What profound changes does artificial intelligence bring to future education?

The second in a series of comments on "education for the future"

At present, with the rapid development of new technologies and concepts such as cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, Internet, intelligent identification, knowledge management and economic and social needs, information technology has entered an intelligent stage. High-tech companies at home and abroad have laid out artificial intelligence one after another, and the State Council issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan", indicating that the development of artificial intelligence has ushered in a new era.

Therefore, while the educational information infrastructure is still being popularized and perfected, and the "internet plus" and education are still in mutual catalytic integration, artificial intelligence, as a higher development stage of information technology, will undoubtedly promote the reform and innovation of education and teaching at a deeper level, thus bringing opportunities and challenges to future education.

On the one hand, artificial intelligence has changed the goal of educating people. Just as machines replace simple repetitive manual labor, artificial intelligence will replace simple repetitive mental labor, drivers, translators, customer service, couriers and referees may all become disappearing occupations, and the traditional social employment system and professional form will also undergo profound changes. To adapt to and cope with this change and trend, education must return to the essence of human nature and shed the utilitarian brand of industrial society. When artificial intelligence becomes people's external memory and thinking assistant, it will no longer be important for students to simply absorb and master knowledge to acquire earning and earning skills. Education should pay more attention to cultivating students' love, empathy, critical thinking, creativity and cooperation spirit, and help students to accurately position themselves in the new social employment system and life value coordinate system. The change of educational goals and educational ideas will accelerate the reform and innovation of training mode, teaching materials, teaching methods, evaluation system, educational governance and even the whole educational system.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence has changed the campus environment. In the future, campus environmental informatization will move towards a higher level of smart campus, and various intelligent sensing devices and technologies will be everywhere. Principals, teachers and students have unconsciously embedded tangible campus physical space and intangible virtual data space. Students can sign in when they step into the campus, automatically notify their families when they leave the campus, send out an alarm for help when they enter the classroom, receive a friendly reminder when they are absent from class, and generate an academic analysis report after practicing the test ... All these show that the campus physical environment, classroom teaching environment and online learning environment have been fully integrated, realizing the transformation from data environment to data environment, from data teaching to data teaching, and from data personality to personalized data. The campus looks like the same campus, but it is full of human temperature and wisdom.

Artificial intelligence has also changed the role of teachers. Some experts pointed out that three kinds of people, namely "creative workers", "interpersonal connectors" and "judges with complex patterns", are the least likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence. Teachers meet the characteristics of these three types of people at the same time, because teachers must adapt to the ever-changing teaching policies and teaching environment, face students with different personality characteristics and needs, and deal with diversified education and teaching problems. Therefore, artificial intelligence cannot easily replace the profession of teachers. But in the future, artificial intelligence can change the role and function of teachers. Teachers can be liberated from simple repetitive work with low added value, so as to focus more on building a harmonious and stable teacher-student relationship and promote students' all-round and long-term development. Teachers are no longer just imparting knowledge, but teaching service providers who meet students' individual needs and growth consultants who design and implement customized learning programs.

In addition, artificial intelligence has greatly changed the learning paradigm. Speech recognition and semantic analysis technology can be used for oral evaluation, image recognition technology can be used for composition correction and photo search, and artificial intelligence can make every child have his own intelligent learning partner. As long as you take a photo with your mobile phone, scan it, say it and click a little, you can automatically generate and push the answer analysis, scoring comments, knowledge points, test sites and difficulties. With the rapid development of cognitive science, brain science and learning science, man-machine cooperation to improve intelligence and group integrated intelligence has become a new direction of artificial intelligence development. Artificial intelligence can not only analyze students' knowledge mastery from the aspects of knowledge association and group stratification, but also provide personalized and customized learning content and methods for each student from the aspects of brain thinking mode, individual personality characteristics and environmental characteristics, and stimulate students' deep-seated learning desire.

Artificial intelligence is constantly developing, and its destination is unknown. Whether it can be controlled by human beings has also caused ethical concerns, which not only provides opportunities for the future development of education, but also brings a series of challenges. In the near future, it is especially necessary to avoid over-reliance and privacy leakage, which requires education to avoid over-reliance on artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is by no means omnipotent, and the field of education involving adult education must not be blindly followed. The misjudgment of a problem solution may only affect a moment, but the misjudgment of a person's growth may affect a lifetime. Teachers' high-level mental activities and teaching experience, students' learning ability and logical thinking habits are by no means innate, and they often need repeated training and accumulation of low-level mental work and even physical labor. Over-reliance on artificial intelligence may lead to overcorrection, and it is easy for teachers and students to become assistants and vassals of artificial intelligence in disguise, teachers lose their applied teaching ability and professional accomplishment, and students lose their independent thinking ability and sound spiritual character.

At the same time, we should also avoid neglecting the protection of teachers and students' privacy. The technical basis and premise of artificial intelligence is massive data accumulation and training mining. The larger the social attribute data and teaching behavior data of teachers and students, the richer the dimensions and the longer the time span, the more accurate the teaching service provided by artificial intelligence, the more scientific the learning advice, the more reasonable the knowledge content, and the more remarkable the quality and benefit of education, which is followed by the sharp increase in the risk of privacy disclosure of teachers and students. Artificial intelligence can give wings to future education, but it must not be at the expense of the privacy of teachers and students. Teachers and students must be guaranteed the right to know, choose, visit, own and control the collected data, and the data must be safe to prevent leakage and abuse.

The future has arrived. For artificial intelligence, education should not only meet the future in attitude, face up to the future in attitude and understand the future in cognition, but also seize opportunities, face challenges and actively build its own bright future in management decision-making and education.