The Demise of the College Lecture Foretold

AI tools will soon be able to replace human lectures in several subjects. Academia should use the opportunity to make quality higher education cheaply available and shift towards research

- SANJEEV SANYAL

Every time I have published a paper in the last six months, I have experienced a phenomenon that has deep implications for the future of higher education. Within about three hours of publication, someone would post a podcast based on my paper. It sometimes involved one person delivering a lecture about the paper, and sometimes two people discussing it. The quality of such podcasts is surprisingly good, including their grasp of technical issues.

The really interesting part is the voices are not human, but bots generated by artificial intelligence. Yet, they are completely life-like. They emphasize the key points and even have a touch of humor. Indeed, the voices include small imperfections of speech that give it a truly human quality.

The AI algorithms seem smart enough to go beyond a simple regurgitation of my papers. They go on the web to find simple definitions of the technical terms I have not bothered to explain, and even look up information from the papers I have referred to but not written about explicitly in the main text. Thus, the AI bot is capable of intelligently extracting wider information to add value on its own. It's also capable of conducting a question-and-answer session. In other words, AI is already capable of delivering a lecture about my research that I would myself find hard to match.

It does not end here. AI models are already capable of absorbing material from a paper or a podcast, and converting it into an exam paper that tests human comprehension. It can then mark the test, identify the gaps in understanding and recommend corrective learning. All of this can be done almost instantaneously, at a tiny cost. Note that this technology is not in development—it already exists.