“Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.” My variation of these words by John Lennon is, “Life is what passes you by while you are preparing for it.” And this is how I feel about people preparing for the advent of Artificial Intelligence, although it has arguably already arrived — insidiously but surely.
Teachers constantly sense AI’s shadowy presence around them. Students gleefully submit work that has been mostly done by AI, which writes essays, summarises long excerpts, answers tricky questions, and creates elaborate images in response to a few prompts. No matter what strategy they use, teachers are fast realising that they cannot stem the tide. Clearly, the solution is to reconstruct our whole attitude towards teaching and learning.
Students have to be weaned away from reproducing content. They must, instead, focus on processing the matter before them and contributing innovatively to the thinking therein. To accomplish this, educators need to encourage students to undertake tasks which cannot be carried out by AI. Teachers themselves are now increasingly using AI to make notes and lesson plans, analyse prescribed texts, set question papers and do various time-consuming tasks. However, they must beware of using it as a crutch and instead develop skills to use this powerful tool in a masterful manner. Once AI drafted a speech for me with the prompts I had provided. It was a fairly good speech but it could have been delivered by anyone. As humans, each of us demands a stamp of identity to project our uniqueness — AI is unable to provide this yet. Thus, one way to get students to be on top of AI is to get them to critique the task done by it and then to improve upon it.
Attempts are afoot to develop Artificial General Intelligence, which will display human traits and respond to emotions and values. The worrisome outcome, if this is successful, may be that we will tend to forget that AI is not a person and perhaps fail to understand that it can never be one. I remember being startled to hear that Siri served as a student’s companion during the Covid-19 years. More recently, I read about a Japanese woman marrying her AI ‘partner’. In this bizarre context, it is critical that educators recognise the growing importance of emotional quotient, existential intelligence* and sensitivity to human values before AI gets the better of us.
In any case, the present state of human relations and strife warrants urgent attention to the basic qualities that make us human. It appears that people have to learn to be civilised once again. It has been said, with reference to AI, that the more sophisticated the technology the more we are forced as humans to ask questions about identity, purpose and connection. Unless we enhance our human qualities and make them universal and deep-rooted, we will fall deeper into the abyss, never mind our dazzling economy. On any random day, if you open a newspaper, you will be sickened by the exchange of insults between various political leaders and the crass behaviour of people in general. The world seems to have run out of visible role models for the young. Many are thus beginning to realise that education is about character building and developing life skills and not just about pursuing lucrative careers by acing exams.
Exams as we know them now will soon be obsolete so we must rethink our assessment patterns immediately. Already, discerning people have observed that good examination results do not always translate into good people for the workforce. Increasingly therefore, young people are seeking wide and varied life experiences as well as opportunities to pick up skills that will be useful and relevant. The young understand that their regular school education is now woefully inadequate. They have all the tools of learning at hand and a super coach in the form of AI, around the clock. Therefore, it is crucial and urgent that teachers should reinvent themselves; or else they will become redundant. They must equip themselves to prepare children for a drastically different and unpredictable future.
We must reimagine and reshape our very approach to education before it is too late.
Devi Kar is director, Modern High School for Girls, Calcutta