It’s been 26 years since the start of the new century. Before then Internet wasn’t popular as of today. We still learn traditionally as if it was in the 1950s, 1910s, 1850s, and even go back into the 1000s or 500s. We learn by reading books, completing exercises and passing exams.
Until the internet becomes widespread around 2000s, we gradually started shifting from traditional learning to digital learning. With globalization, every type of information imaginable becomes more accessible than ever. Every person who have access to the internet can learn everything and become anything.
In the span of 10 years, we shifted our learning method that has been done by generations into something that is novel and perhaps can be said as foreign to our usual habits as human being. Then comes the COVID era, all of the digital technologies that until that point has been hard to integrate becomes a necessity for all human interests that requires face-to-face interactions. We then improved and perfected our learning habits to accommodate the new digital technologies.
Just as we started to become comfortable and perfected our learning workflow in the digital era, after the 2020s comes a new learning paradigm which is A.I. or artificial intelligence. Experts at that time are skeptical that A.I. would possess the intelligence that can rival human beings or becomes “smart”, but the advancements of A.I. proved to be quick, while we traditionally know that technological advancements comes in years, or even decades, measuring A.I. advancement needs to be done in a few months or sometimes even weeks & days.
Then we shifted again our learning workflow to incorporate A.I. technologies. We started to shift from reading human-based provided knowledge manually into asking A.I. to synthesize all of the knowledge available and packaged it into a personalized knowledge for each individual. Learning has thus never been easier, while just only 6 years ago we need to research hours on the internet to look for a specific information, or rummaging all of the books on a local library to research on a topic, now we just need to send a single prompt to A.I. and it will provide you with the knowledge you require, this all takes less than 1 minute.
This all takes place in 6 years, compared to the age of human civilization which is around 5500 years, nobody really knows what’s the future holds.
Then now we arrived at this point in time, where I send a prompt to ChatGPT, discussing on my specialization which is Manufacturing Systems & Automation or specifically, manufacturing engineering. I will explain shortly of what I feel.
A.I. is exceptionally helpful for expanding your current knowledge. It can know where your knowledge barrier lies, and they can “advise” you on the next topic that you can learn. It can know your knowledge gaps, provided that it have a good profile of what you do and don’t know.
This is useful in so many cases, as knowing this information could expand your world view better by offering new perspectives on things that you might didn’t realize before. A.I. raises the standard of an average person’s knowledge.
However, the same perspectives could be dangerous if it’s not approached carefully. A.I. still hallucinates it’s answers and it’s important to acknowledge every time that A.I. answers can still be partially wrong or completely wrong outright. Maybe in the next 10 years, A.I. could provide reliable answers comparable to speaking a person with Ph.D and at that point, many people would questions as to humanity purpose of pursuing knowledge if A.I. could do it better than us.
Nevertheless, I still think that as a human being, we will adapt. As A.I. technology improves, we will slowly adapt and integrate A.I. to our learning workflow, just as we did in the COVID era. There will be a time where A.I. is inseparable to us as digital devices are to us now. Not having A.I. will become unreasonable in the near future. At that point, learning will become easier & accessible, we will have humans that posses extraordinary knowledge and apply those knowledge for overall humanity well being.
This is an optimistic view of A.I. advancements in learning. There are of course pessimistic views by experts, and they are not wrong. Only time will tell. Thank you for reading.
Here’s the link to my ChatGPT conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa678b5-82b8-83ec-a4ab-8b1ceedf1628
