Nathaniel Atherton, Primary Principal
26 April 2024
AI Conference
Last week, I attended an education conference in New York entitled, Future-Ready Brains: Teaching Students to Think, Create, Innovate, Learn, and Adapt for an Anxious, AI Age. The conference hosted 1500 plus participants ranging from early years practitioners to university professors and from school leaders to policy makers. The interdisciplinary conference showcased a veritable who’s who in educational circles made up of top neuroscientists, psychologists, researchers, and educators such as Scott Barry Kaufman, Keith Sawyer, Yong Zhao, and Anna Abraham, while spanning themes on AI effects on critical thinking, ethics and creativity.
One of the talks I was most interested to attend was that of Ethan Mollick. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, is one of the leading voices on AI; its opportunities and its pitfalls. Mollick’s recent release, "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI," made an immediate impact by securing a spot on the New York Times Bestseller List, providing an intriguing examination of the profound challenges presented by the fast-paced evolution of AI.
To be frank, writing a book on AI is a dangerous space in such a rapidly changing landscape, but Mollick does a nice job of keeping to some inherent truths. Primarily, AI has been a part of our lives whether through Netflix algorithms, your smart home assistant to the predictive text on your phone. While AI has been here, its improved power will increase its ubiquity and it will only continue to embed itself in the way we interact with the world.
In the book and in his presentation, Mollick highlights four principles which he proposes will be true despite the rapid rate of change.
I. Always invite AI to the table. We must engage with technology. The only way in which you can learn about the benefits, pitfalls and limitations of AI is to engage it regularly. It is not a simple tool that can be explained in a handbook; it needs to be played with to get a sense of what this paradigm shifting tool can do.
II. Be the Human in the Loop. AI is far from perfect. At a basic level, AI is only as good as the data it is trained on but additionally it has a penchant to ‘hallucinate’ (or in layman's terms, make things up). It’s important when using AI, that you have a deep knowledge of what you are asking it about so that you can act as a fact checker.
III. Treat the AI like a Person. Many in the AI community have discussed the notion of AI becoming sentient. Some have warned of its dangers and others have suggested it has come to fruition, however most agree there isn’t yet a ghost in the machine. Yet Mollick advocates that the best AI prompts involve asking AI to take on a persona as part of a task. By doing so, the user seems to unlock domain specific knowledge that allows for greater accuracy in responses. An example of a persona prompt:
IV. Assume this is the Worst AI You Will Ever Use. There is no doubt that AI has and will continue to develop at a pace of rapid change as shown by its impact unseating Moore’s law. However even if the pace of change slows, there is no doubt that the next version of GPT, Llama or Gemini will continue to transform the way we live, learn and work.
So what does this mean for schools? Interestingly, the conference talked less about the initial concerns over plagiarism and more towards how we need to teach learners to be domain experts, critical thinkers and ethical users of technology. Ultimately, schools, like businesses and society at large, are adjusting to this paradigm shift. No doubt our approaches to assessment and our understanding of how we validate learning will continue to evolve in the coming years. Even now, educators are shifting to focus assessment on process rather than product to avoid being caught out by AI. Additionally, the growth of AI is opening new pathways to provide more bespoke educational experiences including tutoring support in areas like mathematics or languages. Alongside this great awakening, we are getting a lot of technical guidance on how to support a human-centred approach to AI from organisations like UNESCO and Common Sense Media.
Ultimately, as Mollick explains, the best way we can understand how to live with it is to learn from it. So, I invite you to explore this brave new frontier together.
Kind regards,
Nathaniel Atherton
Primary Principal