Bulletin No. 1, 2021

THE NEW GOSPEL ACCORDING TO A.I. 35 programmes, a way forward is to encourage students to have a focus. ‘At the end of the day, it’s impossible to learn everything about the field. We would encourage students in their senior years to figure out whether they’re more interested in the tech side of things or policy work and concentrate,’ said Professor Wong. ‘Either way, they will have developed a reasonable capacity for both understanding the social implications of data and working comfortably with data to formulate a policy.’ As for the future of pre-tertiary AI education, Professor Chiu believes it will be necessary for all teachers to have some familiarity with AI, which will probably be incorporated into every school subject at some point. For instance, language education in the future might involve the use of natural language processing (NLP): teachers might find it helpful to teach grammar by letting machines demonstrate how they breakdown and interpret a text. But no matter what we do with AI in classrooms, said Professor Chiu, it must be shown to be at work in the everyday world, which will require cooperation between the school and the community. ‘After all, AI has everything to do with our daily life.’ Indeed it does. What we’re hoping to cultivate is a readiness for AI, which will allow them to live with AI without the anxiety we’re seeing a lot of.