INVESTMENTS in artificial intelligence are massive ($94 billion in 2021 alone). They will continue as people see profit-making potential in them. We have all heard the rhetoric that AI is going to revolutionise many areas and have a major impact on jobs in several sectors. Where it might increase marginal productivity (output per worker), it will automate jobs and thus replace workers. This is already happening in some spaces.

AI is expected to have a large impact on education too. There were already over 30 multimillion-dollar-funded AI-in-education corporations in 2022; some analysts expect AI in the education market to be worth more than $20bn in less than five years. But the same apprehensions surface in this sector too. Where AI can help create more pathways for personalised and lifelong learning, it will also automate a lot of processes. Teachers fear they might be ‘replaced’ by AI systems eventually.

These apprehensions are a bit premature. AI is still developing and it is hard to predict all that it will be able to eventually accomplish. Although there are early indications that some teacher tasks can be automated, there is also a perception that certain functions that teachers perform, and that are relevant to socialisation and the development of deeper, more contextualised learning, won’t be easy to automate. The future being unknown, let us see how technology develops and is deployed.

Pakistan is not at the frontier of AI use in education. For now, its most common application is seen in students using GPT-3 to........

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