Artificial Intelligence and the future of Education

The word intelligence is a term used and known by everyone, but which does not have a precise definition. The word comes from the Latin "intelligere" which means "to understand". The word is derived from two words in Latin: inter and legere. "Inter" means "between" and the meaning of "legere" is "choose": from an etymological point of view, therefore, intelligence is the ability to select the available data, recognize the relevant ones, and link them together.

We could define intelligence as the ability to achieve complex things.

The foundation of Artificial Intelligence had been laid since 1940 by Alan Turing who in 1942-43 violated the codes of Enigma, the machine used by the Nazis to send secret encrypted messages.

In fact, Artificial Intelligence research really took off after the Dartmouth College conference in the United States during the summer of 1956.

In just 80 years, the computational capacity of machines, available on our planet, has been multiplied by almost 100 million of billion and it's also thanks to this, with an unprecedented availability of data, that we have moved from traditional software with manually programmed algorithms to the era of deep learning (a learning and classification system based on networks of "artificial neurons" that allow a computer to acquire only some of the abilities of the human brain) with the first programs that outclass humans, for example in the automatic object or speech recognition.

Today artificial intelligence is everywhere, its progress is exceptional. Our society, it is obvious, would no longer know how to do without it; indeed it becomes every moment more dependent: we talk and read about artificial intelligence for water, space exploration, finance, production, agriculture, transport, energy, healthcare, communications.

Today we are still in an era in which it will take several more years before the virtual assistants we now use every day, for example by talking with our phone, becomes really efficient: today these artificial intelligences are - let me this simplification - only programmed scripts, built from pre-established scenarios defined by developers.

It is with deep learning that can be said artificial intelligence to be truly born and it's thanks to technologies like these that computers are now more educated than programmed: today targeted advertising on our interests that we find on the web or social networks, the app we use on the phone to book a taxi or to order a dinner, self-driving cars, ... are all based on the combination of:

• computational power,
• data that they may have available
• neural networks of deep learning.

Over two centuries, the world has experienced three major technological and economic revolutions:

• the first with factories, steam engine and railways;
• the second with the birth of aviation, cars, electricity and telephony;
• the third, which began around the year 2000, with the advent of NBIC: nanotechnologies, bio-technologies, information technology and cognitive sciences

Today we are inside of the fourth industrial revolution and the immense power that information technology puts at our disposal it's something unimaginable until 30/40 years ago.

Today, if an artificial intelligence problem exists, it is a problem of education: today we can no longer speak of AI without talking about school, the institution dedicated specifically to the development and spread of knowledge.

Education has always been a challenge and today it is even more than ever.

Now, we can't think to turn off internet or blocking phones. In the same way, if we wanted to consider artificial intelligence as a temporary trend, we would fall into a serious error, because, even today, going back is no longer possible: our civilization is already based on artificial intelligence and, with the passing of time, it is increasingly dependent on it.

There is no doubt that the twentieth century was an era that had an extraordinary acceleration in the pace and importance of innovations. At the same way it's true that the school represents an exception because its methods, its structure and its organization have remained substantially unchanged for more than a century since Hannah Arendt (Hanover, October 14, 1906 - New York, 4 December 1975), in his essay "The crisis of education", explained that each generation of children was like an invasion of barbarians that adults had the task of civilize.

We are surrounded by an industrial revolution like no other. The current and future power of information technology promises and allows to have almost unlimited powers and education must ask itself what the destination of the children who start (or of the children who are already there) their learning path and must also think about the direction that the world has taken.

Even according to several economists, we are entering a "second age of machines". If the first age had allowed man to overcome his physical limits (transport and communications as first place), today we begin to enter in an age where machines will allow us to go beyond our cognitive limits.

If there is a fear of losing our importance and our role in society, it can be reassuring to see that today there is no correlation between the levels of unemployment and the robotization of companies: in Japan and Germany, two of the countries most automated on the planet, full employment also exists.

One of the underestimated aspects of artificial intelligence is that it cannot change its attention, for example it cannot be distracted while driving a car.

Every year road accidents cause around 1,300,000 deaths worldwide, of which, a significant percentage, are due to human distractions.

