Week 1 MBA 6101 - The take over

 It's scary to see how much the world has changed due to technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Not only is it taking over the workforce, but it has also changed the way of traditional teaching. 

As you can see from the image above, in the back we have children doing their work inside a workbook, whereas in the front we have students doing their work on a laptop and tablet. This shows the shift from old school to new school. 

Traditional methods such as having workbooks to do assignments, buying a physical textbook for classes, and hand grading physical in-person exams have started to be outdated. Everything school-related has started to go virtual, even the classrooms, due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. As we move along the path of technology, sooner rather than later teachers will get replaced by AI robots to teach classes in person. Sad but may end up being true. We know that "intelligent machines could never match human interactions (Bushweller, 2021). Kevin Bushweller mentions in his article "Teachers, the robots are coming, but that's not a bad thing" about a study done by Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, who leads the Personal Robots group. 

They worked with an AI-powered, teddy bear-sized looking robot named Tega and 5- and 6-year-olds. The reason for the study was to improve the language and literacy skills of the children by using human teachers and AI robots together in the classroom. Their study showed promising results with learning improvements in children. 

This not only shows that robots can be beneficial to students' education but also can help human teachers improve their teaching techniques with the help of an AI robot teaching assistant. We do not want to see teachers lose their jobs due to robots, so working alongside robots is the best option. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation are a whole new playing field, slowly it is going to empower the world and our job right now is to ensure that we are fully aware of what is to come. It is scary to even think of the world with robots, but I am hopeful that it will be good for us rather than bad. 

References:

Bushweller, K. (2021, September 15). Teachers, the robots are coming. but that’s not a bad thing. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/technology/teachers-the-robots-are-coming-but-thats-not-a-bad-thing/2020/01