‘I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.’
Albert Einstein
Einstein died 34 years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. It was originally created to meet the demand for automated information sharing between scientists in universities across the world. Another 34 years later, 65.7 per cent of the world’s population or 5.3 billion people are using the internet. There are 9.6 new social media users every second. The average global internet user spends 6 hours 41 minutes online per day ().
We are now dependent on the internet for so many facets of everyday life. Our social interactions, shopping online, internet banking, research, reading for pleasure, information gathering, music, entertainment, playing games, news podcasts . . . the list is endless.
I wonder what Einstein would have to say about technology today. It could be argued that already, young people – and indeed adults – spend more time interacting through their various devices than they spend engaging face-to-face. Moreover, the language of popular platforms for young people is more likely to be image based than text. And now we have Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Sharing information through networked databases, having chat sessions on customer service websites with Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven chatbots, using virtual assistants like Siri to access your phone contacts and call a person for you by voice command, using AI driven Alexa to turn on and off your smart home devices – all of these are already old technology.
We can create AI enhanced digital images of ourselves – cartoon one day, avatar the next. We can have a flawless profile picture for social media or a 3-D one. There is no end to the ways you can alter your own image. Long hair, short, curly, straight or wavy – all at the press of a button. At the age of 70, it is possible for a group to reinvent their 30-year-old selves as digital avatars and perform as the star-studded band they were 40 years ago. Think ABBA.
The new AI technology is feared as much as it is welcomed. People worry that AI driven machines will be taking over more jobs. Sub-Saharan Africa and many emerging economies in Asia are among those with the lowest access to the internet which compounds the many other inequities they experience.
One of the most topical AI advances in the education sector is ChatGPT, which could potentially transform teaching and learning. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot. It uses language to create humanlike conversational dialogue. It can respond to questions, write content such as articles, essays and emails and produce images, text or videos. The GPT stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’. It is trained through human feedback which helps its future responses. It uses algorithms to find patterns in data sequences and the transformer draws on a huge databank of information to formulate its responses. The data was limited to 2021 information, but that has changed now because in September 2023, AI learned how to browse the internet.
For those who can access ChatGPT, there are still limitations that result in inequities; for groups who speak languages that ChatGPT does not understand; students with diverse learning needs also struggle; algorithmic bias can occur making the tool more effective for mainstream students than those who are differently abled.
Andy Mison, an experienced Australian secondary school principal, has submitted an article on the use of AI in the school setting (see p.6).
Mison writes, ‘It [AI] should never replace the essential role of educators. The human connection, mentorship, and inspiration that teachers provide cannot be replicated by machines.’
He notes some of the welcome benefits of the new technology, particularly in reducing the administration workload for teachers and principals. He adds that the technology can also be helpful in individualising learning for students. These are benefits that schools would want to exploit.
There is, however, a downside. Mison explores the ethical consequences of ChatGPT, and it is clear from his discussion that schools using the technology would need strong policies to protect students’ data and privacy.
Further, there is the issue of critical thinking. Students need the skills to distinguish between what is real and what is not. They need to know what is fact and what is fiction. With the manipulation capability AI brings, young people are vulnerable. That is where teachers take on a critical role. Students using the technology can easily become reliant on AI and give up on their own student agency believing every response they get is correct.
More than ever students need the guidance of their teachers, if they are to avoid – in Einstein’s words, being ‘a generation of idiots.’