The AI will be able to replace drivers of taxis and trucks in the future, and it will be able to support doctors in the more specialized disciplines because, for example, it will be able to analyze a medical test more faster and in a more precise way than we humans, even after having already analyzed many and many of them.

In July 2017, the Rockefeller Institute (New York) showed that AI is 1000 times faster than a high-level geneticist in analyzing the same problem, for example the most aggressive brain tumor.

If, in the past, the school was important for the development of the society, today it has become absolutely decisive and the content of the disciplines and the subjects necessary to understand the current world must be rethought: the NBIC technologies become an essential knowledge for our time.

With new technologies, the possibilities has expanded as never before in all of our human history.

It's artificial intelligence that could allow us to face challenges such as:

• create customized and personalized learning experiences
• improve accessibility to training, for all students
• tutoring and support outside classroom
• increase information security
• reduce the lack of investments

Very probably, it can also be interesting to think about the need to develop and enrich new skills, since reading, writing and memorizing are all activities that computers perform better than us. Emotional intelligence and creative thinking, on the other hand, are certainly distinctive traits of human.

The school has the responsibility of transmitting most of the fundamental knowledge that everyone needs to occupy his place in society: not only basic skills (reading, writing, ...), but also all useful knowledge such as literature , math, history.

The goal of the school system cannot be knowledge itself but the ability to be able to use it, as Michel de Montaigne, a French philosopher, says:

it's better to have a well-structured head than a full head.

Certainly different, as Fran?ois Rabelais wrote in his book Gargantua, when he describes the absurd education received by the protagonist: a person who can learn entire books in memory and reciting them in reverse.

Obviously not very practical nor useful.

The school has always been the solution, from around 3,000 BC, to the need to share to a large number of people a knowledge possessed by few. Even today we use the same form (born in the Middle Ages): a group of students in a room with a teacher, in order to hand down knowledge.

A classroom of a hundred years ago is very similar to today's one but, if we look at an operating theater of 1900s and a current one, it would be easy to see that they have almost nothing in common: medical knowledge, rules and laws, technologies present within them.

Obviously, the problem of the transmission of knowledge has not changed in a century, nor in a millennium. But most likely it can be useful to think if the way and the content used to transmit it can or should be made more actual.

Probably there is an impossibility, talking about the classroom, to mind personal differences like attitude, attention, speed of learning, maturity and interest.

Perhaps, until today, there has never been a real alternative to how a classroom is designed and this "classic model" is starting to be outdated. Perhaps we can think of a different "physical structure".

Nowadays, teachers can no longer be considered the only holders of schooling, since the transfer of knowledge has been questioned by the amount of resources available today (a 6-year-old girl asked, to a digital assistant, who had invented the popsicle to learn that the invention dates back to 1905 and is due to a accidentally discovery by an 11-year-old from Oakland who left a glass of water and soda on the window with the stick he had used to mix them).

Today, teachers, because technological developments, are able to use tools to be more effective than they could be even a few years ago.

 Artificial intelligence is already used successfully mainly in some tools that help develop skills and systems test. As solutions continue to improve, the idea is that AI can help bridge the gaps in learning and teaching to allow schools, teachers and students to achieve more.

I believe that no professor can ignore the development of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Course), online video courses, very often made available for free: Coursera, a company founded in 2012 - which in 2017 raised 64 million of dollars to integrate AI in its paths - it offers hundreds of courses from the best institutions (MIT, Stanford, HEC, ...).

The success they are achieving is, in fact, the same success of streaming video platforms that we use to watch films and tv series: the greatest professors can be listened (and listened as we want) when we prefer, where we want, even simultaneously by tens of thousands of users around the world.

The algorithms that select for us the books that could potentially interest us, or the music that is suggested by our app, are nothing more than an anticipation of this ability in which everything will be proposed to us following our desires and our inclinations.

The platforms of the MOOCs, which are experiencing an unprecedented development and adoption, go in the direction of continuous training, of which everyone recognizes the need (already today it's necessary to reinvent itself continuously and quickly) and in fact, they are part of the development of adaptive learning, a promising of a personalization of education based on new technologies.

It's precisely artificial intelligence that is able to make the difference, with algorithms able of meticulously analyzing the behavior of the students in front of the lessons and, as a result, adapting the training proposals for each individual.

