The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in eLearning.
– Shrinking the circle between the teacher, the student, the worker and you.
The Beginning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a dream of many, ever since Alan Turing cracked Hitler’s Enigma Machine and put forward his famous Turing Test in 1950.
It has taken 65 years to develop the technology to make Turing’s vision close to a reality. AI has been developing on the typical exponential curve during this time, and has now finally turned the corner and heading upwards at an accelerating rate. AI for the everyday person has been around for a decade or so now in its most baby forms, such as Amazon shopping suggestions; then it got a little bit smarter being able to actually understand most of our words with Siri; and now is jumping ahead faster and faster, with products like Viv, who can actually hold conversations with you and thus allow a back and forth discussion with context and meaning.
The Far Future
As with all technologies, you need to think about where we will be in 5, 10, and 20 years time – have a future vision for what the ultimate expression of eLearning vision will be, and how Artificial Intelligence will express itself. It is only from working back from this futuristic vision that real changes can be made today. At Jzero, we see a future for AI that will be all pervasive, a future that will forever shrink the circle between teacher, student and worker.
The Teacher, The Student and the Worker walk into a bar…
Most applications and visions for AI today only focus on one of these three areas.
- Can the AI become your teacher, how well will they be able to understand and teach you in a personalised way?
- Can the AI become a student, how well can it learn to speak, to listen, and to learn to information just from watching and reading?
- Can the AI become a worker and replace you, how well will it become a welder, an accountant, a programmer?
At Jzero, our vision is for an AI that is the teacher, the student and the worker.
AI as the Teacher
AI will have access to everything that you are. Your emails, your conversations, your heart rates, your mood, and it will know about what you know, and don’t know, what you can do, and what you cannot do. It will adapt its teaching to be specially for you at your rate, your level and your perfect time to learn. The race to make this a reality has already started and is going fast.
AI as the Student
AI has access to everything that humanity knows. Its called the internet, and the race is on to create AI that can learn different things. Today, like 3 years olds, they are learning to pick things out of pictures, understand your words, translate your speech into different languages and many other things. Every year AI gets older, and so does its capacity to learn. In 2014 it was about a 2 year old human. In 2015, about a 4 year old. In 2020 it will probably be able to learn like a 8 year old.
AI as the Worker
AI has been a worker for a long while, running robots and doing all manner of manual tasks. First we assigned them the easy tasks, then we assigned them slightly more difficult tasks, and as they got smarted and smarter we gave them more and more to do.
You and your AI walk into a bar…
At JZero, we see a vision of AI future where they are the teacher, the student and the worker. And they are right beside you, everywhere you go. It is a symbiotic relationship that is getting closer and closer.
Your AI will watch you do your job, look at your emails and your conversations. It will deliver the personalised learning you need right then and there to get your job done better. And the same time, the AI will watch what you do, will learn from your replies, your decisions and your actions, to understand what to do in those situations. And at the same time, as the trust develops between you, it will suggest actions to take in these situations, and then like any good team member it will start to take some of those actions for you.
This is the future vision that JZero is rapidly working towards today, and it is where we believe the future of AI in eLearning will evolve into!
What would you like to see your AI do for you?
(C) Copyright Paul McCoy 2016
Image source – www.pixabay.com
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