Dr. Patricia Scanlon:

The only positive I can lend to this is that people can use their natural language to engage with AI. The thing people miss a little is AI has been designed in a way that they can just press the record button - they do not have to be able to type or spell or anything - and ask it a question. Someone can say, "Explain to me about this". People can take a picture - I have done this - and ask, "What does this mean?" It is just different from other forms of learning. I argue that people could educate themselves without ever setting foot inside a school. People can use their voice to ask it questions. They can say things like "Tell me more about that" or "No, I did not understand that" or can ask "What does that mean in this context?" You can say you are a teacher in Dublin X and ask it to explain what is meant by something. People can keep querying it with their natural language and it will respond. There is opportunity in that where maybe people will start to educate themselves.

In different parts of the world, including in developing countries, arguably, if people have a smartphone and Internet connection, they do not even need the language or the literacy aspects to interact with AI, and we will see a bit more levelling of the playing field. I argue the voice aspect was one thing that really changed that because people did not need to spell-----