FRAIA Podcast with Professor Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai, Executive Director, Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation (CSII).
FRAIA.AI spoke to Professor Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai to obtain his insights on AI-Powered Education and the Challenges Ahead. Watch the video for the full discussion, and below you’ll find the complete transcript for an in-depth read.
Anders Hasle Nielsen*: Welcome to the FRAIA podcast. Today, we’re joined by Dr. Worsak, Executive Director at Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation (CSII). We’re collaborating to bring AI-powered education to Thailand and ASEAN. Let’s explore this exciting journey with Dr. Worsak. I’m sitting here with Dr. Worsak at the University in Bangkok called Chulalongkorn.
Prof. Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai: Welcome, good morning, Andreas. It’s my pleasure to join the conversation with both of you. It’s morning in Thailand, and this is Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation, a small school set up by Chulalongkorn University, which is one of the very old and top universities in Thailand.
Anders Hasle Nielsen: Let me start with the first question. Do we think AI is good or bad for the education system?
Prof. Worsak: Well, for the education system, I think some people are a bit skeptical and careful about using AI, but up to now, I think people have started to understand that they cannot avoid using AI, so they are kind of joining the bandwagon. For me, I think AI will contribute more than the other side, the dangerous side, especially for education because our students don’t go deeply into any specific subject area. They learn a basic sense of STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics – but they don’t delve deeply into either one of them. With AI, they will be able to explore any area that they are interested in because the main goal is to create impactful innovations, which have to be deep tech. Just applying a business model, I think, would be easily duplicated, so they need something very special, very deep, something that only comes from the depth of STEM. For this, AI will be a boon for them because it will help them explore a lot of ideas coming from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. For me, it’s very good. It’s a boon for the speed of learning.
Anders: The biggest challenge is the increase in speed of learning. When you follow a university schedule, you have your semester, your pensum, but even before you finish one semester, the real world has moved on faster.
Prof. Worsak: The original structure of education, especially in undergraduate programs, will gradually change, because today, education doesn’t need boundaries from semester to semester. Everything could be a continuum for three or four years. Students should be free to learn in any subject area without being limited by time and place. They can learn at home, anytime. That means the program can be condensed or compacted. They could even eventually complete it in two or three years, rather than the standard four years in Thailand.
Thor Ranthe*: But what’s the role of teachers in the future? I think it’s a big challenge for them to adapt to this new way of teaching and learning.
Prof. Worsak Kanok-Nukulchai: I think the very big challenge for them in the past was that faculty members or professors were considered to know everything in the classroom, and students just noted down all the things the professor put on the blackboard, assuming that he knew everything. But today, students could even find information faster and more accurately than professors, and therefore, teaching and learning will have to change. I see that professors could become more like coaches for them to learn something more personalized for students. I’m not sure the setting of having a big lecture room with hundreds of students and one professor will still be effective. So, it is a kind of a gradual change, but the world changes so fast, so that is a challenge. Education is always the last sector to change because people are very conservative in universities.
Anders: It’s really interesting what you say about coaching, but the challenge is, if you have to coach, it is one-to-one, and there are many students. But I think you’re right because nobody can sit with all the knowledge in the future; it moves too fast. It’s not like in the past when professors had all the answers. It’s actually an interesting general question about how we can use AI to support coaching, to help teachers coach students.
Thor: We are thinking a lot about what kind of tools we could provide to help the education system and to help teachers. We are thinking about digital twins to help teachers become that one-to-one tutor.
Prof. Worsak: I think today we assume that students will have 24 hours, seven days a week to learn. They can adjust the time and so on. Of course, with AI assistance, they will be able to learn a lot by themselves with interaction with an AI assistant because AI has all the knowledge in the cloud; they know more than professors, mostly, except in some areas. So, I expect that perhaps in the future, every student will have an AI companion with them who stays with them all the time, learning about what you call the digital twins. So, they perhaps know more about the person than the person knows about themselves. So, with that, I think AI could kind of casually accumulate all the information about the person, then customize it to fit the person’s needs. And for knowledge, sometimes it’s very static; like history, for example, it doesn’t change. So, students can learn anytime by themselves, but the ones that keep changing, like technology, I think AI may have a more significant role to play because AI could keep up with the technology and perhaps constantly remind the person who is the twin about the change and what they should learn in the future.
Thor: At the moment, there’s a lot of talk about disinformation and misinformation, and I think that’s an ethical question we need to discuss in the future because what is right and what is wrong in this subjective world that we are going into. What is your point on that?
Prof. Worsak: I think it’s a big challenge, not only for the education sector but for our lifestyle as well. We used to trust that what we see is the truth, but today we start to question whether we can trust videos or photos. This is the negative side of AI – people can generate anything to look real, and sometimes we cannot differentiate. So, I think we should also use AI technology to help us differentiate truth from falsehood.
