Johnny Ch Lok

Artificial Intelligence How Influences Education Innovation Johnny Ch Lok

?How and why AI impacts to education The field of education is searching for ways to respond to the fast-approaching impact of artificial intelligence (AI) across all sectors and fields, including its own. In this conversation with Jennifer Rexford, computer-science chair at Princeton University, she explains how this requires not only focusing on teaching different skills to prepare today's youth for work in an AI world but also employing AI to adopt novel ways of teaching. She also reiterates a common call for including diversity of thought in developing AI to utilize it successfully. As for creativity, machines may behave in ways that seem creative, such as when they make a smart move in the game of Go or chess, but they're really born of exhaustive enumeration and evaluation of the underlying data. It's not born of that spark of creativity. And that's a clarion call for thinking about not only retraining but even basic education. The way we teach today, even at the K-6 or K-12 level, doesn't put enough emphasis on creativity and social perceptiveness and design and working in teams. These are the kinds of things that are going to matter very much in the future and matter already, much faster than we've adapted to them. There's certainly a significant underrepresentation problem in all areas of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math], and this is higher in computer science than in some other areas and higher in artificial intelligence than in general computer science. So diversity is definitely a significant problem. And there's a tremendous shortage of skilled people to do this work. There's this general cry of "We need more people, so we really can't afford to leave talent on the table. But there's a second piece to this: the technology being created is so important in so many lines of work and in so many businesses that leaving a large part of the population out of the conversation leaves these people ineffective in a whole bunch of areas in our society-not just computer science, but everywhere.