How to raise the next generation in the age of AI?

Source: "Economic Observer" (ID: eeo-com-cn), author: Hu Yong

一|| **AI devices are increasingly capable of manipulating and addicting users, and children are especially vulnerable. An overreliance on AI technology can cripple children socially and emotionally. **

二|| **Two legacy issues plaguing formal education systems around the world are: the binary opposition between the humanities and the sciences, and the excessive pursuit of higher education content rather than problem-solving skills. **

**三||The first place where the AI scare affects is the classroom. Now, everyone is generally panicking about two things: the first is cheating; the second is exams. **

**四||The 6Cs are key skills that help all children grow better, and these skills will also help children become contributing members of their communities and good citizens, as this leads to a fulfilling personal life. **

**Wu || A general education develops valuable "soft skills" such as problem solving, critical thinking, and resilience. These skills are hard to quantify and don't create a clear path to a well-paying first job. But they have long-term value in a variety of careers. **

Image credit: Generated by Unbounded AI tools

Artificial Intelligence Generation

While there are still many uncertainties surrounding artificial intelligence, we know that it will affect every part of our lives, and in many cases, the greatest impact on children and adolescents – from how they are born and raised, to The services available to them, how they learn, and the jobs for which they will be trained.

We call today's children the "AI generation," and the decisions made by AI models define the videos they watch online, the classes they take in school, the social assistance their families receive... a reality that both brings Great opportunities, but also serious risks. Without special attention to children, the development of this technology risks taking place without regard to the specific needs and rights of children, whose healthy development is critical to the future well-being of any society.

AI could exacerbate inequality and sustain bias. For example, schools that employ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to sort student applications may inadvertently but systematically exclude certain types of candidates. How do we protect children from discrimination in the context of far-reaching and sometimes invisible surveillance technologies?

AI devices are increasingly capable of manipulating and making users addictive, and children are especially vulnerable. An overreliance on AI technology can cripple children socially and emotionally. Data privacy leakage is also a worrying issue. When social media connects with children through data collection and pushing targeted content, and when smart toys can hear children talking, how should children's privacy be treated?

Children/teenagers already make up a large portion of AI system users. How/when is data collected from them? What can companies do with this data? How to create/filter content for underage users? It’s clear that we need AI leaders, engineers, designers, product managers, and others involved in creating AI systems to be educated on children’s rights so that those rights are upheld and considered in the system’s ever-accelerating development.

Such considerations must be translated into concrete measures such as:

How to establish a content or platform evaluation/rating/ranking system based on global standards of "child-friendliness" and user preferences?

How do you get young people to opt in or out of AI features (whether on mobile devices or on websites) based on their preferences?

How can publishing information about the performance of a company, tool, platform, or individual content incentivize more kid-friendly content?

How can children and young people be involved in the design of global standards and laws and policies governing AI systems?

How to keep children/teenagers data safe and teach them personal management?

Anyone who sells future education is in trouble

For parents, what they are most worried about right now is whether they can still educate a child who will survive in the age of artificial intelligence.

People in education always say this: prepare today's children for an extraordinary future. But how to prepare for their future? What can you do to ensure your child thrives in a world of artificial intelligence? The world will be very different in 10, 20, and 30 years. As an educator or parent, how do you know what career your child will pursue in the future, or can really do that job well? The truth of the matter is, you don't know it.

In fact, it is easy to understand. How much of the work you are doing now can be recognized and imagined by your parents and grandparents? Children and teens will grow into adulthood as a result of the massive use of artificial intelligence in completely different occupations than what their parents and grandparents knew, and even the definitions of "occupation" and "job" are changing.

According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Work report, by 2065 up to 65% of children entering primary school today will be working in jobs that have yet to be created. Most existing education systems at all levels provide highly siled training and continue to employ some of the 20th century practices that hold back today's talent and labor markets. Two legacy issues plaguing formal education systems around the world are: the binary opposition between the humanities and sciences, and the excessive pursuit of higher education content rather than problem-solving skills.

The #1 place AI scares affect is the classroom

Today's child encounters something he/she doesn't know, he/she will not ask his parents, but a search engine. It's very interesting because the child has the notion that s/he thinks that search engines know everything. And we have to explain to kids that search engines don't know everything. And there are some things you probably don't want search engines to know.

But anyway, kids want to know the answers, and as adults, since we don't have enough knowledge, why not use search engines as a tool to teach kids to think more independently? You can say to your child, "Hey, you have a question. Go ask a search engine, look at the answer, and tell me what you think of that answer and what you're going to do with it."

