ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already making a huge impact on society. One might not know that his/her smartphone most probably has an AI engine in it. For example, these engines are optimized for doing calculations used to recognize the face so it lets the user into the phone or they might be to detect the scene that someone is trying to shoot with the camera so it can get a better exposure. The AI is also being applied in all kinds of areas: business, healthcare, gaming, sentencing in the courts to decide the likelihood of somebody reoffending based on their profile, in developing self-drive vehicles or even fully autonomous weapons which would be able to seek and destroy without any human intervention. The higher education realm is surely not exempted from the trend of AI penetration and the buzz seems to be louder than ever. New e-learning platforms that use AI are launched every year and the AI market is receiving amazing financial investments and are gathering many scientific contributors. Every new technology assures in some good benefits and some grave risks. It usually takes time until the legislation responds to the challenges brought by the technology. This paper aims at defining an ethical framework for discerning between the AI capabilities, so it is used for the benefit of the education system and the human flourishing. The research has identified five main challenges: perception of equality, data privacy, moral agency, moral deskilling and data bias. Therefore, it is of primary importance to build AI systems with ethics in mind in order that it mitigates the legitimate fears and secures new practices that are a blessing for one of the most influential institution in society: the university.