It Isn’t a Competition Unless We Make It One

In the November 30, 2020 Forbes article, Staying One Step Ahead of AI, Neera Jain (Assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University) calls for the reorientation of the education system to promote originality and problem solving, rather than all those standardized tests that promote conflating distilling the learning experience down to simple memorization. It is Neera Jain’s hope that a reorientation will prepare students to enter the workforce armed with the skills they need to stay one step ahead of the artificial intelligence.

I agree that the academy does little to prepare students for the workforce of the future. I agree that students are too busy chasing points in their pursuit of a letter grade, rather than actually learning anything. I agree a reorientation is necessary. Finally, I agree that students are ill prepared to interface with artificial intelligence. However, I disagree that creativity and problem solving will distinguish humans from AI software.

Just like children learn to be creative, eventually AI will learn to be creative. People have to stop thinking about human attributes that cannot possibly be replicated by machines and they have to start thinking about how humans can interface with machines. After all, it is only a matter of time and the right code before a machine can present any human attribute.

Interfacing With Artificial Intelligence

Dr. Neera Jain with her students researching human automation interaction.
Dr. Neera Jain, with her students, researching human automation interaction in her lab at Purdue University. Pictures taken from Purdue University and Jain Research Lab websites.

Dr. Neera Jain’s own Jain Research Lab has multiple projects underway. One project in particular focuses on human automation interaction. Essentially, in order to improve human quality of life, humans have to trust the automations with which they interact. Dr. Jain’s team is modeling the evolution of that human trust as humans interact with machines.

While she wants to point out the engaged students involved in this project are the kinds of students whose creativity and problem solving is on the her syllabus at Purdue, I want to draw attention to the interaction itself. The students are clearly interfacing with the computer, cooperating with the computer, collaborating with the computer, and working with the artificially intelligent automation on that computer.

The interface is what is important.

It is only when the public worries about machines replacing people, politicians make laws to insure people stay a step ahead of the machine, and computer scientists define artificial intelligence by “superior to humans” benchmarks, that we finally realize that we are the ones who made it a competition.