Date: 17/01/2023

Relevance: GS-3: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Key Phrases: Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Human Intelligence, Education, School Structure, Teaching, Efficiency, Accuracy, Creative Thinking, Student-Teacher Ratio, Future Generations.

Context:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the way to teach and learn. By utilizing AI technology, teachers can personalize instruction for each student, provide immediate feedback, and offer a wider variety of learning materials.
• However, with any new technology, there are also concerns and challenges that must be addressed.

Key Highlights:

• Students around the world have been using AI to complete their work and teachers have been reporting about how they doubt the credibility of the work being submitted to them.
• AI tools, in the near visible future, are going to change the way one lives his/her lives. One of the major areas to be at the receiving end of this change will be education.
• The education sector needs to quickly catch up and adapt to the changing environment. With Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning-based tools, the skill of just knowing an answer is becoming increasingly less important.

Need For the Change:

• The model school structure, where a teacher gives instructions to numerous students and teaches them to follow those instructions with efficiency, needs to change.
  • The focus on the skill of memorising information will need to shift now.
• Students are being taught to be mere “rule followers”, people who follow instructions properly and get a task done efficiently. As with AI, this skill runs the risk of turning irrelevant.
  • Human beings cannot compete with a machine when it comes to following instructions and carrying out a task with efficiency and accuracy.
• Creative thinking is where the focus needs to shift. Students should be helped to form their own opinions and perceptions that are individualistic.
• An important skill is to learn how to ask the right questions or an inquiry-based approach. With AI, we still need to know what to ask the machine.

What Needs To Be Done?

• It should be considered whether our education system provides ample opportunities for the cultivation of this skill
  • Are schools equipped with a comfortable student-teacher ratio where each student gets a chance to ask questions and nurture their curiosity?
  • Do we have enough infrastructure and budget allocation to ensure these setups?
• The culture of asking questions seems to be on the decline in our social fabric too, and that poses a major concern.
• One skill that gives Human Intelligence an upper hand is our ability to adapt to change in circumstances.
  • The need is to focus on learning, how to adapt and apply the learnt knowledge rather than finding a direct solution.
• The national curriculum is still not allowing secondary school students to use calculators.
  • Current generation is not prepared to let students be independent learners,who are not just being trained to know the answer can create their own paths.

Fear with Technology:

• The fear with technology is often that it would replace humans at multiple jobs and leave a huge working population helpless.
  • However, it cannot be denied how the rise in technology has also created a different set of jobs that works with and for technological development.
• It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the presence of technology in our lives. Although AI has the potential to automate many tasks in the future, it is important to remember that it is a tool that we utilize.
• It should aim to make the current and the future generations empowered to efficiently use these and also to be able to create similar technology.
• Another important role human intelligence needs to play is to be able to correct the biases that data can create and uphold the ethics of any tool.
• An AI tool might not have the social-emotional context of all situations, which human intelligence needs to keep is enhancing.

What Makes Us Humans?

• The answer to this will be the strategy to remain relevant in a world full of AI. These human elements are what human intelligence needs to focus on while designing the education plans for the future.
• Education cannot be just about gathering cognitive knowledge, but has to include the entanglement of our learnt knowledge with social, emotional and ethical implications.
• In an extremely competitive ecosystem with coaching centers creating a factory of “efficient computational machines”, the view about education and the purpose it serves has become extremely myopic.

Conclusion:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize the way to teach and learn, by personalizing instruction, providing instant feedback and offering a wider variety of learning materials.
• However, it is important to address concerns such as bias and job loss, and use it responsibly.
• Teachers need to be prepared for the integration of AI in the classroom, by being trained and educated on the technology and its capabilities.

Source: The Indian Express.

Mains Question:

Q. Human Intelligence has an upper hand in ability to adapt to change in circumstances when compared to Artificial Intelligence. Comment (150 words).