ChatGPT is the same. It tests the student's ability to ask questions. How can I find out if I don't know the answer to something? How do I find those who have the answers? How do I fit these little pieces together into a solution? Also, how do you look at the data? How to discover what is behind the data? That's what people need to learn, how to solve problems. I don't think a lot of school education is built around that.

The first place where the AI scare affects is the classroom. Right now, people are generally panicking about two things:

The first is cheating. Previous papers had a plagiarism check mechanism, but now teachers need to know how to identify whether an assignment was written by ChatGPT. GPT is a generation mode, which means that there is no historical data information on the Internet, and it is difficult to find duplicates. In response to this situation, Princeton students have developed an intelligent monitoring tool called GPTZero, using technology to fight technology; while many schools simply disable GPT directly.

The second is the exam. We have seen that GPT4 can successfully pass legal, medical and other examinations. The test was originally the standard for assessing and admitting students. If the GPT can be passed, it will put pressure on the test and evaluation, which is related to the underlying logic of education.

These two points have a great impact on education, and will affect how teachers and schools judge a student. For such a challenge, the simple and crude operation method is to ban, but the ban is definitely not effective, and it cannot be banned for a long time. After all, the temptation for students is too great.

Why not think about it the other way around, what benefits might GPT bring? Looking at education from a completely different angle, GPT has given us a warning: the original education model has problems.

For example, homework has long been considered a necessary means of training students, which seems to be justified, but is it useful for students' growth? Is there really a causal relationship between homework load and student performance? The reason why the current candidates keep brushing the questions is determined by the assessment method, and the logic of the assessment is consistent with the logic of brushing the questions.

Educational philosopher Dewey discussed what students actually learn in school. The purpose of the assignment is to learn from the explicit curriculum, but students also learn from the activities they participate in, which is called "incidental learning". Dewey said that perhaps the greatest misconception about education is that one learns only what one is learning. In fact, in addition to the knowledge that people acquire intentionally through specialized learning, there is also a kind of knowledge acquired unintentionally, which includes ideals, emotions, interests, will, etc. acquired in the learning process through communication and evaluation. Dewey believes that incidental learning is more important than learning about knowledge in school, because it can cultivate students' most fundamental attitudes towards future life. There will always be students who can take exams, but students with high scores may not be good learners, and even lack the ability to study independently.

Self-learning ability cannot be measured by homework, so we need to think about how effective homework is, and whether we should not be oriented by homework in the classroom, but instead be oriented by discussion, collaboration, and project-based learning. Brand new assessment.

In this case, GPT can not only be used, but even become a teaching tool. For example, a teacher used to be able to give students writing assignments to make an argument for something and grade them based on the text they turned in. Now, she can ask students to use ChatGPT to generate an argument, then have them annotate how effective that argument is for a particular audience. Finally, students rewrite according to their opinions. At this time, GPT can become a teaching tool for training students' ability to identify information. Through this process, it is also possible to examine whether students have information literacy, thereby improving "artificial intelligence literacy", distinguishing the authenticity of information given by artificial intelligence, and judging its logic.

A teacher can also encourage students to use ChatGPT in their written assignments, but when evaluating assignments, evaluate both the prompts as well as the results, and the prompts are even more important than the essays themselves. It is important for students to know the words used in the prompt and then understand the output that comes back. Teachers need to teach how to do this.

There will be broad shifts in the role of teachers. Information once handed out in classrooms is now everywhere: first online, then chatbots. What educators must do now is tell students not just how to find this information, but what information to trust, what not, and how to tell the difference. Teachers are no longer gatekeepers of information but facilitators.

I've often thought that education should really just be assigning people problems to solve, rather than teaching, as it is now, engaged in the theoretical demonstration of knowledge. We urgently need to change the concept of education: a child becoming "smart" means the improvement of two abilities at the same time - both the mastery of those formed knowledge and the flexible problem-solving skills.

What people need to learn

In the past, we thought of children as containers that needed to be filled. If we can manage to fill them with the right subjects or the right activities, it's like putting all the right things in their brains, and they can walk and climb up -- great School, big money, a comfortable job.

Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh Pasek, in the bestselling book Achieving Greatness: What the Science of Learning Tells Us About Raising Successful Children ( Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells us About Raising Successful Children states that the foundational skills for all students—no matter what path they choose after high school—are the 6Cs: collaboration, communication, knowledge Reserve (content), critical thinking (critical Thinking), innovation ability (creativity) and self-confidence (confidence). Employers want to hire great communicators, critical thinkers, and innovators—in short, they want great talent. But employers are often disappointed when children come out of an education system where well-formed knowledge is king.

