Mid Sweden University

There is an increasing realisation that the more we learn the less we know. This ancient aphorism is often attributed to Socrates, and it simply points out that as we increase our knowledge, we realise just how enormous the frontier of knowledge actually is. And the field of AI is a wonderful example of just how correct this aphorism is.

It has been a long time since the term artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy in 1955. In the early years our effort to produce systems which simulated the human mind was slow in fact we often hear the term the winter years of AI being used to describe those very slow advances in the late 1970s and 1980s and into the early 1990s.

However, in the past couple of decades there have been some remarkable steps forward, but it needs to be clearly understood that we are still quite some distance from what many thought AI would deliver. Noam Chomsky articulated the original expectations of AI in his famous article to the New York Times this year in which he said AI was” that long prophesized moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity, and every other distinctively human faculty”. Clearly, we are nowhere near that type of outcome and we have quite some distance to go!

But nonetheless we have made progress in many aspects of AI and we have learnt that this technology will bring with it many advantages and some specific challenges. Automa?on in one form or the another is to a large extent one of the most important drivers of the shape of our society today. Automa?on in the agricultural sector has allowed us to feed, to varying degrees of effec?veness some 8 billion people. Automa?on in manufacturing has allowed us to fill our retail outlets with an almost endless range of products ranging from goods sold for pennies to high prestige items sold for thousands. Now we can combine automation and AI and as some of the developers of these systems suggest, we may be entering a world where blue-collar jobs may all but disappear.

But this perspective hardly touches the edge of what AI might eventually achieve. The potential applications of AI are almost endless. It is likely that it will touch almost every aspect of our lives and our civilisation. AI will also challenge our value on many fronts. But these types of generalisations are not particularly helpful. As Stephen Wolfram pointed out in a recent video, we need to think carefully about what we want from AI and perhaps we are now in a position to do this properly as we are really beginning to learn about the potential of AI and this learning now makes us realise that there is much to consider in the application of this new technology.

This symposium is subtitled Education will never be the same again as it is quite clear that AI has the potential to enormously impact our delivery of education. But does this mean that all we want to do is use AI to be more efficient in delivering what we have been doing for decades. Our system of funding education which in most parts of the world is anything but generous, would certainly benefit from efficiency improvement. But is there not a much greater opportunity available. Should we not look to AI for ways of making education more effective? Education is fundamental to our whole society and is seen by some if not many people to be like the “yellow brick road” to both personal and national success. Are we not through the judicious application of AI in a position to radically enhance the educational opportunities available to all levels in our societies?  I think there is a real possibility to do just this.