In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the presence of AI in our daily lives. Education is one of the fields that has been more influenced by this technologies due to the increasing reliance on personalized AI-based tutors. In this essay, I will discuss whether the advantages of this trend outweight the disadvantages or not.
First of all, it is important to examine the reasons behind this trend to fully understand the actual context of education. One of the potential reasons could be the increase in the pricing per hour of human tutors. The increase in the amount of children needing individual teaching as well as the reduction in the number of available has led into a rise of the hourly tutoring rates. As a result, artificial intelligence has emerged as a possible solution with the aim of providing personalized attention at a more affordable price.
However, some people argue that this approach could have many drawbacks and affect the education of childs in a significant way. One of the main disadvantages is the inevitable error rate of current machine learning tools. Although having a good overall performance, these algorithms still make some errors that in critical situations, particularly when dealing with something as fundamental as the education of future generations, could lead into irreversible consequences.
On the other hand, advantages are considerable and should be taken into consideration. In the context of global inequities in access to education between high- and low-income countries, AI could have a transformative role. It has potential to help on the way we shape education in contexts with low resources and high students-to-teacher ratios. Moreover, in setting with more resources the enormous quantity of internet avaible information can somehow be overwhelming and in this context, AI can help students organizing ideas and concepts.
Taken everything into consideration, although AI has considerable potential to improve education in the future, I believe that, given the performance of current models, human teachers remains essential and irreplaceable.