The 6Cs are key skills that help all children thrive. These skills will also help children become contributing members of their communities and good citizens, as this leads to a fulfilling personal life.

While we all want our children to achieve, every child is made up of more than his or her grades. People whose skills are limited to a stockpile of formed knowledge sometimes do well in school but never seem to be able to make big headway at work. Will anyone think of them as managers when new roles come up in the company (perhaps they lack the ability to collaborate)? Or do they have the ability to run in the other direction (perhaps due to lack of creativity) when their lab needs to develop a new method?

Through the lens of the 6Cs, we can gain a more complete understanding of our children's strengths and weaknesses. This means that we need to de-emphasize standardized testing, which focuses schooling on too narrow a set of skills that shape the knowledge base, while neglecting to develop the other foundational skills mentioned above. We also need to de-emphasize developing career-specific skills, knowing how to code, weld or account is not the most important thing to have a successful multi-decade career. The half-life of all these class skills is getting shorter and shorter. That's not to say that knowing how to code, weld, or do accounting is completely useless, it's just that these are career-ready skills that are added to the cake and not critical foundational skills. In the age of AI, students still need to have a foundation in order to use AI effectively. Children can use this foundation to answer more questions and solve more problems. And only when parents and educators focus on developing these six key skills will they become change agents for their children.

Re-Emphasis on General Education

In a column titled "In the Age of AI, Major in Being Human," New York Times columnist David Brooks proposes another A list of skills beyond artificial intelligence: unique personal voice, presentation skills, childlike creativity, unusual worldview, empathy, and situational awareness.

If you're a college student preparing to live in an AI world, you need to ask yourself: Which courses will give me skills that machines can't replicate, making me more human? You might want to avoid any class that teaches you to think in an impersonal, linear, generalized way — AI will crush thinking like that. On the other hand, you may wish to lean toward courses in the sciences or humanities that will help you develop the following obvious human skills:

A distinct personal voice

AI often churns out the kind of impersonal, bureaucratic writing that can be found in government reports, corporate communications or academic journals. You want to develop a voice as unique as George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and James Baldwin, go to classes where you'll hear unique perspectives so you can learn Forge your own voice.

Presentation skills

Whereas the previous generation of information technology favored introverts, in an environment full of new artificial intelligence, we value human relationships more and are more likely to favor extroverts. The ability to compose and deliver a great speech, connect with an audience, and organize fun and productive get-togethers seems like a set of skills that AI won't replicate.

A childlike talent for creativity

After you've interacted with a system like GPT for a while, you'll notice that it can go from giving bland answers to utter nonsense. And children are born creators. Children don't just mimic or passively absorb data; they explore, creating new ideas and imaginative stories to explain the world. So in your studies, you need to take classes that unleash your creativity and give you a chance to exercise and hone your imagination, whether they're about coding or drawing.

Unusual worldviews

AI is just a text prediction machine, good at predicting what should come next, so you have to be really good at being unpredictable and out of the box. Prepare your mind with worldviews from distant times, unusual people, and unfamiliar places. In this era when traditional thinking is driven by turbines, people with reverse thinking and unique worldviews will be valuable.

Empathy

Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns of crowds, but it's not great for understanding the unique individual in front of you. If you want to do that, good humanities courses are very useful. By studying literature, drama, biography and history, you can gain a better understanding of other people's minds.

Situational Awareness

People with this skill develop an intuitive awareness of the unique circumstances of their situation, knowing when to follow the rules and when to break them. A sense of where events are going, a special sensitivity, not necessarily consciously, but knowing at what speed to act and what decisions to make. This sensitivity comes from experience, historical knowledge, humility in the face of uncertainty, and living reflective and interesting lives. It is a knowledge held in the body and in the mind.

Ultimately, we need a renewed emphasis on general education. As Harvard economist Dave Deming wrote:

A general education develops valuable "soft skills" such as problem solving, critical thinking, and resilience. These skills are hard to quantify and don't create a clear path to a well-paying first job. But they have long-term value in a variety of careers...Even from a narrow career perspective, a general education has enormous value because it builds a foundational set of competencies that benefit students in a rapidly changing job market .

This is also my hope for the age of artificial intelligence—that it forces us to more clearly distinguish between knowledge as useful information and human knowledge that enables people to be wiser and change.

The shift in education is about helping students build or learn new AI tools and understand all the social and ethical implications of those tools. This will prepare students to go out into the world to solve problems, ask fundamental ethical and social questions, and envision using these tools to contribute to a more just and equitable world.