, and restructured signaling in a network of neural networks. For many of us, such conversations might have been the primary source of Artificial Intoxication. In short, AI. Nevertheless, the AI that the world knows about is a boon. Beware of the darker side of that boon. That’s it and that’s all.

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Suggested resources (in context to the article)

1.?????YouTube: How ChatGPT Works Technically For Beginners. https://youtu.be/uCla6V4uF84

2.?????MOOCs on Large Language Model: ?(https://coursera.org; https://edx.org ; https://aws.amazon.com ; https://www.cloudskillsboost.google

3.?????Websites: https://openai.com ; https://ai.google ; https://quantumai.google;?https://azure.microsoft.com

4.?????Newsletter Article: Meal, Yes. Fasting, No. Think Karma. Linkedin

5.?????Best papers on Large Language Models: https://levelup.gitconnected.com?

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