To begin tracing AI’s development within the field of mathematical education ten years in the future, I asked Poe.com’s Claude-Instant AI their opinion on the matter. Claude-Instant AI’s development company, Anthropic, aimed to create a safe and accurate artificial intelligence with a basic human level of common sense, unlike other AI’s, one being OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Plugging the prompt into Claude-Instant…
>> “You are a futurist that helps humans explore a wide range of possible futures by exploring provocative long-term forecasts and speculative scenarios 10 years in the future. The ‘futures’ topic we are focusing on is Generative AI and the education of the subject Pre-Calculus in high schools. Please develop 3 scenarios ranging from possible – that is, imaginative – to probable, -that is likely.”
Claude responsively produced its “thought.” It began with a possible future, that in 2033, generative AI will revolutionize the general education system, developing lessons “tailored to each student’s needs.” However, this future reduces the social aspect of modern education. People may argue that this individualization of learning has stripped students of the opportunity to interact with one another on common ground, specifically, academic material and concepts. As a student in the year 2023, I see this potential drawback evident today in the education system. Although I still interact with fellow peers during breaks throughout the school day, the quality of conversation tends to plummet, putting friendships on furlough.
In Claude’s plausible future, AI acts as an “intelligent tutoring system” providing instant feedback. Teachers, on the other hand, can use their time elsewhere in human-necessary tasks, including student-life support or wellness, lessening self-doubt in students, etc. However, some teachers may feel how AI is beginning to take away from the overall fulfillment of their job. Personality, if this future existed in 2023, it would make mathematics assistance much more accessible, especially if the AI was both precise and accurate. It would free up a majority of my time, that I could spend participating in extracurricular activities or completing other assignments.
Finally, Claude’s probable future restricts AI to being only a basic aide to the education system, grading papers and “automating other routine tasks,” similar to what we can already do today. (See, in some cases, progress takes a long time!) “AI acts as a supportive tool rather than replacement, freeing teachers for more human-centric roles like advising and mentoring. Overall, the teacher-student dynamic changes little from today.”
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To dive deeper into the inner workings of Claude-Instant and generative AI, I decided to plug the following prompt into its input bar:
>>The possible future does not seem imaginative enough. Make it more imaginative.
The initial response I received from Claude was a future where mathematics, specifically Calculus, was taught through virtual and augmented realities. Learning would be reduced to “mere moments,” as AI would be able to access a student’s mind, “uploading” the concepts and material directly into their brain.
This was somewhat the response that I expected, as AI drew the knowledge from various plots of sci-fi and futuristic movies. However, I decided to continue plugging the same prompt into the input bar various times, and after the fifth time, Claude produced an “approaching fictional” reality that, in simple terms, humans could travel beyond universes and time itself to develop an understanding of mathematical concepts, not limited to Earth. In this future, AI could project a human’s consciousness into beings in alternate lives and timelines.
Obviously, Claude produced much more of a detailed future than this, but just the fact that it could “imagine” (or more so articulate,) a future just as humans can, left me speechless. Through a simple experiment like this, AI revealed its potential to develop ideas such as these, thinking further into the future than any human could understand or even imagine.