An experiment done in Japan by Prof. Arai highlights that education today maybe flawed. Instead of absorbing meaning from their studies, she observed that our children behaving more like her Todai robot. They ingest facts and spit them back out, without comprehending. The problem is, Todai and other forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will inevitably surpass human memory and cognition at some point. The human brain can never compete with the rote fact-checking power of a computer. Humans excel at pattern recognition, creative projects and problem solving, i.e. non-routine cognitive tasks. We can read and understand. As Prof. Arai notes, computers cannot – at least, so far. “So we have to think about a new type of education, one in which kids are taught not just to deposit facts, but also to analyse and think critically about them. At the same time, we have to think in a hurry because time is running out.”
For India, which lives in multiple civilisations at the same time, this becomes all the more important. If a robot can pass an entrance test in Japan, we can safely assume that it can do so in India too. India’s skill development ecosystem needs to be more responsive to these new challenges. Currently, in order to cater to the large unemployed population, Skill India is focused on job roles that are narrow, repetitive and can be done with minimum supervision. These are exactly the kind of tasks that technology is coming after and aiming to reduce human drudgery in.
Nor can robots have non-cognitive socio-emotional skills – teamwork, creativity, innovation. Even technical jobs seem to be getting more intensive in higher-order general skills, as Indian IT industry is realising.
https://thewire.in/labour/industry-4-0-skill-india-unemployment-artificial-intelligence