Part 1: What we Will Lose
The UK government has recently decided to move the national conversation to being a leader in AI, rather than the more inconvenient conversation of dealing with the countless thousands of young girls being gang raped across 50+ cities.
If you ask me, it sounds like they don't really understand what they're even talking about, just desperately latching on to the buzzword for the sake of it, maybe snag a few ignorant investors or something before bankrupting them with dystopian regulation and bureaucracy like they're doing to everybody else.
But what bothers me is this push to bring AI into education. I maintain that, realistically, teachers will be one of the last to go in the AI revolution.
Even in a truly futuristic time of sentient robots and such, I can see them replacing relationships as sex bots, coders, maids, delivery men, truck drivers and so on.
But the problem with replacing teachers is that the human connection is an innate requirement. Your children are in school 7-8 hours a day, 5 days a week. That's most of their young lives. It would be like replacing their parents with AI, whatever that even means.
It only makes sense if you have no idea what a teacher even is.
Most people think a teacher is basically somebody who reads a book in front of class, and then hands out quizzes with multiple choice questions on them.
If you are a teacher like this - and I had a few as a kid, tbh - then you should be replaced with a brick and we'd probably see better results. This is not teaching, this is called getting a paycheck for minimal work.
If society wants that idea of a teacher, then yes, AI can replace them. But if they want to raise students with critical thinking, emotional resilience, empathy among peers, a firm grasp on social structure and tradition, etiquette, and a deeper understanding of one's own soul and ambitions - I honestly can't see how even the most futuristic AI can accomplish that.
This applies to all teachers of any subject!
For mathematics, most people argue 'I'll never use this trigonometry in my life' and then they go on in life to never even hear the word again. But the process of learning that maths wires your brain in a certain way, setting you up to be able to think and analyse, approach problems with greater perspective. It's that kind of element that a teacher needs to learn to tap into.
A teacher has to understand the very specific needs of each student in the context of a room full of multiple individual students, and adapt their teachings accordingly. Yes, an AI can be fed some test results and vomit out some basic google search on how to improve things for each student. But the teacher presumably would then have to read that and understand it in the greater context, where things like family history, race/gender, health, climate, budget, room size, and the mood on any given day, all make a huge difference.
Yeah, you can technically work your way to replace a teacher, but you'd definitely be losing a LOT MORE human connection and development all in the name of efficiency.
People always conflate words like efficiency and productivity with 'good'. It's an alarmingly utilitarian approach society is taking and it's dangerous. Making a classroom more efficient, students more productive, and grading more easy for teachers, you're cutting corners.
It's like swapping out the need to prepare and cook your own meals for instant microwave meals of the same ingredients. Yes, you're eating the same thing and it's more efficient. But you've now lost the ability to cook.
Who cares?
Well, by losing your ability to cook, you've now lost your ability to customise your meals by flavour or portion size. You've lost the ability to know exactly what's going in your food. Or more abstractly, things like losing the connection with the local grocery shop lady.
A similar analogy would be the door man. A door man's job is simply to open the hotel door when people come in or out.
Well, switch out the door man with a significantly cheaper and more efficient automatic door and you save a bunch of money!
But what you've lost is a door man. It turns out he's not just a doorman, is he? He greets customers, makes them feel like they're in a legitimate, prestigious place, like they're being treated with something special. They can help with bags and generally give the lobby a sense of societal goodness and chivalry.
Now he's gone, you walk up to the hotel, see homeless people begging for change, and you enter the automatic door to a hollow, empty room with a self-check-in booth that shows errors every time you try, forced to call for assistance by the begrudging, underpaid clerk sitting in the back room to do it for you with a big sigh of annoyance.
But we don't think about it. We don't walk in and think 'I wish this place had a door man'. Nobody on the board of directors thinks they should invest a bit more money in a salary or two for this because it's so abstract. The things we lose are lost in silence.
Electric cars will lose the culture of the car hobbyist, now unable to switch out engines or upgrade their exhaust pipes or whatever it is these people do. Nobody will wish for them to come back. But one day we'll realise a part of the way we live is gone forever and we never even considered it.
Meanwhile, self-driving cars will kill of the London Cabby brain, famous for having extremely developed sense of location and direction. There will be nobody around with a sense of direction in the same way we basically lost our ancestral skills of hearing and smelling things from great distances (people in natural tribes can still do these things).
So yes, technically, we can replace teachers with AI, in the same way we can replace them with a brick. But maybe let's... not do that? For the sake of humanity and all that.
Part 2: Creativity
Let's look at one of my lessons as a music teacher, and I want you to try and envision how an AI could successfully replace it:
Here's a submission by my student Frank. I've highlighted certain parts of the music and written how and why they could be improved, which I then showed and discussed to the rest of the class.
