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The past fifteen years have seen considerable AI advances in education. Applications are in wide use by educators and learners today, with some variation between K-12 and university settings. Though quality education will always require active engagement by human teachers, AI promises to enhance education at all levels, especially by providing personalization at scale. Similar to healthcare, resolving how to best integrate human interaction and face-to-face learning with promising AI technologies remains a key challenge.

Robots have long been popular educational devices, starting with the early Lego Mindstorms kits developed with the MIT Media Lab in the 1980s. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) for science, math, language, and other disciplines match students with interactive machine tutors. Natural Language Processing, especially when combined with machine learning and crowdsourcing, has boosted online learning and enabled teachers to multiply the size of their classrooms while simultaneously addressing individual students’ learning needs and styles. The data sets from large online learning systems have fueled rapid growth in learning analytics.

Still, schools and universities have been slow in adopting AI technologies primarily due to lack of funds and lack of solid evidence that they help students achieve learning objectives. Over the next fifteen years in a typical North American city, the use of intelligent tutors and other AI technologies to assist teachers in the classroom and in the home is likely to expand significantly, as will learning based on virtual reality applications. But computer-based learning systems are not likely to fully replace human teaching in schools.

Cite This Report

Peter Stone, Rodney Brooks, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Oren Etzioni, Greg Hager, Julia Hirschberg, Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Ece Kamar, Sarit Kraus, Kevin Leyton-Brown, David Parkes, William Press, AnnaLee Saxenian, Julie Shah, Milind Tambe, and Astro Teller.  "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030." One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA,  September 2016. Doc: http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. Accessed:  September 6, 2016.

Report Authors

AI100 Standing Committee and Study Panel 

Copyright

© 2016 by Stanford University. Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030 is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 License (International): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/.