AI is revolutionizing education

Artificial intelligence will accelerate the evolution of teaching and learning. Overall, AI should allow students to get personalized instruction and teachers to have more free time to prepare classes and update their information.

While it’s still too early to evaluate the extent of the change in the quality and scope of instruction that AI might achieve, what is certain is that it will cause a revolution. That is because educational systems around the world remain rooted in the foundations established in the 1800s. Most of all, AI will crush the idea that all students must learn in the same place, in the same way, and at the same speed.

Kai-fu Lee, an AI expert, has described the current education system as an “educational assembly line,” in which children advance from class to class without paying too much attention to differences in terms of learning, personal preferences, and abilities.

The role of AI will be to trigger a veritable revolution of the very idea of what constitutes education.

To better grasp the depth of this revolution, consider that for more than three thousand years, ships traveling in the Mediterranean were propelled by human power, transmitted to the water by oars, or by the wind, playing with sails. And it took weeks for trade to move from North Africa to Rome, or from Alexandria to Crete. The invention of the steam engine changed all that. Trips that took weeks now took days, becoming safer and cheaper. And steam power allowed for powers like Great Britain, Germany or even the United States, which did not have a shore on the Mediterranean, to dominate that region, dealing a fatal economic blow to the peoples who had thrived thanks to the land routes to China, such as the Silk Road.