1.3 Learning About vs Teaching with AI
If your remeber only one sentence from this page: AI is a satnav. It saves the driver who already has a map in her head and quietly stops the driver who hasn't from ever building one
The satnav problem
To drive a London taxi, you must first pass a knowledge test: 320 set routes across the 113 square miles within six miles of Charing Cross, for which Transport for London allows up to two years before the examinations even begin.
Examined drivers also use a satnav, and nobody thinks less of them for it. The knowledge test did not become worthless when the device arrived. The satnav became the thing that makes the drive safe. A driver with the city in her head uses the satnav for what she cannot know: the accident on the bridge or tonight's traffic. And she notices when it routes her down a street that has been dug up since April.
Now put a newcomer in the same taxi with the same satnav. She arrives at every address. For a while, she is indistinguishable from the experienced driver. But following the satnav’s instructions, she is building nothing. After a year of turning left when instructed, she still cannot cross the city without the device, and she cannot tell when it is wrong.
That is a decade of research on AI use in one image, and it holds without the image too. The effect of an AI tool depends far more on what the user already knows than on the tool itself. This is what researchers call a schema,schema, the organised prior knowledge of a person.