Thor: Personally, I think it’s very important to keep the students both curious and cautious, and they need to be critical about the information they hear because you really need to fact-check things that you read and hear. I think it’s important; science is about that in many ways.
Prof. Worsak: It is a principle of science – you don’t trust anything until it’s proven.
Thor: Let’s see what we think is the future of AI. I mean, where is this all going? It’s very difficult, of course.
Dr. Worsak: Anything that is exponential, you can see something is coming, but you don’t know what is coming exactly. It’s a bit different from other global mega-trends, like climate change or poverty, where you know exactly what is coming; it’s coming a bit slowly, it gradually comes. But for AI, for this kind of disruptive technology, it’s coming, but you don’t know what is coming, and that is a problem. So, the best way is to prepare ourselves. We tell our students that you have to adapt, so this four-year period is best for you to prepare yourself to be adaptable to something new. You must prepare now, not only for a job right after your graduation, but you have to prepare now for 20 or 30 years afterwards, which nobody knows what will be.
Thor: Who can predict the future just three years or five years ahead?
Prof. Worsak: You prepare yourself to be adaptable to change.
Anders: But again, if you say everything comes at an exponential speed, it’s really difficult.
Prof. Worsak: Today, everyday something new is coming up. We’ll get new normals every day. We used to talk about the new normal after COVID, the post-COVID new normal. Today, we have a new normal almost every day. And if you don’t follow technology, you might miss the last train. It’s difficult if you don’t realize that you need to follow technology.
Thor: What do you think are the biggest pros and cons in this AI movement? I know it’s a difficult question.
Prof. Worsak: I think the pro is that we have someone or something to work for us. In the future, perhaps humans won’t need to work so hard, but of course, that comes with the negative side. If you don’t work hard, if you don’t use your brain, perhaps you become inactive. Some people are talking about AI attaining consciousness and taking over humans on this planet. Who knows?
Anders: How do you think Thailand and the university here are prepared compared to global competition? “How do you think Thailand and the university here are prepared compared to what we call the competition, since the competition is global now?
Prof. Worsak: Correct, I think today there’s no boundary, but Thailand is still conservative. Okay, I think for some reason, we are not as excited as, perhaps, people in other countries like Japan, Korea, or China. We are still too busy with all the regular things, you know. Even though there are groups of people who know that AI is coming and will be very useful, and if you don’t follow, you are going to miss the boat, the majority of the population, I think, don’t realize that in Thailand.
Anders: But what I hear you say about how you want to change your education system, I think this is actually quite ahead of what I hear from other places. I don’t think you hear it anywhere in Denmark or any university where we come from, so you are aware of it. That is a good start.
Prof. Worsak: Well, we start with the founding our school, which is a bit unconventional because we don’t follow the silo type of education where students train into one specific area really deeply and become specialists. But then, they just focus on their discipline. You know, in the real world, everything is interdisciplinary. It affects one another, and that is, I think, the shortcoming of the education model since the 19th century. And since we have this AI, perhaps students do not need to be specialists; they should be more generalists and whenever they need something, they use AI to search for knowledge for them, at the time of need and right place in the right time.
Anders: I think the challenge here is, as Elon Musk says, the same. It will actually not be a unique basic income; it will be high income because we can make infinite production, you know. But the problem is the companies will have the technology. They would be America and China. And will we share with Thailand?
Prof. Worsak: Yes, that is a big question also. We talk about how eventually the world may not have any borders anymore, exactly because if we talk about UBI, you know, it’s going to be contributed by a group of elites. The governments themselves, they cannot provide anything, so they are useless. And then, how can they govern the people? Exactly. Eventually, all the borders will be shared, and people will move around, but it will be different.
Thor: There will be a need for a different political system in a way, and it’s going to change a lot.
Prof. Worsak: It could become a global government or something.
Anders: I like to see China, North Korea, and the US. That’s a difficult question because the model of North Korea is affordable, but we don’t want war, we want peace, and how do we do this the right way? This is really difficult.
Prof. Worsak: I have a joke that I read. They asked AI what they had just programmed into it, so that AI would prevent war. So, AI searches all the options, and says that the best option would be to kill all humans.
(HaHa, Laughter).
But AI is correct – the absolute solution is that if you get rid of all the humans, then the planet will be peaceful. (HaHa, More Laughter).
Thor: That solves all problems. That’s a paradox.
- *Anders and Thor hosted the podcast featuring Professor Worsak.
- Anders represents the LB&A Consortium, comprising LionBrain Co. Ltd. and Anders H.L Soft Co. Ltd. LB&A Consortium has recently signed an agreement with CSII details of which are available at this link: https://scii.chula.ac.th/blog/groundbreaking-partnership-between-csii-and-lba-consortium-to-revolutionize-education-with-ai/
