There is a lot of discussion about AIs now, especially as it effects employment and business productivity, but I don't see much discussion about how it could affect education, an often-neglected topic anyway. That effect is something that cannot be overstated. Education is one of the biggest limitations on individuals and economies. There has been some discussion about that AI can make people intellectually lazy, but the young human mind is "experience expectant". That is that children and teenagers are naturally programmed absorb the information, strategies and values that they will use to create their world views and direct their lives in the future. From Taoism we hear: "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear" suggesting that guidance and knowledge will be accessible when you are truly receptive and prepared to learn. But will the teacher be there? Too often not. Perhaps AI can provide the ideal teacher, at the time the student is ready and the teacher needed.

Most intelligent people realize at some time in their lives how important and valuable various individuals were to their intellectual and personal development, and lives. Often these are particular instructors, but just as often they may be parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, or perhaps the parents of friends. It is not just about what a person can learn, but also what they need to learn. Perhaps more important than any lesson can be the direction a mentor can offer. It is both about revealing what can be learned and what experiences will teach, as well as guidance to what is valuable to learn. The mentor must recognize what the pupil is ready for. This demands a lot from any teacher or mentor. It is something of a tragedy when an adult realizes what they missed when they could have so easily learned something valuable. An AI should be able to help with this and the value would be enormous.

Teaching is not a well paid profession. Schools are often underfunded. No matter how good intentioned the instructor is, they will meet students with potentials that they do not have the ability to build. The more intelligent a child is, the more demanding their education requirements are to reach their full potential. In any kind of normal classroom, they are held back both intellectually, in the speed they could progress, and the topics they could master. There are also students that need far more attention due to intellectual or behavioral weaknesses. The less gifted may be far less limited than they appear. Just as weaknesses can come from strengths, so too can strengths come from weaknesses. We all know individuals that are really not that bright, but to compensate have developed discipline we all can highly respect that certainly makes them extremely functional. In those cases, you can often easily find who their mentor was that taught them, and most importantly, that guided them to a niche where they could thrive.

There are also different ways that different people characteristically learn. The three primary ways of learning are considered to be visual learning (absorbing information through sight), auditory learning (learning through sound), and kinesthetic learning (learning through physical movement and hands-on experiences). Some teachers and teaching methods are going to be better at one or another. An AI could detect which is most appropriate to a particular child and focus on using that, but also work to strengthen their weaker natural learning methods.

Think of how AIs could help with every one of these problems. The gifted could have access to all the information resources, at the speed they can move. The less gifted could have detailed patient instruction. Both could be given instruction in the ways that they naturally learn best. Both could have recognition and instruction of what they were ready to learn, and wise guidance as well. It would be economical, as technology tends to be.

The benefits of using AI to help with teaching are obvious. What about the inevitable dangers? The first question is what to teach. Reading and writing must be the first because they are the basic skills needed as a foundation for lifelong communication and learning. They start to develop and shape how we think. These days we focus on teaching science because recent history has shown the wealth and power that it creates. A problem is that STEM teaches much of what to know, but does not well teach how to think and skips much important understanding. Over and over, it is recognized that the critical thinking skills of logic and reason are so important, especially in this time of misinformation and information overload. Yet those skills are commonly severely lacking. The skills of science require those thinking skills, but it is not science that teaches those skills. It is philosophy, an incredible wealth of knowledge that has largely disappeared in the meme wars that science has dominated since WWI. For a human to intellectually develop they need instruction in very basic lessons of philosophy that teach how to think and lead to the foundations needed for mature understanding and thought. That foundation is needed for a healthy personal, psychological, and intellectual life, as well as for deeper comprehension of the sciences they learn through life. We do learn some philosophy from our culture, but the lack of critical thinking skills and other weaknesses, show that much more instruction in basic thinking skills and the foundations of knowledge are needed.

Obviously, AI could be a great help in advanced subjects. Some people are actually extremely good at developing advanced technical skills using various forms of media on the internet. Some people are great at picking up knowledge from videos while others gain most from following technical documentation. All require mastering the details, and all need practice at any science or skill they want to develop. One had to be careful to walk the land instead of just looking at the map, or the knowledge tends to not be real or useful. It is already recognized that AIs can make people intellectually lazy. There are going to be some difficult balances to achieve there, but elsewhere I have written about how that can be done.  

And then there is the problem of ideology. If an AI could be such a great teacher, could they be a great propogandist? Yes. The wonders of human progress... This is another reason to teach the basics of the old philosophies from the Greeks, Taoists and other older philosophies. They were developed before the complicated political ideologies and religions that were fought over so much through history and perhaps especially today. Really, the ancient wisdom, vetted by the thousands of years it has taught and used, is very non-ideological. It necessarily reflects the real world. It is not only that basing the development of the AI's model in older philosophy would reflect both the real world and how human minds work, but also because of the integrated knowledge of how an AI works, it is a bit hard to manipulate its outputs. It can be done by manipulating its inputs, but if the inputs are built upon an underlying layer of philosophical traditions, it will be hard to integrate ideology into them. Manipulation will also tend to be recognizable by the human mind using the information from the AI. Still, as in all generations, fighting for the truth will be an ongoing challenge for all good men and women.  

Humanity exists in a rapidly changing world that is highly dependent on information and technology.  Education is incredibly important. AIs could be incredibly powerful tools for improving education and helping individuals best develop their intellectual skills and potentials. Blindly depending on them will obviously lead to stunted development. The AI systems are naturally prone to errors and so they will need human guidance and their outputs will need human verification.  Humans need to develop their intellectual skills to verify what the AIs are producing, just as we need those same skills to verify the insights from our own biological neural nets. As with all change and technology, there are hazards, but just in terms of education the benefits could be personally and economically of fantastic value. The potentials of AI for supporting human development are amazing and maybe even more important than the technology and productivity they can provide.