Educating for a Digital Future: The Challenge

The following blog is an abstract of an article I wrote for the Government of New South Wales, Australia, for use as part of a symposium on Education for a Changing World. To see the full article and a companion piece I wrote on the implications of these technologies for education, click here. I'd like to thank the New South Wales government for prompting me to return to an interest in artificial intelligence and its implications for education that first preoccupied me in the 1980s and for permission to reprint this abstract here. It is not a law of nature that new technologies will put a lot of people out of work in the short term, but then create just as many new jobs that are even better in the long term. What is distinctive about artificial intelligence technologies is that they embody the very thing that makes us so different from any other thing animate or inanimate on earth: high intelligence. It is now clear that intelligent agents already exceed human capacity in some domains of intelligent behavior.