This article has been written by Madhulika S Naidu pursuing an Executive Certificate Course in Corporate Governance for Directors and CXOs from Skill Arbitrage.

This article has been edited and published by Shashwat Kaushik.

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is technology that uses machines that have capabilities of intelligence just like humans. Capabilities like learning, reasoning, problem solving, and language interaction are its major features. Over the past decade, all across the world, AI has gone from strength to strength in terms of big data analytics. AI has taken over all facets of work and life and it will not be a stretch to state that education and learning are among the most impacted aspects of everyday life. Just like any other technology, AI will turn into a bane or a boon based on how it is utilised. There is a lot of chatter and debate on the implications of AI in the education industry. After reading many articles on the internet about AI, what can be deduced is that technology is mostly talked about as if it exists by itself without having or causing any impact on anybody else. This article is written to highlight this fallacious argument. Nothing ever exits by itself; everything is connected to everything else and causes a domino effect just by emerging into the world.  

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State of education

Education in India is still evolving, and is often talked about with the connotation of being a market’, especially in the school segment. Grossly inappropriate is the phrase that comes to mind when one is confronted with such a conversation. Once education is turned into a market, then every aspect of life can be bought and sold. Money is required to propel educational advancements, innovation and outreach, but to turn education into a market is to turn the very essence of human endeavour and existence into a transaction. “Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” (John Dewey, Democracy and Education). If there has been one factor that has propelled the underserved masses of India from poverty into social and financial mobility, it is education.  

State of technology  

India has made great strides in the area of technology, particularly information technology (IT). IT has enabled rapid mobility for millions of people yet it has its limitations. To reach the weakest link in the masses, not just in the form of a mobile phone or internet but in the form of a robust technological innovation that can be a game changer for the marginalised, should be the goal for both education and technological empowerment. There is progress and advancement in technology every day. Right from the application of drones in agriculture to smart boards in educational environments, every bit adds up towards making educational innovations available to everyone.  

State of technology in education

This article will look at technology in education as a means for emancipation; it will position technology as a tool rather than an end or means towards educational reform or innovation in education. This article is influenced by systems theory and will be a complicated conversation about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead as crucial decisions will be made for the future of the children and youth of India. Technology in education is currently at a stage where private schools, both affordable and   are using smart boards, videos, the internet, YouTube, and conference facilities. Government schools, on the other hand, deploy technology based on state government mandates and are utilising laptops, digital boards and smart boards in some states, while a few states are yet to catch up.  

Complicated conversation

Complicated conversations are an inherent part of the educational rhetoric in discussions in the humanities and social sciences and this article aims to entrench the reader in the problematization of AI as a technology tool. Such problematisation, the premise that a certain technology tool is a problem rather than a solution, allows the writer or a facilitator to create a dialogue to emerge if it is a discussion or a monologue to merge if it is a reflection. For example, a topic like the Anthropocene can be used to elucidate the impact of humans on ecological destruction and the associated implications that mushroom out of the dismantling of natural systems due to technological advancement. Based on the vast literature found on the topic of the Anthropocene, both in popular media and academic research, it can be proposed that AI is going to create more issues than the solutions it might provide to elevate the state of conventional education in India. It has been known for a long time that technology can only compliment what a teacher or facilitator can offer; it cannot substitute them!  

Technology perspective

A branch of AI called generative AI has emerged, and it has reasoning capabilities. What it enables is the use of bots and virtual assistants on a fundamental scale and interfaces like ChatGPT, which can produce a well-researched and well written article in seconds or DALL-E which creates images and artworks based on prompts provided as words. For example, the kind of assistance that is received on bank websites, is also possible in virtual classrooms through chatbots or virtual assistants or to assist children and adults in completing homework. There are several implications to this form of technology, there are proponents and opponents for its use in education. Those that support the usage argue that this form of AI can assist illiterate parents in helping their children learn and can be of support to children who do not have literate adults at home. 

Elevates human capability

There is a proposition that AI will ease redundant work and create space for metacognition, i.e., higher order thinking about thinking. This proposition will fall flat on its face, Metacognition is a faculty of facilitation of learning; it is an aspect of pedagogy that is already well researched and employed in many disciplines. It will be worth the effort to conjecture based on observations in journal article publications and practice in the discipline that metacognition is not a widely used part of teaching methods in engineering yet, which as a discipline mostly relies on age old didactic approach. Hence, as a discipline specific approach, it is being proposed that the machines can achieve this feat without understanding that humans have accomplished it in many other fields and all that is required is the transfer of learning.

