spacemunkey336

spacemunkey336 t1_j9t7t3x wrote

Teaching and education involve so much more than the dispersal and absorption of information. Until AI learns how to understand the human condition, relate to and motivate students, I doubt the fundamental principles on which education operates will change much. Yeah, AI can and will tell you everything you want to know, but how many people will develop the curiosity to actually ask for that information without human intervention?

My argument is, at a cognitive level, education is rooted in philosophy, imagination, curiosity, and human beings' capacity to be understood and influenced by other human beings. AGI or even ASI can solve a lot (or even all) of our problems, but they will have a very difficult time grasping the human experience -- this is not a problem to solved, after all. Some can say that AI doesn't need to understand our lived experiences to generate meaningful data, and give the example of AI art, but even art has certain objective metrics which it can be evaluated by. In my opinion, human education is more about the connection of minds rather than simple consumption of media/information, and AI is likely to struggle with this concept since there isn't a clear loss function or probability distribution or even very good datasets it can leverage for this task. I say this as an academic working in engineering, and I use AI tools for my research. It will be a while (or forever) until we see human education being completely devoid of human teachers.

Now, AI "educating" (training) other AI from start to finish.. that has a lot of potential and could possibly happen in the short-term future.

2