"Replacing" educators with Artificial Intelligence

Recently I received an email that made me think a little longer than usual. It came from a startup that wants to create digital copies of university professors to offer 24/7 support to their students. They argue that professors are not always available — and could… should be. Everything would happen asynchronously.

I didn’t respond at first because I started imagining what a world like that would look like. And it struck me — and still does — as both revolutionary and disturbing. On the one hand, it is curious and fascinating how the boundaries of what is possible keep expanding, and the idea of digital copies will surely go beyond professors. I can imagine it extending to loved ones and more. That is one case I find even more disturbing, but alas, let's stick to education.

I gave it that strong adjective  —disturbing— because the idea attacks the very essence of teaching and pedagogy — at least when we are truly interacting. And that is the heart of the matter, because the world is more complex, especially in education.

I told the entrepreneur that there are at least two academic worlds. In one, the idea could work very well. This is what they call a rock stars, meaning professors who are so top of the heap that they are inaccessible — demigods who inhabit ivory towers. These could potentially end up as avatars so people could pay to interact with them. And why not, if it somewhat democratizes access and the system of praise sustains itself.

However, the more interesting world for me is the second one. It consists of the millions of colleagues who are neither nor want to be academic demigods. We live closer to the ground than to the peak of the ivory tower. And this is where I see the true definition of education: accompanying, guiding, and inspiring — not dazzling those who actually need guidance and motivation. And this has both a technical dimension and a more human one.

I remember my frustration during my first semester of university in Germany when I directly asked one of those demigods — he would publish about four books a year! — if I could stop by his office for five minutes to ask about his career and get advice for my life. He looked at me disapprovingly, told me to learn to walk before running, and asked his doctoral students to close ranks and handle the freshman. That is the opposite of what I call the “second world,” the world of mortals.

But I write this column because I am concerned about what I see in part of this second world, which sometimes allows itself to be cornered by AI because it has forgotten that what matters most is inspiring and helping — taking pride in a student’s success and years later receiving a message saying they went further than they ever imagined. That is deeply gratifying. But the more distance professors create from their students — becoming stuck in empty methods that demand nothing from the learner’s cognition — the more these solutions will advance: humanly empty but technically powerful. Not to mention those “institutions” that hand out degrees in cycles and perhaps even political favors, destroying the soul of what a university is (this is incredibly present in Latin America).

In that second world — and I am thinking only of serious institutions — there is something the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, famous in developmental psychology, called the Zone of Proximal Development. In short, the ZPD is the distance between what I am and what I could become if someone guides me. If a professor limits herself to lecturing instead of guiding, education becomes an empty formality — and AI has arrived to remind us of this aggressively. Now, if the student himself or herself has no interest in education, even after understanding its potential, perhaps his or her path lies elsewhere. But many students both can and want to develop their potential.

I also told the entrepreneur that I like seeing startups changing things, but — in my case — I do not want them to create a digital copy of me so I can be 100% available like a phenotyped bot. I told him that his idea might work for the first of the two worlds. While this will happen one way or another, in the second world — in the shadow of the ivory tower and grounded on the earth — it will fall to the rest of us to remember that true interaction lies at the essence of being human. I believe in an education that brings out the best in each of us, not one anchored in the entropy of fame turned into code. That is why it is time to wake up the second world and ask whether we are merely professing or truly guiding and motivating.

Originally published Revista Semana: