Bill Gates (cited in Huddlestone 2022)

“The AI’s will get to that ability to be as good a tutor as any human ever could” 

“This should be a leveller. Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you’ve done and look across your entire body of work.”

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Gillian Keegan – UK government – Secretary of State for Education (cited in Head 2023)

“AI could have the power to transform a teacher’s day-to-day work. For example, it can take much of the heavy lifting out of compiling lesson plans and marking. This would enable teachers to do the one thing that AI cannot and that’s teach, up close and personal at the front of the classroom.”

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Prof. Stewart Russell – University of California computer scientist (cited in Devlin 2023)

“Education is the biggest benefit that we can look for in the next few years. It ought to be possible within a few years, maybe by the end of this decade, to be delivering a pretty high quality of education to every child in the world. That’s potentially transformative.”

“Oxford and Cambridge don’t really use a traditional classroom … they use tutors presumably because it’s more effective. It’s literally infeasible to do that for every child in the world. There aren’t enough adults to go around.”

“Hopefully the system, if properly designed, won’t tell a child how to make a bioweapon. I think that’s manageable.  I’m sure the Chinese government hopes [AI] is more effective at inculcating loyalty to the state. I suppose we’d expect this technology to be more effective than a book or a teacher.”

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Rose Luckin (2023)

The fact that “generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are likely to profoundly disrupt this sector” is a reflection of “our failure to build education systems that nurture and value our unique human intelligence”.

“AI could be a force for tremendous good within education. It could release teachers from administrative tasks, giving them more opportunities to spend time with students. However, we are woefully equipped to benefit from the AI that is flooding the market. It does not have to be like this. There is still time to prepare, but we must act quickly and wisely”

“Staying ahead of AI will mean radically rethinking what education is for, and what success means”.

“Failure to change isn’t an option… While Silicon Valley conjures up its next magic trick, we must prepare ourselves to protect what we hold dear – for ourselves and for future generations.”

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Baroness Barran – UK schools minister under the Conservative Sunak government (2023)

Wrote that UK government Ministers are enthused by the educational potential of AI and want to ‘harness its magic’. She saw AI as having the potential to “help children with special needs and disabilities learn more intuitively … ease a teacher’s administrative burden by doing the heavy lifting on routine tasks like marking … help reduce the attainment gap for disadvantaged children by giving them a free ‘personal tutor”. 

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References

Barran, D. (2023). A free ‘personal tutor’ for every child – artificial intelligence could revolutionise the way we teach. The Independent, 15th June, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ai-chatgpt-schools-teachers-teaching-b2356800.html

Devlin, H.  (2023).  AI likely to spell end of traditional school classroom, leading expert says.  The Guardian, 7th July, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/07/ai-likely-to-spell-end-of-traditional-school-classroom-leading-expert-says

Head, M. (2023). Education secretary says AI could take over much of ‘heavy lifting’ involved in teaching. The Independent, May 9th

Huddleston, T. (2022).  Bill Gates says A.I. chatbots will teach kids to read within 18 months’ CNBC, April 22nd, https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/22/bill-gates-ai-chatbots-will-teach-kids-how-to-read-within-18-months.html

Luckin, R. (2023). Yes, AI could profoundly disrupt education. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. The Guardian, 14th July