Coding as Digital Equity?

Schools are rapidly adding coding to the curriculum as an important career skill. Web developers without a college degree can earn good money. Coding in high school can expose students to careers in computer science.

When coding is taught with robotics, problem solving and maker experiences, it encourages computational thinking. At Olin College, a next-generation engineering school west of Boston, just-in-time computing is taught across the curriculum. Students learn the programming skills they need to solve the problem they are working on.

While valuable, these “add coding to the curriculum” instincts miss the broader implication — artificial intelligence is rapidly impacting lives and livelihoods.

We used to code algorithms to perform specific tasks. Now we can code them to learn, and the more data the algorithms are exposed to, the smarter they get. Artificial intelligence (and its subsets, machine learning, neural nets and natural language processing) currently results in narrow forms of machine intelligence — programs that are good at specific tasks. 

A recent Stanford study noted numerous ways that artificial intelligence is transforming social media, health care, retail, transportation and the employment landscape. Over the next decade, machine intelligence will broaden in capability, rivaling humans in increasing respects. The report suggests, in addition to introducing coding and computational thinking, school communities should discuss the emerging ethical and economic implications of artificial intelligence.