IEEE Future Directions
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The third aspect of education involving symbiotic autonomous systems –SAS- is the trend towards an autonomous development of education content deriving from the SAS design and experience.
It has become common for a broad range of products to contain an instruction manual that can provide instructions to the user. Televisions, digital cameras, washing machines and cars are just a few examples that come to mind. Software applications usually come with an embedded way to provide user instructions, some have these instructions as part of the application, others provide the instructions through a web connection.
This way of “education” is usually quite effective since it is tied to “need to know” and “here and now”. However, most of the time the instructions are “one type fit them all”. They do not take in account the specific user, his experience and motivation.
It is a sure bet that in the next decade artificial intelligence will permeate this “spot education”, finely tuning the instructions to the user experience and needs.
Creating an education content for products is often complex and time consuming. As products become more and more flexible and evolve over time it becomes more and more difficult to provide a valuable/effective on board instruction manual.
Interactions with the product and with its “educational” part are also going to change, drifting towards natural language and seamless interaction (involving gesture, touch, images…). Imagine being on a team with both human workers and robots. In the next decade there will be a growing level of symbioses in the team and learning will be a continuous experience. The content on which learning will be based will be unlikely to be produced at the time the robot is produced. Instructions will have to be customised to a specific situation and to the way interactions take place. It is much more likely that robots will self-learn how to teach their team-mates, similarly to what the human team-mates do when they need to instruct each other. We do not come with a pre-loaded manual, we have acquired knowledge and skills and when needed, or asked, we share this knowledge and skills in a way that is appropriate to the context and to the receiving person.
This is likely to happen in working environment, as well as back home when interacting with a new appliance. Notice that, as IoT and computers become embedded everywhere and connected, the overall system complexity will grow beyond our average capability of understanding and managing (it is already happening in several situations, one of the best selling point for a product is its capability to self-configure adapting to the environment with no user intervention required).
New products are likely to embed education capabilities. Firstly, they might be confined by the use of the product itself, then they may expand to cover the use of the product in conjunction with others. In the Industry 4.0 paradigm, with products resulting from the loose cooperation of various players the “instruction manual” will no longer be the responsibility of any single player, often unaware of what other players will be providing (like asking a computer manufacturer today to provide the instruction manuals for all the applications that will be run by that computer…).
Yet, the interplay of the various parts may require a single point of explanation. This may be achieved through third party applications that will create instruction material (and possibly deliver it) by accessing the various digital twins operating in a symbiotic relation.
Education content may take different forms and may be delivered in different ways:
- as separate instruction (an evolution of MOOCs, highly contextualised and personalised, delivered on an access device –I get instruction on the use of my digital camera from my smartphone that connects to the camera on one side and to the manufacturer on the other, it is still a very basic experience but it gives the gist of what might happen in the future)
- as automated in-product courses that pop up when needed as I am interacting with the product. Differently from what we have today this in-product courses will not be rigidly tied to the product, rather they will be tuned to the user and to her growing experience and specific needs. In a way, the education content will constantly re-arrange the interface to the user, making it seamless to that user and evolving as the user competence grows.
This will likely apply to any kind of interactions as the players are getting smarter and smarter. Education will be an important aspect in symbiotic autonomous systems both finely tuning and evolving the interaction within the system and in the interaction with other systems.
We can expect that further down the lane any interaction can be a source of learning, through an adaptation to the players involved.
Accessing information in large data bases, like the IEEE archive of articles, now in the millions and growing, will no longer be like opening a drawer and picking up an article, with the smart support focussing on helping to find the right drawer. Rather it will be a matter of sharing a need and responding to that need. That might involve the extraction and reassembling of content contained in several articles, as well as setting up a customised education course to let the person understand the information provided. It may also require a structuring of the education to leverage the context of the user, like upgrading the tools he may be using.
