Abstract
The dilemma of artificial intelligence (AI) is both beautiful and dangerous. One problem, easy to be ignored but worth paying attention to, was put forward by Rosemary Luckin (2018) in the first part of this book: The penetration of AI into human life makes human gradually lose the ability to think, thus underestimating human intelligence and improperly overestimating AI. The increasing dependence of human beings on AI is reflected in the quantification of all aspects of human life, for example, we judge the freshness of vegetables, trusting the sale label more than our eyes and noses; even the AI measurement of human intelligence has become almost obsessed, so we begin to succumb to the authority of AI. This also shows up in education, for example, we judge whether a child is engaged in learning by a series of measured data in educational life. This book reminds us that human intelligence is the core of human beings, the basis of human activities, and it is based on human thinking. Therefore, we must attach importance to the leading role of human intelligence in education and make full use of the well-designed AI to promote the development of education human intelligence.
Human intelligence is sophisticated and rich, and the development of our own intelligence is based on comprehensive knowing of objective and necessary elements of intelligence and full understanding of our own intelligence. In chapter 2 and chapter 3 (section II), this book introduces various elements that play an important role in human intelligence development. The author introduces what intelligence is in two parts. The first part presents the concepts of knowledge, epistemology, and intelligence and their relations among them. Knowledge exists beyond our knowledge and helps us understand the world. The second part, as the subject of intellectual development, human beings should fully know and understand ourselves, which is the necessary condition for our intellectual development. Our meta-intelligence includes meta-cognition, meta-emotion, meta-situational awareness, and self-efficacy, all of which play an irreplaceable role in the development of intelligence. The author pays special attention to the role of self-efficacy. These elements of meta-intelligence are absent from artificial intelligence.
As Rosemary Luckin says: “If we get our education systems right, we need never feel we are intelligent enough: we can use AI to help us to keep striving for intellectual growth.” In the next three chapters, the author introduced the idea of interwoven intelligence as a way of thinking and talking about intelligence. Interwoven intelligence consists of seven different elements. And it tells us that the reason we think of AI as intelligent is mainly due to our concern about how AI plays a role in education. Author has also tried to clarify this value for our current AI dilemma by referencing the ideas from Who moved my cheese? In addition, it points out the importance of learning and education in understanding artificial intelligence and promoting the development of human intelligence. On this basis, it tries to answer: how can we develop our intelligence by taking advantage of AI? In the intelligent model of human–computer interaction, it has been clearly shown that human intelligence has “wisdom” and “brightness” that is superior to AI; but, if we overestimate AI, our intelligence will be diminished. In order not to be replaced by AI, the best way for us is to learn the knowledge and skills in AI world, give play to the role of our meta-intelligence, and use AI as a tool to promote the development of human intelligence.
So, what can education do to help us meet some of the big challenges posed by AI? How can we use AI to advance education in the future? With the help of big data analysis, teachers can know more about their students or conduct teaching analysis according to the characteristics of students. However, in AI-based education, our relationship with the content of education and with ourselves, the way of teaching, and teaching interaction have changed. Therefore, there needs to be educators with the relevant knowledge and skills to teach. As we know from the last chapter, the future education needs to do the following: 1. Integrate the seven elements of intelligence and design a progress model that promotes development; 2. train educators; 3. involve educators in the design and development of education systems and 4. we need to change the way we view intelligence and the way we design our education systems and then re-imagine our education systems which is based on these progression models. Art and drama also provide an advantage for intellectual development, so there should be room for that in AI-based education. In addition, the problem we have to face is that the requirement of intellectualization in poverty-stricken areas is not up to the standard. Accordingly, there is a gap between poverty-stricken person and privileged people in AI education. In the course of time, it will form a vicious circle and then the gap will be widened, the author reminds us.
One of the advantages of this book is opening new perspective for thinking the effect of AI deeply. Generally speaking, we pay more attention to positive effects that AI brings to people; however, after deep research on AI, Rosemary Luckin focused on the “threat” that AI brings to people. And the author introduces the components and functions of intelligence to readers in detail. Apart from the good sides mentioned above, there are still some areas can be improved in this book. It is too cumbersome to explain the human brain system and can be more concise in expression. It is also worth noting that questions put forward by this book have been not answered systematically. It seems to pose a topic worthy of deep discussion, but how to balance human intelligence and AI has not yet been a definitive statement. For example, in progression model design, how exactly should be done is still not specific enough.