Artificial Intelligence and K-12: How to Explain?

Introduction

If anyone search for “inventions that changed the world”, a plethora of lists will arise. Can be imagined those any of those lists what our life would be like without any of the items listed. Let’s imagine living without electricity? How about a world without the wheel or antibiotics? We have grown used to inventions that make our life easier to the point that we take them for granted, and we are not fully aware of the big impact that they have on our society. We forget that many inventors, researchers and scientists had to step in to get us where we are now. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is ubiquitous, and it’s been an amusement changer for the complete of humankind (Idin & Donmez, 2018). It has expanded dramatically in recent decades. STEM was present from very early on when human being invented the wheel using the laws of physics to make people's everyday lives easier. The early form of STEM was manufacturing with human hands then replaced by machines during the first industrial evaluation in the middle of 18th century leading to an increase in industrial products. One of the important STEM invention was the steam engine. As a result, new modes of transportation such as steam powered locomotives and ships developed (Catterall, 2017). In the middle of 19th century, with the discovery of petroleum and electricity, the source of power was shifted to those resources (Chesky & Wolfmeyer, 2015). Then the second industrial revolution come to stage. It was a period of great progress on science and discoveries. Inventions of these period were bulb, aircraft, telephone, radio, penicillin, antibiotic etc. Without these inventions, life of today would not be imagined. The third industrial revolution comes at the second half of the 20th century which brings digitalsation of machines leading to an increase in mass production (Catterall, 2017). The third industrial revolution had an enormous impact on the communication and media with the arrival of the Internet in addition to affecting manufacturing jobs. Most of the jobs that were previously done by human body force and employees on the factory are now done by engineers, designers, IT specialists. Hence, new technologies require different skills

Thanks to STEM we see, touch and use thousands of products, software, apps, tools, devices in daily lives. For instance, the Internet helps us to connect to the people from all over the world thanks to STEM. According to Barr (2018) we are on the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 because of the way we manufacture products as a result of the digitization of production. The fourth industrial revolution is the adoption of computers and automation with agile and self-ruling systems powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Mankind is on the verge of gaining all the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) as a commodity, but this also brings up some questions:

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  Does having AI at our disposal mean that humans will be entirely displaced in factories, and if yes, how does one prepare for future skills?

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  Will manual work become obsolete and will the skills of manual workers become unnecessary?

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  Even more to the point, can education endorse all future students with the right skills before the fourth industrial revolution?