Education and many other key social organisations and industries in the Nordics are standing on the doorstep of artificial intelligence and analytics. Governments, companies, and researchers struggle to find ways to make these technologies fit for Nordic life-wide learning. Companies promote technologies that are not ready, open, or robust enough to capture the complexity of learning and to empower educators and students. Governments often adopt technologies based on policies with a lack of scientific evidence. Research struggles to collect evidence and to provide knowledge to support industry and government. These new technologies offer data-driven tools to support decisions and policy-making, and when combined with the highly digitized Nordic Society this raises multiple challenges for how we harness such tools for the benefit of our societies. AI in Nordic School Life (aiLife) takes the challenge forward with the case of formal education to question and frame an interdisciplinary deep investigation on how AI is, and should be, intertwined in our society and culture – through a focus on education. Our team brings together leading Nordic research centers and their research infrastructures in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden that combine educational science, humanities, psychology, social science, engineering, and natural sciences. By framing the larger question of how people can leverage AI to improve society in Education we deeply investigate how new technologies can provide understanding and improvement to our Nordic values. aiLife’s impact will provide clear results and insights about 1) narratives, attitudes and ideals of AI, 2) impact of these new technologies in educational contexts, and 3) propose and develop solutions on best practices for how AI can be integrated into Nordic society. aiLife takes a participatory investigative approach that brings together interdisciplinary researchers to explore the big societal implications together with the diverse stakeholders from educators, learners, industry, and policymakers through diverse activities that provide clear results that help guide the Nordics. As part of understanding the technological solutions, we will investigate a deeper understanding of AI in education as to the humanistic and societal implications in relation to terminology, bias, power and control, trust and security, economy and ownership, identity, gender and culture.
