Teaching Technology

Teachers are some of the most influential people in our lives.  Parents are often our earliest exposure to the role, imparting life’s essential information: things like eating, walking, and basic communications.  As we grow older, our paths cross with a growing number of teachers until we meet our first formal educator.  This initial professional might be affiliated with a religious organization, a pre-schoolteacher, a kindergarten educationist, or some other trained individual.  Technology increases the number of potential teachers and allows more efficient dissemination of information.  This efficacy reduces the need to interact personally with a teacher. 

Technology has reached a point where a future in which humans are no longer necessary for the profession is plausible.  As it is, people are already becoming less crucial to the education of robots.  A Czech firm has a school which goes by the name GoodAI.  This company specializes in teaching robots to think.  According to their website, their aim is to, “automate cognitive processes in science, technology, business, and other fields.”  They are not simply programing behaviors by installing complicated sets of instructions, something which has been done for years.  Instead, they are trying to teach thinking and ethics, so these machines can apply previous knowledge to circumstances they have never before encountered while still behaving in accordance to generally accepted principles (e.g. stealing is bad).

For now, there seems to be more questions than answers about how machines will impact the human condition. Robots have become more efficient at many tasks but it remains unclear whether or not they will become better situational ethicists than us. Experience is one of the greatest teachers.  Our society has embarked on an ongoing technological experience now, and the process may ultimately not be easy for those living through the transition.  Only time will tell if the globe’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence will provide valuable lessons to humans and machines alike and whether the real-time tutorial will be painful.