AI Threats to K12 Education: A Series of Dystopian Scenarios

Welcome to Teacher’s AIed: the newsletter about AI in the K12 Classroom.

Understanding how AI will affect K12 Classrooms is complex. Each week, we curate knowledge for educators about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of AI and K12 education.

In this week’s edition, we continue our SWOT Analysis of AI and K12 series by exploring threats. If you haven’t read the previous article in this series yet, click the links below.

• Introduction - “SWOT's Next? AI's Potential in K12 Education Explored”

• Strengths - “Strengths in the Face of AI: K12’s Proverbial Right Leg and Left Leg”

• Weaknesses - “Cracks in the Armor: K12 Education's Achilles Heel in the Age of AI”

• Opportunities - “Continually Expanding Opportunities: AI’s Endless Possibilities in K12”

I love dystopian fiction because it explores, in part, how humanity reacts to threats. Naturally, I am most fascinated by stories featuring education, technology, and humanity’s reaction to their intersection. One example of education technology dystopian fiction is Ted Chiang’s short story “The Evolution of Human Science” (also known as “Catching Crumbs from the Table”). The story explores the future of human knowledge in a world with artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Here is a brief synopsis from Wikipedia.

While this future might seem far off, the World Economic Forum has declared we are in a “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” Like the past three industrial revolutions (first steam, then electricity, and electronics most recently), the fourth industrial revolution will “fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another,” but this time through advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (World Economic Forum).

While it is far too soon to fully understand how AI and other advanced technologies will impact the future of education, in this article, we will outline the threats that might become reality.

Let’s take a semi-dystopian dive into AI and K12 Education to round off our SWOT analysis series.

TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) Summary:

• Specific to education, AI directly threatens to change the role of educators.

• Students might be tempted to cheat using AI, which could lead to the widespread replacement of pure human thought with AI-generated thought.

• Some critics of our education system already claim that the existing curriculum is irrelevant and not appropriately matched to the skills students need post-schooling. And if K12 education does not respond appropriately to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, AI threatens to make an absolute education system even more irrelevant.

• There are direct threats to K12 education that are non-specific yet highly relevant to education, such as cybersecurity, data privacy, and ethics.