By now we all are aware that Artificial intelligence is already changing the way the world operates. It is the future and AI must be made a part of the curricula. The AI for K-12 working group formed by The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Teachers Association have suggested 5 big ideas about AI that every student must know of.
Computers use sensors to understand the world- Camera is a computer’s eyes and microphones its ears. Extensive domain knowledge is a must this specialized field. Without comprehensive knowledge speech recognition by a machine can never be as accurate as that of a human being.
Machine learning agents can only understand representations of the world- A machine’s intelligence can only have a perception of the world where a map shall represent a territory or a diagram can represent a board game. The computer further uses data to create representations and can use algorithms to learn from new information to change representations. High school children can learn elementary data structures and its usage to program simple inference algorithms.
Computers can learn from data- Machine learning is a sort of statistical inference that seeks to spot patterns in data. Machine learning algorithms can create their own representations from training data which can come either from a human or it can generate its own in the learning process. A high school student should be able to train a network and code simple applications using open source tools.
Making the machine interact naturally with humans is difficult- This could be because of the machine’s failure to predict what a person will do or say next based on their previous conduct. This factor must be kept in mind by high school students. Language processing tools should be used to construct a chat bot and use sentiment analysis tool to discover emotional tone in text.
AI applications can have a positive and/or negative effect on humanity- AI can be both a boon or a bane for the society and students must be made aware of its ethical considerations. Since AI systems will be making decisions that affect people’s lives, the issues of transparency and fairness must be kept in mind.
