As artificial intelligence (AI) gains a foothold, your next favorite teacher may be a silicon-based bag of bolts. We all remember a favorite teacher. But I wonder if what we recall is the social engagement or the actual teaching ability. I would imagine that it's a combination of both. Yesterday's and today's great teachers have that knack for bringing information to life and igniting a desire to learn.

Artificial intelligence – more specifically, the machine learning (ML) subset of AI – has a number of privacy problems. Not only does ML require vast amounts of data for the training process, but the derived system is also provided with access to even greater volumes of data as part of the inference processing while in operation. These AI systems need to access and "consume" huge amounts of data in order to exist and, in many use cases, the data involved is private: faces, medical records, financial data, location information, biometrics, personal records, and communications. Preserving privacy and security in these systems is a great challenge. The problem grows in sensitivity as the public becomes more aware of the consequences of their privacy being violated and misused.

We all remember a favorite teacher. But I wonder if what we recall is the social engagement or the actual teaching ability. I would imagine that it's a combination of both. Yesterday's and today's great teachers have that knack for bringing information to life and igniting a desire to learn. And central to this is the ability to customize content around a student's needs or aptitudes.

Earlier this year, I witnessed a scene out of science fiction, had it not been reality. A video shown at the NewSchools Venture Fund annual conference showed a young African-American girl answering a teacher's questions with confidence, enthusiastic to get them right. The girl was real, but the teacher was not. She was a virtual instructor named "ALEX," powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The virtual being was programmed to use an African-American dialect.