Opinion | Why Hong Kong’s embrace of AI in education is much too superficial
- Hong Kong’s emerging debate on AI in education lags behind other parts of Asia despite a rich recent history of world-class pedagogical research
- If we view AI through technological solutionism, we ignore the importance of localisation and potentially face both regional relegation and redundancy
Published in 2018, AI versus Children Who Cannot Read Their Textbooks became a runaway bestseller across Japan. Written by Noriko Arai, the director of Japan’s prestigious National Institute of Informatics (NII), the book detailed results from a lavishly funded multi-year project that attempted to build an AI system that could pass University of Tokyo’s entrance exams.
Despite tens of millions of yen poured into the project, the AI system failed although the research team concluded that it could gain acceptance into other famous universities in Japan.
AI could outperform 80 per cent of Japanese students, mostly in maths and science. But in language and reading tasks, AI could not identify with the emotional states of leading characters nor imagine how cultural context generates meaning.
Interestingly, Arai’s team recognised that emotional identification with characters is a dominant approach to reading in Japan, emerging from the deep literary traditions of East Asia. More than plot structure, reading requires an intimate emotional identification.
Throughout Japan, these skills are crucial to success in everyday interactions, business negotiations and the production of art and culture. Recognising this, Arai’s recommendations for the future were bold. The urgent task was not the further development of AI, but educating more Japanese children to identify with others, better infer context and learn to modulate syntax to generate meaning.