The new Dutch Coalition Agreement pays considerable attention to AI. Rightly so, I think, because AI is going to have a major impact on our lives. This, to my mind, is the key sentence: “We are building a digitally resilient society through an ecosystem approach, working together with education, business and government to take a step forward so that everyone can fully benefit from the opportunities of artificial intelligence.”
Good idea! But how do you do that? How do you ensure that “everyone can benefit from the opportunities”? How do you make sure that deploying AI strengthens human autonomy? That AI contributes to a good life? How do we know who benefits, and who bears the risks?
One important ingredient here is AI literacy — the ability to understand, use and critically evaluate AI. Under the EU AI Act, organisations have been obliged to work on this since last year. How do we give that shape in education?
One of the best resources I have come across in this area is the UNESCO AI Competency Framework. There is one for students and one for teachers. It is well-grounded, evidence-based material. For students, the competency dimensions are:
- A human-centred attitude
- Ethics of AI
- AI techniques and applications
- Designing AI systems
Each dimension comes in three levels: understand, apply, create. This way, each aspect can recur several times throughout a curriculum, allowing knowledge to stick and deepen.
If you are working on this topic, this framework is well worth your time. What appeals to me most is that ethics and a human-centred attitude form the foundation for everything else. And that awareness is something we are going to need urgently to hold our own in the AI storm ahead.
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