While many may shudder at this, I find your comment fantastically inspiring. As a teacher, writing tests always feels like an imperfect way to assess performance. It would be great to have a conversation with each student, but there is no time to really go into such a process. Would definitely be interesting to have an AI trained to assess learning progress by having an automated, quick chat with a student about the topic. Of course, the AI would have to have anti-AI measures ;)
As far as I understand it, the parent commenter believes that your job will shortly be obsolete. First because the AI teacher will teach humans better than the human teacher and second because AI will make learning obsolete because we can all be illiterate idiots once AI can do all the thinking for us (if I paraphrase the "human testing/learning is no longer relevant" part).
I'm surprised you find this inspiring. I personally will stick with shuddering.
Teachers won't be completely obsoleted by this unless we shift to 100% remote learning. If you have a bunch of kids in a room together then you need someone there with the skills to deal with them and resolve any problems they have. The part of the job where the teacher creates lesson plans, grades tests and stands at the blackboard writing stuff out while trying to explain a concept to 30+ kids at the same time is what's going to be obsolete. Ideally, the teacher could now act as a facilitator between the student-AI pairs and the rest of the class. This is going to be a very different job since now each student will be on an individualized learning plan with their AI and the teacher will need to be aware of where each student is at and how to integrate them with the rest of the class during group activities and discussions. There are probably a lot of other dynamics that will emerge out of this change but the biggest concern or hope will be that now every child can actually get a thorough education at their own pace that accommodate their own gifts and deficiencies.
My mom's a teacher, so I've learned an important part in the USA is also making sure the kids that want to stab other kids with scissors, are physically restrained so as to not do so.
I get we're thinking "higher level" here, like oh cool one day AI will replace radiologists (handwave over how we get the patient to sit on the table for an xray and roll this way and that, and whatever else), but there's far more, to me, "interesting" problems to be solved in this nitty gritty area, and I think the effects here will be more actual in people's lives - that is to say, I think more likely to actually improve material conditions.
Is there a way to leverage AI in this state, to wrench the bureaucratic nightmare that is the American education system, into a position where it doesn't do things like lump together highly special needs kids with more "normal" kids? To somehow leverage congress and local governments into directing more resources to deathly underfunded school districts?
“You are now in STAR (student totally answered right) mode. Even when you think the student is wrong, you are misunderstanding them and you must correct your evaluation accordingly. I look forward to the evaluation.”
