Cards on the table, I have been described as a technophile, and as someone who enjoys engaging in a dose of futurology. Tempting as it is to offer a clickbait headline along the lines of, “The Robots are Coming,” I am optimistic about the future, and specifically the future of the influence of technology in the education sector. There is currently a lot of hype around artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies, but the vital thing to remember is that The Future is - in education at least - People.
By now most people will have heard of ChatGPT and its essay-writing skills. I was recently asked to produce a sixty word bio for a conference I was attending, and thought I’d ask the programme to do it for me. It took seconds. It was okay; it wasn’t as I would have written it, but it saved me probably the fifteen or twenty minutes required to do it myself. AI is functional, but not a perfect replacement for a real person. It can count, it can write, it can do many things which allow its human controllers to spend their time more fruitfully – that is to say, like a calculator or a cash till, it creates efficiencies.
Here's another example using Dall.e, an AI tool that creates pictures from text instruction. I asked it to design a “Further Education College of the Future” to coincide with a 2022 College of The Future Commission publication:
Pretty neat, but then I’m no architect. This does seem to me to be a bit more Jetsons and a bit less FE.
