Automation

I sometimes see ethics concerns raised about the potential impact of automated teaching on learning, and I wanted to explore this question further.

First of all, what is being automated?

Teaching? So what? To ask if teaching ‘should’ be automated is to assume that it’s the teaching that matters. What matters is the learning. If we automate teaching, and it results in a better learning experience, then teaching should be automated. We can quibble about what ‘better’ means in this context, but I would argue that for whatever definition of ‘better’ you want to use, the outcome remains the same.

And learning can’t be automated. You can’t upload information into your mind. It’s an active and personal process of knowledge construction.

So, let’s assume that we have ethics concerns about the impact of automated teaching on learning.

First, let’s ask what automation is likely to mean.

• Cost. Automation would probably enable us to provide a learning experience at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent experince at a university.
• Scale. Automation means we can provide a learning experience to orders of magnitude more people.
• Personalisation. Automation means we can provide a personal learning experience.

What are the potential negative impacts of automation of teaching?

• All but the best teachers lose their jobs. Even as a teacher, I have little sympathy for this position. No-one laments the loss of telephone exchange operators, farmers, street lamp lighters, and so on. Having said that, I don’t believe that this change will happen overnight. Rather than being fired, I think we’ll simply see no new teachers being hired. Natural attrition means that posts won’t be filled by humans, and we’ll see those tasks taken over by machines.
• Loss of the social aspects of learning. I love how universities tend to offer this as some kind of value-add they offer, as if it were impossible to have social interaction outside of a university.