Minister of Tertiary Education and Skills Training Professor Prakash Persad is urging caution amid the growing hype around artificial intelligence (AI).
Speaking at the Huawei Cloud in Education Launch on Friday, Professor Persad said artificial intelligence should be adopted as an assistive tool rather than a replacement technology.
“When AI came out and started with Stanford and all these other things, they said, you know, in the 1990s, when it became popular in Japan, that AI was going to replace everything. It didn’t happen. It’s now happening so we have to be careful.”
Minister Persad said the benefits of artificial intelligence in education should be maximised but should not be used to replace human interaction.
“I would suggest we use AI and the cloud as assistive technology, as opposed to replacement technology. That’s what we need. So it’s going to assist teachers, it’s going to assist students, but I don’t think it’s going to replace everything.”
Professor Persad said a unified cloud system to support the nine university institutions across the country can improve efficiency, especially for administrative processes.
“Right now, you have to apply for your transcript. If there’s one cloud, or one storage, let’s use that word, in which all students’ data are located, perform, et cetera, then we don’t take a month to get a transcript.”
He said it would also allow for significant cost savings.
Professor Persad also noted that his Ministry has started the process of digitising key processes such as the scholarship programme for automated performance monitoring.
“To get a scholarship, you have to do well academically. The data are showing that once students achieve a scholarship, a fair amount of them relax. Now, we have a very, very low, low, low, low sort of threshold, 2.5 GPA. But the issue is that once they go there, we do not know their performance because there’s no follow-up. So we have started this process of, you know, digitising the whole data system and, you know, transforming it to digital, where now students will upload scholars, their results automatically to the Ministry and they’ll be warned or appraised.”
The Huawei Cloud of Education Summit brought together professionals and scholars to share ideas on strengthening Trinidad and Tobago’s digital future.