With the rise of technology and its applications comes the risk of putting people out of their jobs. Millions of workers around the world have been replaced by computers, will computers replace teachers too?
Can computers replace teachers?
Computers will not replace teachers in the short term. Replacing teachers will require computers to be able to generate perfect academic content that can be taught at schools and universities, which is something that they can’t do on their own at the moment.
What can happen however is that computers will change the way teachers teach. It has already started.
Take what has happened recently for example. Due to the 2020 pandemic and with the help of computers and technology in general, teachers are adapting their methods of teaching to fit the online teaching classrooms.
More on how computers are changing the academic industry later in this article. But first…
Why can’t computers replace teachers in the short term?
1- Computers are not yet capable of teaching others on their own
Artificial intelligence (AI) has allowed computers to automate a lot of human tasks. There are a lot of concerns today when it comes to AI. However up to this point, AI is not capable of replacing a teacher when it comes to teaching the future generations of our nations.
The computer generated content today has reached a very advanced level and I’ll talk about this later in this article, however, there is no doubt that with its current state, it can’t replace teachers.
2- Not everything can be taught using only video recordings or written text.
While college majors like computer science and others can be taught using only video content, there are still other majors that can’t be taught by only using media forms, like the medical majors for example.
In order to teach a medical student how to perform a surgery for example, you will need to let them practice performing the surgery themselves on dummy bodies or on people who have donated their bodies for science.
A computer generated content can’t teach you that, you’ll need to practice it by yourself under the supervision of an instructor.
There are many examples of majors that can’t only be taught using media content and this means that you’ll need a teacher for those majors.
How can computers affect the teaching methods?
While computers can’t completely replace teachers at the moment, they can definitely change the way teachers teach.
Instead of drawing a graph on the white board using markers, teachers can now just project the graph that they have on their computers on the board and use it to teach.
Computers have made things easier for both teachers and students. You don’t have to carry tons of books anymore, you can watch the lecture later if it was recorded and so on.
Online courses have also opened the chance for teachers to expand their audience and reach more people.
Instead of having to repeat the same lecture hundreds of times for different people, you now can record your lecture once and make it available for as many people as you want.
So the benefits of computers and Artificial intelligence are huge for teachers.
What about the future of teachers?
The future for teachers can be scary. AI is improving rapidly every day to the point that some well known figures are claiming that limits should be put in place to protect humanity.
Artificial Intelligence has reached an advanced level when it comes to generating written content. Check this Forbes article about where AI has reached in content generation.
There might come a day when AI will replace most of the bloggers and textual content creators in the near future. Artificial Intelligence today can generate articles that are perfect to the point that you can’t distinguish if it was written by a computer or a human.
If computers can generate perfect textual content, then who knows what they will be capable of doing in the future?
To summarize what you have just read
Currently, computers can’t replace teachers because they still have some limitations when it comes to content generation, however, this might not hold for a long time and there might come a day when AI will indeed be able to replace teachers.