How ‘Artificial Intelligence” makes learning faster and easier

• Fred Swaniker of African Leadership University reflects

Recent advancements in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) – as exemplified by ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, etc. – have the potential to unleash progress for humanity at a scale never seen before. Fred Swaniker – the founder of the African Leadership University, and African Leadership Academy – spent some time exploring how the education industry in particular has been plagued with uncertainty and disruption since the birth of AI. The following are some observations he sent to me recently to share in this column:

First inflection point

The earliest successful AI program was written in 1951 by Christopher Strachey, later director of the Programming Research Group at the University of Oxford. For 4 decades after that initial breakthrough, AI largely remained the subject of academic research papers, inaccessible to most. Then in 1997, the world took notice when Deep Blue by IBM became the first computer to beat a chess grandmaster using AI. Since that point, AI has developed at the speed of light, evolving from niche applications restricted to the very few to widely accessible powerful tools like ChatGPT today.

When it comes to education specifically, there have been two major inflection points with respect to AI:

The first inflection point happened in 1998 with the advent of powerful AI-driven search engines like Google. Until that point, the only way a student could learn was from the head of a teacher or from books in a physical library. Information therefore was scarce and controlled by the powerful few: professors, teachers, and educational institutions.

You had to pay expensive fees to gain access to this ‘information kingdom’. Google and other search engines broke the monopoly on information that existed. All of a sudden, a child in rural Africa could access more information than someone who had done a PhD at Oxford a decade before. Students could teach themselves using technology, for free. All they needed was a smartphone and a data connection.

Second inflection point

While search engines radically democratized access to the world’s vast trove of knowledge, they simply listed thousands of links with information on a certain topic. They did not synthesize or analyze that information, and did not generate anything creative or novel. Until generative AI like ChatGPT.

Today, generative AI can provide both information and insights, synthesis, and creativity. It can generate poetry, write music, answer questions like a human being, write essays, and put thoughts together into a cohesive narrative. It can think critically and has some semblance of judgment. These incredible functionalities are mind-boggling for educators worldwide, and therefore appear threatening. But they do not have to be.

If you are an educator, or run the learning and development function in a corporate setting, there are six shifts I believe we need to make to continue to develop human potential in these times of AI:

Original thought will now be more important than ever:  Using natural language processing, ChatGPT scours the internet to find existing ideas and content, and then puts them together in accordance to existing patterns it has seen. Therefore, in the time of AI, schools and corporations need to learn how to teach critical thinking skills more than ever.

Those who can form unconventional, bold, ideas or create new patterns, will be those we consider ‘educated’. Daring to challenge the status quo will differentiate the leaders from the followers. The central question every school or corporation should be asking now is “How do I teach people to think for themselves? How do I create a culture where people feel safe enough to share unconventional or unpopular ideas? How are you driving your students or staff to think from ‘first principles’?”

Ask the right answers

Asking the right questions will become more important than knowing the right answers. For centuries, education has been about finding (or remembering) the right answers. I remember memorizing times tables and the spelling of words, and being rewarded for knowing the formulas for various chemicals in chemistry class. With AI tools today that can provide intelligent-sounding answers, we need to get better at teaching students how to ask good questions. The more we learn how to ask the right questions, the more valuable the answers we get from AI systems, and the more useful insights we will have as humans.

How can you redesign your teaching and learning to reward the asking of questions instead of the memorization of answers? “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” Said Claude Levi-Strauss.

We need to move from “just in case” education to “just in time” learning: For years I have been talking about the importance of ‘just in time’ learning versus ‘just in case’ education. Today, most education focuses on filling our minds with all sorts of facts and figures just in case we ever need to use them.

However, the reality is that we quickly forget those facts and figures, and the world is changing so quickly that they become irrelevant, even when we remember them. ‘Just in time’ education is not about memorizing facts and figures. Instead, the end goal is to ‘learn how to learn’ and to ‘learn how to solve problems’.

ChatGPT then just becomes a tool in our learning arsenal. In a world where facts are ever more abundant, what are you doing to teach general problem-solving skills? How are you enabling your staff or your students to see themselves as lifelong learners who constantly update their knowledge without being prompted?prompted?

Fred Swaniker of African Leadership University & SAND Technologies

Email:anishaffar@gmail.com

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