What do you think is the future of AI?
When I was a child, my parents bought us a set of encyclopedias. Not the expensive ones. These were the affordable variety, lined up on the bookshelf, promising answers to questions we hadn’t yet thought of asking. My parents understood something important. Knowledge mattered, and they wanted us to have access to it.
When I began academic research, I spent hours in libraries hunting down journal articles. Occasionally I’d discover that the article I desperately needed was held by another university. This was apparently character-building, though I don’t recall feeling that at the time. Today, with the help of computers, we can find relevant articles in minutes. Extraordinary, really.
Which raises an awkward question. If AI can provide all these answers, what exactly are we supposed to be learning?
For a long time, education has been largely about acquiring knowledge. Teachers knew things, students didn’t, and examinations established how much information had survived the transfer. But having an answer isn’t the same as understanding it. And understanding something isn’t necessarily the same as knowing what to do with it.
Looking back over my own studies, what mattered most wasn’t the information I accumulated. It was how learning changed the way I thought, the questions I asked and the decisions I made.
Perhaps education needs to spend less time teaching students to reproduce information and more time helping them ask good questions, examine assumptions, evaluate evidence and exercise sound judgement. We learn to think by wrestling with difficult ideas. We learn to write by struggling to put our thoughts into words. If AI does all that work for us, we may end up with beautifully presented answers and very little understanding.
I write on this blog every day because writing helps me discover what I think. AI is a useful conversation partner, but I wouldn’t want it to take over. The struggle to work something out is often where the learning happens.
The future of education should be about becoming more thoughtful people, forming our character, nurturing our curiosity and stretching our imagination to engage with questions that matter. Perhaps the greatest promise of AI isn’t that it will do more of our thinking for us, but that it might help us become more fully human.
What do you think is the future of AI?
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