Debate is between AI vs human intelligence HI: Dharmendra Pradhan

London: Artificial intelligence (AI) and digitisation are the order of the day, and the debate now is about balancing this with human intelligence (HI), Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan said on Wednesday.

Addressing India Global Forum's (IGF) UK-India Week summit from his office in New Delhi, the minister joined UK Education Secretary Gillian Keegan in London to highlight the many areas of bilateral cooperation in the field of education and also two-way skills exchanges.

"India and the UK are very dependable and old partners in the area of knowledge and education," said Pradhan.

"We don't have the option to judge whether it is good or bad; AI and ChatGPT are there today as new tools to create ease of living in society. Now, the debate is going on about god-gifted human intelligence. This is a debate between artificial intelligence, AI, versus human intelligence, HI… digitisation is the order of the day, and globalisation, mobility and the future skills are the need of the hour," he said, responding to a question about the role of AI.

His views were echoed by Keegan, who spoke of how AI could be used to free up a lot of teaching time in the classrooms of the future.

"In my experience, you don't get to pause technology. It happens, so you have to embrace it… there's a huge opportunity within education," said the UK education minister.

"I think it (AI) can free up a lot of teaching time as teachers want to be able to sit in the classroom and they want to take time to learn more themselves so that they can develop and there are lots of things that AI can really help us with," she said.

The ministers also highlighted the innovative and forward-looking partnership between both countries in the field of education and skills, with Keegan welcoming the mutual recognition of qualifications agreed upon recently.

"Transnational education partnerships have been a big focus, where UK universities have opened up campuses in India, and obviously, that is a great moment that we will look to continue. We've got a lot of students coming from India to the UK and students going from the UK to India as well. We also have those mutual recognition qualifications that form a really important foundation," said Keegan.

Referencing the visa regime for Indian students, the minister highlighted the two-year post-study Graduate route open to Indian students, with recent changes to the ability of overseas postgraduate students to bring in their dependent family members only applying to taught Master's courses.

"One of the things we did was remove the right for people to bring dependents towards the taught Master's courses. And the reason we did that was because we were never expecting that to be a big number, and then it shot up massively. But I think most people value the Graduate visa route," she said.

According to the latest statistics by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Indians overtook the Chinese as the largest cohort of foreign students studying in the UK last year and the new Graduate Visa route, introduced in July 2021, was also dominated by Indians – accounting for 41 per cent of the visas granted.