Teaching AI Report 09072019
Teaching AI Report 09072019
Abstract
As Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking an important part in our lives, the question of ed- ucating
towards AI becomes increasingly relevant. We argue in this document that although it may be premature
to teach AI, we recommend an education to five pillars or core ques- tions which should be of great use
in the future: data awareness or the capacity of building, manipulating, visualising large amounts of
data; understanding randomness and accepting un- certainty or the ability to live in a world where
models cease to be deterministic; coding and computational thinking or the skills allowing each to
create with code and to solve problems through algorithms; critical thinking as adapted to the digital
society and finally a series of questions amounting to understand our own humanity in view of the
changes AI induces.
Introduction
Artificial intelligence has been described as the new electricity. As such, the belief that it will have a
profound influence over many fields, of which Education, is widely shared. For instance, in its 2018
report on artificial intelligence, the French committee chaired by Cedric Villani [25] presented
Transforming Education as the first “focus”. In [12], hundreds of applications of AI have been scrutinised
and mapped to the relevant technologies. More recently, the JRC report The Impact of Artificial
Intelligence on Learning, Teaching, and Education, by Ikka Tuomi et al. [20], considered the different
aspects of the questions relating artificial intelligence and learning. And more generally, the question of
transforming education with the help of technology is addressed by the Sustainable Development Goal 4
adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, and also by the OECD [13].
In this report we study the different interactions between AI and Education with an emphasis on the
following question: If we accept that artificial intelligence is an important element in tomorrow’s
landscape, what are the skills and competences which should appear in the future curricula and how can
we help to train the teachers so that they can play the required role?
This report is one of the first addressing these questions: as such it is less built as a synthesis of
existing reports with an increment from previous works than as an analysis based on the expe- rience of
teachers, researchers, academics and practitioners. A recent exception is the work by the UNESCO itself
who has been exploring the links between AI and education [15].
1
Another of Turing’s contributions to artificial intelligence is what became known as the Turing test: in
this test an external (human) examiner has the capacity of interaction with both a machine and a human,
but the interface being mechanical, he will have to examine the answers to the interactions rather than
their form. The examiner’s goal is to distinguish man from machine; the goal of the artificial intelligence
is to confuse the examiner. This leads to the very general definition of artificial intelligence still in use
today where it is less about a machine being intelligent than about a machine being able to convince the
humans that it is intelligent.
The official birth of artificial intelligence is usually associated with the Dartmouth Summer Research
Project on Artificial Intelligence: in 1956 researchers met in Dartmouth College to address the difficult
questions for which computing failed to contribute [11].
Today, because of the impact of Machine Learning, and most notably of Deep Learning 1, alternative
definitions for artificial intelligence have been considered: a more business oriented view is that AI
matches these deep learning techniques which have a strong impact on industry [12,30].
Being able to pass the Turing test is no longer the shared goal of research and would not explain the
impact of AI today. Today’s successes of AI depend on several factors including machines tailored to the
needs of the algorithms and the massive increase in quantity and quality of data. Machine learning
techniques work today much better than 10 years ago. They build better models, make less errors in
prediction, they can make good use of the huge volumes of data, are able to generate new realistic data,
and are being tuned and adapted to an increasing variety of tasks. As such, these algorithms are no longer
aiming at tricking the human in believing that they are intelligent; they are actually replacing (in part) the
human in one of her more intelligent tasks: that of building algorithms.
If computing is about algorithms and data, modern AI is a data science: it relies on being able to
handle and make the most from data. Whereas the natural trend for computing was to build algorithms to
handle data, me may argue that artificial intelligence is about data building the algorithms that build
algorithms.
7 Conclusion
We have presented in this preliminary report five competences or pillars which should be taking an
increasing importance given the penetration of AI in society.
Further work should follow, to better understand at what age and in what way the relevant concepts
should be introduced, studied, mastered. around which we expect to explain how AI should be taught,
both to teachers and to learners.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following persons for their help and expertise: Neil Butcher, Victor Connes,
Jaco Dutoit, Maria Fasli, Françoise Soulié Fogelman, Marko Grobelnik, James Hodson, Francois
Jacquenet, Stefan Knerr, Bastien Masse, Luisa Mico, Jose Oncina, John Shawe-Taylor, Zeynep Varoglu,
Emine Yilmaz.
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