Artificial intelligence and the future of education
In schools and universities, the relationship between students and study has already changed: it is important to ask how the method will change
The relationship between science and society is one of the crucial nodes for interpreting the contemporary world. All the industrial revolutions, from the end of the 18th century to the present day, have first changed the world of manufacturing and products, then society, the way people live and think, but also geopolitics and relations between states based on military and industrial leadership.
What is happening today with artificial intelligence, high performance computing and data centres should not surprise us. These innovations, formerly the object of research themselves, have turned into tools for scientific acceleration and for the translation of science into technology, in such a way as to radically change scientific fields, and also to have a very strong potential impact on entire industrial sectors. Perhaps the distinguishing feature of this industrial revolution, identified with generative AI, is the speed with which the new development paradigms are being implemented and impacting work. The development cycles of AI, and their application in the field of media, are very rapid and have an impact especially on politics through the impact on social networks and the conditioning of the information system, with very powerful tools that create the possibility of profiling, and thus classifying the population, by monitoring their ideas and behaviour.
In the field of services and in the financial and intangible world, the impact of AI is running rapidly and showing its effects. One possible explanation is that generative AI has mainly been applied to the automation of cognitive and intellectual activities, to productivity in generating and processing texts, images, music. In practice, AI has already revolutionised the field of activities related to human creativity and is therefore interfering in our relationship with culture, writing and intellectual production in general, and therefore the change in the humanities is very strong. Therefore, analysing the perspective with a detached look at this scenario, one wonders why this was the first goal of generative AI, and why it was decided as it was.
From my perspective, it was an ethical choice, because compared to such consumer use, other areas of application could be privileged instead, for instance concerning societal challenges and the solution of global problems. Obviously, these strategies conceal a marketing and business objective, or perhaps even a deeper mission, because with today's directly accessible applications for everyday use, one can reach practically all smartphone owners; by affecting the field of creativity, one can completely change people's relationship with writing and reading, even before their productive lives. In this way, it is possible to influence the development of cognitive skills, and the very identity of people, in adults as well as in children.
I am sure that one of the areas where generative AI will have the most impact is certainly education. In schools and universities, generative AI tools have already changed the relationship between students and study and it is very likely that learning will be mediated by generative AI in a structural way. Partly this process is also related to the agentification of AI, which can be high impact in this field. [...] In practice in education we could move from a system that responds to student prompts, processed through prompts, to an AI agent-based method that takes over the training and shapes it based on the student's learning goals and performance, ultimately taking the place of a tutor. Therefore, we can ask ourselves how teaching, knowledge transmission and more generally knowledge will be affected, how the students' critical ability to elaborate and develop texts and creativity will evolve. [...] The autonomous exercise of the student and the verification by the teacher represent a decisive moment in the evaluation of the actual development of competences by the student, which however are also shaped through peer interaction in the classroom and in practice moments. The classroom environment is decisive for character development and confrontation with learning and the ability to demonstrate one's knowledge and verify it with others.
