Workshop: The Future of Learning in the Age of AI

BACKGROUND
While the immediate concerns of educationalists about AI have focused on the consequences of LLMs for student assessment, the rapid development of increasingly capable tools for data processing and generation raises deep philosophical and political questions about how we conceptualise human knowledge and intelligence. What is the future for human thinking or human craft as AI plays ever greater roles in our everyday lives? At present educators can point to skills of critical reflection, creative imagination and intellectual empathy as distinctive to human approaches to learning, but are these attributes likely to continue being identified as uniquely human capacities?  Indeed, were they ever so? There is now a growing body of research on alternative conceptions of intelligence before twenty-first century AI. Furthermore, in past, present and future worlds, there are crucial questions of verifiability, truth and trust, which take us to the politics and geo-politics of knowledge. As philosopher John Tasioulas has pointed out, ‘the development of AI is not a matter of destiny, but instead involves successive waves of highly consequential human choices’.  The arts and humanities, he argues, are best placed to explore these questions of who makes such decisions and how it is decided who makes them.
It is often overlooked that one-third of the world’s population still lacks access to the internet, which means, among other things, that their preferences are excluded from the data harvested to inform the algorithms for generating future data. What are the desirable values, processes and political practices to shape human learning in the age of machine learning? How can we reconceptualise human knowledge to maximise the benefits of AI and minimise the risks? 

ABOUT THE EVENT
This workshop, convened by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Centre for Humanities Education, offers colleagues the opportunity to brainstorm and reflect upon such questions, especially from the perspectives of their various disciplines, and to think about the next steps in a programme of work to explore further their implications for universities, learning and knowledge-making. Most of the time will be spent in break-out groups, stimulated by input from this year’s Quirk Creative Fellows, all four of whom are working on the theme of Knowledge Futures. Their projects are designed to offer new imaginaries of knowledge and craft for inclusive worldmaking, based on themes of speculation; authenticity and sovereignty; ways of seeing; and sustainability and accessibility.