Teachers won’t be successfully replaced by artificial intelligence
With the relatively sudden surge in the popularity of artificial intelligence in the marketplace, it isn’t surprising to see a similar rise in the frequency and fervor of AI-related discussions in the world of education. In fact, these sorts of discussions have followed almost every major technological advance in recent history, from radio, to television, pocket calculator, and of course — the personal computer and smart phone.
In an almost perfect echo of history repeating itself, the questions of educators around the world are almost always the same: “Can we somehow use this to improve learning?”, “Will students use this to cheat?”, and my personal favorite: “Will this new thing somehow replace teachers in the classroom?” The questions around AI in education are the same.
I’ve taught both computer science and graduate-level education for more than two decades, and in my mind the answers are pretty straightforward.
Yes — we can improve teaching using AI. Just as we can improve teaching using pencils and paper, a calculator, or a personal computer, AI can be a powerful tool in the hands of a good educator. And just as it is true with those other tools, AI can’t transform bad teaching into good. It’s just a tool, and we should learn to use it in the context of what we know to be true about teaching and learning.
It’s true. Students (and professionals) can use AI to do their homework for them. Some will do exactly that, in fact. However, we shouldn’t blame the emergence of this new technology for a problem that already existed, or allow our focus to be drawn to the mechanism for cheating when we should be focused on the reasons that students cheat in the first place. The overbearing emphasis on grades, the over-the-top workload given students in the name of “rigor,” high-stakes testing, and teaching practices that favor memorization over personal understanding would be great places to start. In the right educational context, students won’t be driven to cheat. In the wrong one, students will find a way, with or without AI.
Teachers simply cannot, and will not, be successfully replaced by AI. The notion of a robot standing at a whiteboard, delivering the knowledge into the brains of students, or the online equivalent of that where an algorithm decides exactly what facts students need and can intuit the best way to put them into the minds of each individual, is fiction. I know this, because that isn’t how people learn in the first place. If facts could be downloaded into our brains a-la The Matrix, then we wouldn’t need AI — we could just plug in and we’d all know Kung Fu in the blink of an eye, just like
Neo in the movies.
Teaching is a uniquely human profession, where the best among us forge powerful relationships with students in the context of the classroom, challenging them to engage in the process of expanding their understanding of the world in specific ways. This connection is exclusively human in that it relies on a real connection between teacher and student. I suppose if your view of humanity is that we are machines made of flesh — a Skinner-like belief that every response is connected to a specific stimulus — then you might be replaceable by AI. However, I don’t want to be in your classroom, either.
In my mind, there is something special in a human-to-human connection. Whether you see it as the manifestation of our soul, a spark of the divine, or something else, if you are a teacher I hope that you will remember that the most powerful tool in a teacher’s kit is our own humanness. No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, I believe that humanity will always transcend it.
So as my colleagues in education and I rest up and recharge for the spring term, I hope we will also consider the importance of that human-to-human connection in our classrooms. Artificial intelligence won’t make us great, but it won’t ruin us either.