Human perspective

Hampers brain development  

Rhoda Kellogg was a psychologist and researcher based in the US and she studied children’s art to understand brain development. Rhoda studied over a million samples of scribbles made by children in the early childhood years and identified 84 stages of learning associated with complimentary stages of brain development. Her findings have been employed in understanding young children and it has been found that when children are forced to write, as is done in conventional schooling, their emotional development gets arrested around the early stages of development. These children remain stuck in those stages most of their lives and cannot reach their potential, either for themselves or society at large. Children are required to run, play, draw, fall, and cry to make sense of the world around them. In most cases, adult presence itself generates an overload of conditioning for the child. In education literature and education psychology research, it has been found that children whose parents do not interfere in their process of learning develop faster and become independent learners. Currently, children are already burdened with the conditioning of their parents and teachers. Add to that the damage gadgets are already causing, and an artificial bot is the last thing a child might need to grow and develop!  

Deskills human cognitive potential

Human cognition is not confined to brain function alone; human cognitive potential includes perception, sensory function and experience of the phenomenal. The premise that AI will eliminate low order work for humans to situate the species in higher order existence is fallacious and will be extremely detrimental to human existence. There is a disconnect between those who study learning and those who innovate technology. There is an interesting hypothesis that when humans start working with machines, perhaps over a period of time, they too become like machines! If machines are becoming like humans, is it not possible that humans are also becoming like them? Conscious awareness, which is a unique quality of human existence, will be diminished by machines that can numb human perception, which requires constant honing and practice. There is a word called Arivu in all South Indian languages; in the vernacular, it translates into perception. A person has to maintain their perception; otherwise, it gets lost! An observation of a potter in a potting community, will inform you that he/she will never teach children pottery through sight. They facilitate the learning of the sound of beating the clay; the child learns pottery through sound. Similarly, learning to make jowar or bajra bhakri by watching is a futile exercise, the technique and process are learned by learning to beat it properly; the learning happens through sound!

Dependence on machines

There is a gap between those who work on education and those who work on understanding learning. Those who work in education focus on the delivery of content, and evaluations to test mastery of that content but those who work in the area of learning focus on honing the perception of the learner and facilitating suitable experiences so learning may set in and higher order metacognition may emerge. In traditional systems of learning in India, when they gave a mantra to a person, they never explained the meaning of it! As the person grew up, the mantra also grew with them to hone their perception, create many possibilities in life, and create many experiences so the person it is given to may grow and develop!  What AI will do is augment content-based education and eliminate higher order human potential of learning. Currently, the direction of AI research and development is creating art and writing on topics of interest and humans have to align with mundane menial work such as cooking and cleaning. Whereas what would be ideal is if AI did the menial work like cleaning and washing so people could have extra time to create art and express through writing. That would ensure that technology assists human growth and development, not the other way around.  

Impact on learning

There can be a disastrous impact on learning if generative AI develops further! Nature works on a system of balance and trade-offs. So, if there is a shift from human perception to machine assisted perception, there is a possibility of sensory overload in humans. If you have ever seen a child draw, the child will hold the pencil in their fist and draw a set of scribbles and call it an elephant! What it means is that as the child’s perception is honed, the child sees an image as many pieces in layers. Already, with the advent of gadgets, children are exposed to many moving images simultaneously, this is altering how they see things! To begin with, the developing perception of the child sees the world in layers and these are moving constantly, causing an overload on the child’s brain development and perception. Many children are falling into the autism spectrum as a result of excessive use of gadgets. Autism and children on the spectrum have been at the forefront of the bane of gadgets; one can only imagine what kind of storm AI is bringing with it!

Conclusion

To sum up the suppositions discussed in this article, it will not be unwise to state that there will be a shift from cognition to kinesthetics, meaning if humans will not be doing cognitive work, then they might overcompensate with physical work. There is nothing wrong with shifting back to physical work but humans have already built machines to replace physical work and skilled labour in factories and industries. Humans have generative AI, making art and creative pursuits a technological feat rather than an expression of human ingenuity. The day is not far when bots will tell humans what they should do and should not do! Perhaps humans do not need a comet to arrive to exterminate them like the dinosaurs; they have already begun the journey towards that outcome with advancements in technology that may not be conducive to the progress of humanity as a whole!  

On the other hand, there might be pockets of emergently redesigned learning, meaning newer avenues for work in creative fields may arise that could use the machine like a servant instead of becoming its servant. There can be immense scope for experiential learning. As humans situate themselves in kinesthetic possibilities, they might be able to engage in pursuits that stretch the possibility of learning through their body.   

“We’re still learning how AI technologies will integrate into the education sector as they develop, and we don’t yet have a full picture of how AI will affect critical issues of ethics, equity and data safety.” –  Iilana Hamilton, Forbes

As the author of this article, it was imperative to reflect upon what and how it should be concluded. As of now, it can be proposed that AI, whether big data or generative AI, has phenomenal implications for business, health and the consumer market, not so much in education. However, AI is in nascent stages and can be directed to develop in areas that augment human potential and not diminish it; there might be areas of education that need inputs from large scale data mining. Education, which determines the direction of human life, should be under human control and based on empathy, creativity, lifelong learning and the enrichment of experience using human faculties of mind, body, emotion and energy, not artificial intelligence.  

References

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