Time for AI in education

...like when printing emerged

- AJIT BALAKRISHNAN

"Teachers: AI is coming for your job!" says one news headline. "Will AI kill meaningless jobs in universities?" asks another headline. "Students use AI to cheat in university exam," says a third. Every day, nowadays, headlines like these are thrown at us, not just by online newspapers but by journals from some of the most reputed educational institutions in the world. How to make sense of all that is being said about the role AI, artificial intelligence, is going to play in the world of school, college, and postgraduate education?

If you reflect for a while, what is being said is that the field of education is on its way to a revolutionary makeover and my worry as a person strongly anchored in the Indian middle-class belief that a good education system is the most important driver of progress as well as economic well-being, is this: Are we as a country doing the right thing with AI in our schools, colleges, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian Institutes of Technology, and medical colleges?

Till now, one has lived calmly in the belief that AI, like other technology innovations of the recent past such as computers and the internet, functions as a useful tool to assist the current education system we live with. But what is facing us now is that the time-tested methods of human learning and teaching, our institutions of schools and colleges and universities, and systems of exams and tests may have to be fundamentally changed, thanks to AI.