Giving Compass' Take:

• The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) launched the AI for K-12 Working Group (AI4K12) which drafted five ideas that students should know about artificial intelligence.

• What are the challenges ensuring that students understand AI and the impacts on their education?

• Read about artificial intelligence and the future of humans. 

Machines that learn are reshaping lives and livelihoods. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important change force in modern society but it remains common for high school graduate from to know nothing about how it works, the opportunities it creates, and what we need guard against.

In May, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) launched the AI for K-12 Working Group (AI4K12) to define for artificial intelligence what students should know and be able to do. With lots of input, the steering committee drafted five big ideas that every student should know. A summary of the report (available here) they will present at the AAAI conference in January follows.

Big Idea #1: Computers perceive the world using sensors.  The ability of computers to “see” and “hear” well enough to be practically useful is one of the most significant achievements of AI.

Big Idea #2: Agents maintain models/representations of the world and use them for reasoning. Students should understand the concept of a representation–the way a map represents a territory, or a diagram represents a board game.

Big Idea #3: Computers can learn from data.  Machine learning algorithms allow computers to create their own representations using training data that is either supplied by people or acquired by the machine itself.

Big Idea #4: Making agents interact naturally with humans is a substantial challenge for AI developers. Understanding people is one of the hardest problems faced by intelligent agents.

Big Idea #5: AI applications can impact society in both positive and negative ways. The societal impacts of AI involve two kinds of questions: what applications should AI be used for and what ethical criteria should AI systems be required to meet?

Read the full article about what students should know about artificial intelligence by Tom Vander Ark at Getting Smart