That teacher is so artificial...

I suppose I should have seen it coming 10 years ago. My daughter had only her dad to rely on, while getting ready for a dance competition with an 'up' hairdo. Of course I, the former Marine whose hair style hasn't changed in 40 years, was useless in a situation like that. She on the other hand, props her cellphone up against the floor length mirror in her room, and immediately starts playing instructional videos from YouTube. Not only had she learned a valuable skill for hairstyling but she also demonstrated an ability to self learn leveraging what was becoming an invaluable resource.

We are all graded, in one manner or another, most every day of our lives. Had my daughters hairstyle not met the requirements for her performance, she would have received a lower score. If we perform poorly on a test, are unable to recall facts and figures, or find ourselves stymied to answer the questions correctly we get a lower score. If a welder is not comfortable working with a new type of metal or variable temperatures of their equipment it can result in poor ratings as a professional. The same holds true for any of the trades; construction, plumbing, electrical, the deftness of their skills is plastered to their resume and the feedback loop of other customers is nothing if not a grade on their performance. If a doctor or dentist, is not proficient in can mean severe damage or even death, so we all demonstrate an interest in their grade. A whole industry exists to give grades to businesses and individuals to help our decision making process (800 Dentist, Angies List, WebMd). Even if you hop into the back of an Uber, as a rider, you are graded.

Self help books, and classes have been around a long time for the person who ultimately is not happy with their current 'grades' or wants to learn a new skill, and is willing to make the investment. I believe that this investment hypothesis is about to change significantly. With video and audio based artificial intelligence advancements, the perfect course of instruction will increasingly be a few clicks away, it will be always available, capable of grading incessantly and be infinitely patient for the struggling student offering the holy grail of one on one instruction. The investment was never just a function of time, it also was the time of day. Additionally this has involved costs that are generally large enough to warrant thoughtful review as a ROI calculation, will I make more money or be happier as a result of learning. The last part of the hypothesis generally involves some element of certification, a degree, something is bestowed to identify the person as having achieved proficiency. Anyone paying attention to technology today and particularly with artificial intelligence fields, should see how this evolution will effect us all in a very real way, and not feel artificial at all.

Three technologies that appear to be all the rage in artificial intelligence include video intelligence, natural language engines and machine learning which seem to have expanding use cases daily. We have likely all experienced the commercial products talking to our Alexa, Siri or Google devices giving us examples of natural language in technology. Hopefully you know that walking into a casino these days, means your face is captured on video and they likely know who you are before you ever sit down at a table. And then there is the quiet behind the scenes work of machine learning and its algorithms that sit in the shadows of a lot of what we experience every day, from the routes delivery trucks take to the optimization of health plan pricing for insurance companies. To miss the opportunity these technologies and the role they can play in your business is to render yourself unable to compete in the future. Bringing this back around however to self improvement and grades simply is moving the camera lens from outward facing, and instead looking at ways it can elevate each of us to be greater than we already are.

I start with an example involving video. Work is underway blending solutions like CrowdOptics video based technology with National Bioskills Labs aimed at improving the techniques and capabilities of medical professionals across a wide array of procedures. There is a term called 'Never Events' that by some estimates occurs at a rate of 4,000 times a year in the surgery room. These are avoidable surgery room errors. Imagine real time corrections and instruction being offered to a medical professional that could lower hospital error rates and reduce the chances of secondary challenges associated with the procedure. It would be akin to having not just the best doctor, but an entire team of top professionals involved through out the process constantly focused on flawless execution and getting you the patient healthy, quicker.

The second AI field of voice (or NLP- Natural Language Processing) is one becoming rapidly adopted. Who hasn't called into a business today and had second thoughts wondering if its a real call center person on the other end of the line, or if in fact it's a virtual agent. I have listened to recordings of these virtual agents today that are almost indistinguishable between a live person or computer. One such company, Interactions.com has industry focused agent sets that tackle many of the low hanging fruit /calls for many industries. However take that same technology and now marry it with video like that used in the fitness training product called the Mirror. Now I would have in the home an always available educator. The educator would listen to my questions and give feedback, and if it didn't have the answers right away, they could follow up in our next class, just like a real human being would do. Why be limited to just fitness instruction through the mirror. Why not enable that virtual educator to get modules from a whole variety of contributors, who can then instruct the person on any skill. Leveraging more observational cameras built into the mirror or placed elsewhere as instructed, this educator can also conduct real time analysis of how I am performing in my new skill and critique what needs to be improved. My investment hypothesis for training and education would become much more flexible and possibly less expensive than ever before.

We cant leave out the opportunity though for machine learning to play its part as well. We talked about grades. I like getting good grades, I want people to think that I am a professional and consistently yield great results. I need proof however, and that is where the machine learning could step in. Can we leverage this diary of experience in such a way that our grade follows us as an objective measure of our performance. Again, I can use the Uber example of drivers this time, and the very real grade that is visible to us, each time we hail a ride. This discipline is really only enforced however because it has become easy to grade, or rather rate the driver. There is no easy to use similar mechanism for everything we interact with daily. Yelp might be the closest thing we have, but generally speaking only the most vociferous among us spend the time writing up reviews and actually perform ratings. Are the samplings that Yelp represents statistically significant? Here we get into individual preferences which is why I argue this isn't exactly objective grading. The machine learning of the future for education, needs to be objective and ensure that proper and meaningful measurements are applied so the goal of improvement can be achieved. For the opportunity of a stronger weld, a better driver or even a safer surgeon, I would think that machine learning will increasingly play its lurking role in the background with real world observations of performance and pass out its grades where applicable.

Innovation of an artificial nature for education is set to explode. I am not sure that todays educational institutions have the same incentives or desire to pursue these goals. It may well be like Clayton Christensen wrote about 20 years ago in the Innovator's Dilemma. Some outside disruptor may need to deliver the combination of solutions that will forever make our educators more artificial, and at the same time less institutional while evolving a better grading system. The monopolies for bestowing accreditation is a topic for another article. Hopefully by the time my granddaughter is relying on grandpa to get her to a dance competition, her options will be better than leaning her phone against a mirror. I suppose in the best case, I may have even prepared myself the night before by taking a course in my mirror on how to brush in, an 'up' hairdo.