Then, I recreated his music done correctly according to that discussion, highlighting voices and their different roles in voice leading (basically, writing smoothly so it's both easy and interesting to sing):
I added some lyrics that are a bit funny, with the phrase 'kicked your ass', a little naughty but also pretty innocent, something I decided after gauging my students sense of humour and comfort with such things (sometimes we get religious or otherwise strict upbringings who might be uncomfortable with it).
I also recorded myself singing each part, with fourteen separate tracks to mimic a small choir. There was no need for me to do this, but I know they'd find it fun and appreciate it, as well as inspire them to see what it is they could potentially accomplish.
Next, it was their turn. Divide them up into four parts: Soprano - Alto - Tenor - Bass (SATB) and have them learn & Sing their lines together in choral harmony much like the recording!
We did some other stuff - a worksheet I made further investigating the rules of this style of music, but that was the crux of it. It was a fun class with a lot of intense learning along the way!
Imagine if an AI replaced a teacher. Would this class ever exist?
Not even that. Imagine if a teacher was trained to depend on AI for content, and how to adapt to students needs, and to plan and schedule their work.
This would just never happen. This one class was highly inefficient. It took me a long time to make - longer than the class itself. But it was damn fun and surely left some memories and a new budding sense of musical harmony.
It also greased up my own rusty part-writing skills and kept me in check, even improved in some ways I had previously misunderstood. Professional development, if you will.
I think we might be seeing it differently. Ai should be feared in terms of education. Of course teachers would be scraped but let’s think in terms of decentralized educational system where I human teacher would have to opt for the value for value type of scenario. I don’t think AI has that much power when it comes real human creativity without a human behind it to connect every dots. But I might be wrong tho
I think it's the unintended consequences I mentioned that I find most concerning rather than some hostile takeover.
Like my examples above, we replace things for the sake of convenience, and the result is the loss of things we don't notice until it's too late.
Replacing the traditional teaching methods with efficiency is going to turn schools into battery farms for dead eyes kids with no capacity to think for themselves or interact with others in a healthy way.
Teachers themselves will just lose the ability to improvise and adapt, always turning to AI to solve their issues as a point of policy, if not choice
Yes we can’t all control what happens with AI at this point. so the consequences of integrating them into almost everything is going to happen one way or the other but on a larger scale this is good for the world because now everyone has the same opportunity to learn whatever he or she wants to learn.
Either you let AI do all the thinking for you or you use it to enhance what can be created in the future is left for you. Let’s not forget that these AI only has access to past information based off human perception of the world.
I think that there is my issue, something that you perceive to be a good thing; everyone has the same opportunity to learn whatever he or she wants to learn
Everybody already acquired the same opportunities to learn when the internet became ubiquitous. The difference is using AI is emphasising efficient, productivity, output - battery farming for GDP, basically.
How about we lie down under a tree chewing on a piece of straw in our mouths as we close our eyes and listen to the trickling stream occasionally splash with the flip of a fish fin? Is that no efficient enough? Should I not be learning something?
We don't do that huckleberry thing anymore, because it's more efficient to be shoveled into a big city to produce more goods and services. Is that objectively a good thing? I'd say absolutely not.
Yes, there's an argument to quality of life in terms of illness and lifespan, but it's the cost of the more abstract things - which I think is absolutely vital - of which AI is going to be responsible for exacerbating the loss (terribly constructed sentence but hopefully you get the idea).
It's a hard concept to put into words
Somehow I get the idea. For someone who has thought AI would be a world destroyer or even be like the Terminator John Connor type of story I think we can only start trying to preach the better usage and trying not to get addictive with these things at this point.
Some people now has the terminator bots being built right now even if the world isn’t yet aware of it. Maybe if we also get bad AI we can learn to use that same knowledge to create the hood ones. Trust me the big techs won’t have the whole world in their hands with AI. Instead each individual would be more like a walking big tech. Honestly thinking about it all is wild at this moment and I agree with you— it is hard to put all of these things into words.
Agreed. I'm actually less worried about the big tech companies. We've seen with the new Trumpian leadership easily they bend and warp their principles according to the narrative. They're weak. But the weakness of the individual citizen, our complacency, is something we need to sort out!
I do enjoy a good head scratcher debate XD
The individual sure will always be his own greatest enemy. Let’s hope we don’t stay ourselves in the back with all that’s coming.
And yes, it was a nice lil debate. Something I’ve been starting to like about Hive that I can’t seem to find else where.
Have a great day ahead man.
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I think even the most uneducated fellow should be able to know that switching a teacher with an AI is a stupid choice 😭😂
Unfortunately I don't think IQ is the deciding factor