Recent prediction from the head of the most renowned public school in Britain, Sir Anthony Sheldon, suggests that the inspirational teachers of the future will be intelligent machines.
In a decade, a revolution in technology will overturn all the current perceptions and norms of education and alter our lives completely. School teachers would become mere classroom assistants and they will lose their traditional role.
Human teachers won’t vanish from the classroom, they will be present in class to set up equipment, help children whenever required, and maintain discipline.
However, AI computers, solely, will do the work of instilling knowledge into young minds. It will completely change the human life as we currently know it. Everyone can have the best education and the best teacher which can be completely personalized. The software will be stay with the child forever as long as he studies.
The machines would be able to work as the speed of the learner. This would be far more advanced than anything we’ve seen in the industrial revolution or since with any other new technology. These machines will be adaptive and change according to the user. They will listen to the voice of the students and read the face of the student – Reading and comprehending.
These views were presented by Sir Anthony in a talk at British Science Festival which took place in Brighton. He’s presented this in his book The Fourth Education Revolution which will be published next year.
The first education revolution was when we learnt the basics for survival –foraging, hunting, growing crops and building shelters.
The second revolution occurred when the first organized sharing of knowledge took place and the third revolution was the invention of printing.
Each child will learn things at his or her own pace in the AI classrooms. No more set courses would be applicable to all students as teaching will be highly personalized. The teaching will be carried out by emotionally sensitive machines.
Sir Anthony is afraid that these modern machines will replace the inspirational role of teachers. The machines are going to be extraordinarily inspirational. Humans will be there in the school during school time, but the major inspiration in terms of intellectual excitement will come from the lighting-up of the brain for which the machines will be well apt for.
The machines will know what excites the child the most and give you the right level of challenge to you which will be neither be too difficult nor too easy for you.
These machine teachers are coming and they have already started to arrive. They can be found at the west coast of the US and it’s already beginning to transform education in these schools. They will be prevalent in 10 years.
The only and treacherous danger is that it takes away jobs and we humans depend heavily on our work for almost everything. If we get the technology wrong then it will end up doing everything for us in the same way as SATNAVs have taken away our ability to read maps.
