During a panel discussion at this year’s ASV+GSU Summit in San Diego, Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke a little about how he thinks artificial intelligence will be used for education in the future.
Gates said, among other things, that he believes AI will be used to teach children to read within 18 months. Then AI will also start to be used to improve students’ math skills.
If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing. And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math. Our bottleneck in math really is more of how we fit in the overall system and getting that teacher adoption. We have very good tools today, that if they were fully adopted, would actually make more progress in math scores than we’ve made in the last 20 years.
The advantage of using AI for education, according to Gates, is that it could provide students who cannot afford private tutors with an opportunity to get help with their studies in their free time. He also suggests that AI could be better at this than human tutors.
This should be a leveler. Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you’ve done and look across your entire body of work.
You can find the entire panel discussion with Bill Gates from the ASV+GSU Summit in the video above. If you prefer to read it in text format, there is a transcription of the conversation at the link below.
