Wednesday, February 8, 2023

What The Future Holds

I'd been wondering when schools would need to address developments associated with artificial intelligence. In a meeting today it was clear that time had arrived as we found ourselves discussing exactly what students' access to ChatGPT will mean for our practice in the classroom and in more general terms. The simple answer, by the way, is that it will mean a lot, given what the AI involved is now capable of.

I must say, I couldn't help wonder what lies ahead. Colleagues who seemed to know most about the technology involved appeared fairly sanguine as to what we are likely to have to deal with in the near future. But given my understanding of AI I couldn't help but privately entertain some fairly apocalyptic scenarios in educational terms and the real possibility that many current assessment practices won't be able to deal with what ChatGPT v 3 (coming very soon!) will be able to offer. Whether the system (or variety of systems in relation to assessment) will be nimble enough to deal with this strikes me as doubtful.

Hope I'm wrong, otherwise some intense headaches lie ahead before I get to retire!

(I wonder whether I'm being influenced in all this by a key motif involved in my protracted visit to my personal Fantasyland back in the ICU in September last year. I'm not terribly keen on remembering the details of my various delusions, but one I will mention here is that when I was trapped in the alternative reality my fevered brain conjured up I was convinced that the 'real' world I had somehow fallen out of had been taken over by the superior intelligence of AI technology and, therefore, was no longer available for me to return to. Very odd, eh?)

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