Executive summary
At the November 2017 Gothenburg Summit, the Commission presented the
Communication 'Strengthening European Identity through Education and Culture', that
set out a vision for a European Education Area and announced a dedicated Digital
Education Action Plan
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, which aims to foster digital skills and competences for all citizens.
The Action Plan focuses on implementation and the need to stimulate, support and scale
up purposeful use of digital and innovative education practices. It has three priorities:
making better use of digital technology for teaching and learning; developing relevant
digital competences and skills for the digital transformation; and improving education
through better data analysis and foresight. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have an impact
on all these, and in the last priority the Communication specifically invites to explore its
impact in education and training through pilots. This policy foresight report suggests
that in the next years AI will change learning, teaching, and education. The
speed of technological change will be very fast, and it will create high pressure to
transform educational practices, institutions, and policies. It is therefore important to
understand the potential impact of AI on learning, teaching, and education, as well as on
policy development.
AI is currently high on the political agendas around the world. Several EU Member States
have declared it as a political priority. Influential studies now suggest that perhaps one in
two occupations in the industrialized countries is likely to become automated using
already existing AI technologies. Policy makers at the European Parliament have
highlighted the importance of the issue, and the European Commission, in its 2018
annual work programme, sets its wish to make the most of AI, which will increasingly
play a role in our economies and societies
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. AI is now often called “the next
electricity.” The transformative impact of general purpose technologies, like AI,
however, becomes visible only gradually, when societies and economies reinvent
themselves as users of new technologies. Technological change brings social and cultural
change that is reflected in lifestyles, norms, policies, social institutions, skills, and the
content and forms of education.
Wide availability of cheap processing power and vast amounts of data in recent years
have enabled impressive breakthroughs in machine learning and created extraordinary
commercial and research interest in artificial neural networks, i.e. computational models
based on the structure and functions of biological neural networks. Neural AI, and
machine learning methods associated with it, are now used for real-time language
processing and translation, image analysis, driverless cars and autonomous vehicles,
automated customer service, fraud detection, process control, synthetic art, service
robots, and in many other applications. Although some of this excitement may be
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