Is It Really More than Just Two Letters?

 

   Recently I was doing a bit of tossing out and reorganizing some books and paperwork and ran across the bound copy of my doctoral dissertation. It has been quite a while since I had completed the research on my topic.

   Each morning, beginning around 5 AM and for the next couple of hours I would shuffle papers and looks through books and a pile of photocopied articles in an attempt to gain some information and ideas that would help me put my thought together about the research I had selected to study.

   After about 2 hours of work almost every day, I would dress and prepare to go to my office and begin another day of work. This process lasted for many months as I was determined to complete the work and earn my advanced degree. Periodically I would send copies of my work to my professors for their review,  input, and suggestion and finally the day came when I presented my work to the committee who  would eventually approve it and grant me my degree.

   It was a long process, especially the researching parts because I was taking on this challenge in a time when computers were just becoming popular and many of us were not in a position to personally own a computer or a word processor. The research was done most often in libraries, looking through books, newspaper, and professional journals and developing my own research tools, asking  teachers and other school professional to take time out of a busy day to answer questions and submit ideas and thoughts about teacher and student learning styles.

   It has been a long time since I completed my dissertation work and during that time research methods, procedures and information gathering has changed tremendously. In this particular situation I am referring to something now  called artificial intelligence, or simply put, AI. And as I learn more about AI, I sometimes wish it had been around to make my work a bit easier back in the day on my dissertation. Maybe!

   So what is the difference between human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence?

   The difference is really quite simple. Human intelligence uses the brain, memory, and cognitive abilities while AI relies on the data provided by the human. Human intelligence is based on the ability of humans to learn, to reason and to problem solve. Based on what we may wish to believe, artificial intelligence does not have that ability or capability just yet. AI can take vast amounts of data and produce different models while human intelligence is learned from experience, simple observation, instruction and change.   While human intelligence can adapt to new situations and environments, artificial intelligence, to date, aims to build only on current human behavior to perform human-like actions. So again, humans use the power of the brain to think, to remember, and the ability to observe whereas AI relies strictly on the data and specific instructions fed into the data system for it to be effective.

   Now, there is a great deal of fear in today’s world about the pending power and control that AI will have in present and future learning. Will students just be able to type in a few words or sentences regarding a specific classroom assignment and within seconds have a written assignment to be handed over to the teacher. Will the teacher know the level or degree of learning achieved by the student completing the assignment or is it something he or she just pulled off the internet out of AI.

   The current debate rests with the understanding that while AI is a helpful tool, it has yet to take over the potential power of the human brain. It does has the potential to become an extremely useful tool in storing and examining data that is fed into it. But remember, it is still the human brain that has created AI.

   While I may, on occasion, have wished for the help of AI as I completed my research and study for my dissertation, the research and writing helped to improve my ability to think, problem solve, observe, and improve my memory.  In addition, I also know that some of my work was used and expanded by others who continued to advance work in classroom student- teacher learning, all contributing to what we now call today  AI.