Read What Educators in China are Reading About AI

They are reading about fusing academic and computer deep learning approaches

It was nice to wake up this morning to an email from a professor in China who had read the paper I wrote with Dr. Sabba Quidwai — Humanity Amplified: The Fusion of Deep Learning and Human Insight to Shape the Future of Innovation. The paper is about integrating more academic deep learning approaches into education to help prepare students for a world of artificial intelligence, a world where machines are starting to surpass human intelligence in limited areas and will likely exceed our abilities in at least most intelligence domains over the next five years.

In the current world, innovation doesn’t just come from technology, it also comes from ideas. In fact, without the power of human ideas, we would not even have the technology we have today. And it will be ideas, amplified both in their development and articulation with AI and other technologies, that will enable us to take advantage of both the challenges and opportunities the technology will present.

As we note in the paper, it was the ideas in San Ramon Valley’s learner profile that originally inspired us to make the connection between computer deep learning and academic deep learning.

San Ramone’s idea sent us in this direction, and conversations with others further inspired the project. Now, we hope to learn even more from those in China.

If you have time over the weekend, please take a moment to look at our paper. It is focused on expanding investment in human intelligence to prepare students for an AI World. If you read Chapter 2, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about all of the current developments in AI. In Chapter 7, we cover the hot topic of school guidance, which has informed our approach to working with schools that are developing AI guidance documents.

The developments in AI are significant and will arguably reshape our entire world. Bensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, recently argued we are entering Industrialization 5.0.

Recent industrial eras included transformative changes triggered by the development of modern agriculture and then energy. This emerging industrial era is defined by the production of intelligence, something previously not possible outside of living beings.

And it won’t just be defined by the production of this intelligence and how we use it, but also by how we merge with it.

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This may create a ‘‘Cambrian Explosion,” a new era in which new life forms begin to proliferate. And this will be accelerated by recent developments in synthetic biology.

The emergence of these technologies over the next 5 years will present greater challenges to society and education than any previous technological change. The size of the change is difficult for anyone to imagine.

But if you take a minute to think about how modern agriculture and energy influenced the development of society and education systems, it will help you think about the size of the change that is coming. It will even be magnified by the fact that education is in the business of human intelligence, which will have to help students integrate with artificial intelligence systems that are smarter than them in many ways.

While it may be tempting to be overwhelmed by the challenges ahead, one upside that schools, especially k-12 schools, have is that they have a lot of knowledge, and even superpowers, related to the deep learning approaches. They are also filled with eager learners, both students and staff.

As for me, I’ll be spending most of the rest of today and the weekend running a debate tournament for 450+ students. There are few, if any, approaches to academic deep learning that are better than debate :).

This—all of this—is barely version 1.0.
Fei Fei Li, Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University
Fall 2023