IBM briefs the White House about artificial intelligence: society, economics & education

In June 2016 the White House published a request for information about the future of Artificial Intelligence. Seeking for input of industry and thought leaders. In my humble opinion I think that was because 2016 seems to be the year where Artificial Intelligence left the lab. Sure, there have been widespread applications of deep learning classifications in image classification, customer classification in retail and other specialized areas.

But since IBM stirs the pot with it's Watson technology, Tesla gets publicity with it's self driving cars everyone can buy and Google's AlphaGo won it's epic Go match against Lee Sedol things got more visible to the public eye. I think there is now a widespread awareness rising that Artificial Intelligence is no longer part of Science Fiction playbooks but is rising in our everyday's life.

I agree mostly with IBM's answer to the RFI, however in some points I have a different opinions I will lay them out here.

Social and economic implications of AI 

(Version from: July 28, 2016)
Overall the assessment is that the positive consequences will out weight the negative ones and history have shown us that everyone will benefit from a rise in productivity. Well, I think this will depend on how society, investors and policy makers will react to this productivity rise. I still remember an article in I read in the 80's from the German popular science magazine P.M. Back then, the robotics industry was on the rise, especially brought to public awareness by the success of Japanese companies. The prediction in this article for the new millennia was that it would be sufficient for employees to work around four hours a day to earn a living, even a good one! Well, we are far from that - surprisingly the assumed rises in productivity turned out to be quite right. So where did the benefit go? Only a fraction of society in the western industrialized world benefited from the productivity gains from industrial robotics and the widespread introduction of ERP systems. The coming challenge will be to really let the whole society benefit from increased productivity by AI.

Education for harnessing AI technologies 

(Version from: July 28, 2016)
I think it is prudent to point out that the biggest potential for education lies in AI itself. In AI coaches to be specific. I use the term coach instead of teacher because in the beginning AI systems for teaching will be more like a coach, supporting instead of guiding and developing a curriculum. This will be already a big step of challenging the the one teacher many students problem. AI coaches have the potential to give every student the feeling of being taken care of by offering a tailored learning experience. Chalapathy Neti, Director of Education Transformation at IBM has already pointed this out.

That AI systems can be utilized in teaching has already been demonstrated by Professor Ashok Goel who introduced 'Jill Watson' as a teaching assistant. The whole semester his students were unaware that Jill was in fact an AI system. They were quite surprised when it was revealed to them because they were about to give a very positive feedback for this assistant. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote a nice article about this. Professor Goel also thinks that AI systems, AI coaches in my wording, could be a big improvement for MOOCs.
Official press release from Georgia Tech.

To be continued...