Tools that are able to adapt exercises and tests to the difficulties of each individual student and to control the times and levels of learning (even platforms like LinkedIn, today, allow to perform tests on skills written in our CV to be able to demonstrate the truthfulness and, therefore, increase its "weight" for potential new job).

They are adaptive and automatic tools that will be able to free up time for teachers so that they can use it for more valuable activities: train themselves continuously, prepare material for richer lessons and more adapted to the needs of their students, ...

In this way the teaching can develop methods specifically designed for each student: an evolution that will be comparable to what happened in the last century in the world of goods and services.

Artificial intelligence will assist the teacher, also knowing how to encourage students, how to pay attention to specific problems and will be able to manage the pace of learning. Without getting tired or "surrendering".

The development of platforms and conversational agents (bots, chatbots) will allow the creation of scenarios in which the training will be constantly supported by interactions similar to those we experience between human beings, increasing collaboration and productivity. This is the same evolution that we have benefited from call centers when they went from people, usable only during office hours, to when they became usable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, simultaneously by all possible users.

Teachers will have to learn to relate to these virtual assistants, able to create personalized learning paths, in order to allow everyone to learn at their own pace and according to their own characteristics.

The experience of Professor David Kellermann, in Australia, or the cases of Universidad de Murcia in Spain, or Staffordshire University in the UK, or Georgia Tech in the USA, tell us a unique and personalized approach for people, with computers skilled at providing personalized guides and helps.

Systems that collect data generated during the conversations to be made available to the same universities to analyze the inclinations and the desires of the students to create innovative programs and services with the aim of improving and enriching the educational and training experience of the students.

In Japan and Korea, there are already several cases in which humanoid robots work with students for the study of languages, monitoring errors in pronunciation and the use of incorrect words or verbs.

In a short time, we could make children learn basic knowledge from online, through the best tutorials in the world, and in the classroom, homework will be done, with professors who will be more and more like mentors, in charge of following students.

Higher education can be conducted at a distance, with "superstar instructors" who will teach, through their lessons, to millions of people around the world (what we already do today when we choose a cinema or theater to follow our favorite actor / actress, when we buy the last book of the writer we want to continue reading or when we see the last TED Talk by Simon Sinek).

Teachers will become more like coordinators, able to verify whether the pupil is following and adequately carrying out the prescribed program.

Algorithms and technologies can (and will) be useful in proposing and guiding lessons, in making decisions, but they will not be able to perform all the activities related to education.

Several weeks ago, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, at an international conference dedicated to the future of artificial intelligence in education, UNESCO (the UN Organization for Education, Science and Culture) declared how AI technologies can help to achieve the goal of reducing barriers to access to knowledge and can improve and facilitate learning.

Technologies such as Skype Translator, able to use 10 different languages for voice translation and 60 for text translation, are a great example of how a language barrier can be broken down.

The experience of the Dhour Shweir Public Secondary School, in Lebanon, is a concrete and significant example.

I believe it's essential to increase the consideration for school and its educational goals but also that our society, for its future, need to believe in this technological tsunami and need to prepare adequately.

These issues could be one of the most important conversations of our time and the risk of not taking advantage of the benefits of knowledge of AI would be unforgivable and too big for future generations, especially for the less fortunate.

This is also the reason why access to these technologies must be, as much as possible, made democratic.

Otherwise, talking about digital in general, we risk creating a ditch that will not be too different from what five centuries ago separated a Parisian scholar from a peasant who lived in a remote countryside.

Starting immediately saying we live in a rapidly changing world, where technology is one of the most disruptive influences on our society, would have been an obvious and useless exercise.

Education is not (and could not be) immune to the growing influences of technology: AI is going to enhance and enrich, through increasingly intelligent applications, both professors and students.

Maybe the greatest challenge for teachers will be not being afraid of technology.

In the coming years it will be essential that the school not only uses AI and demonstrate how useful can be to improve education and training, but also needs to educate the new generations to know their basics and how they can work and live with it.

The biological intelligence will not die with the artificial one but rather it will be the motivation to take advantage of nuances of our capabilities of which today, potentially, we still have no idea.

As far as we're concerned, our mission is simple: to unlock limitless learning, empowering every student on the planet to achieve more.