AI and the future of skills, volume 1: capabilities and assessments

Policy interest in the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) has sprung up in the past few decades as AI technologies are developing and being integrated into more and more aspects of life. A deeper and more precise understanding of this impact for the economy and society is fundamental for strategic planning in various policy areas. With regard to employment and education, this understanding can provide the basis for realistic scenarios about how jobs and skill demand will be redefined in the next decades. It can also demonstrate how the education system needs to be reshaped to prepare today's students for these possible futures. However, this understanding of the impacts of AI and robotics fundamentally rests on an understanding of the technology's capabilities. What can AI and robotics do and what can they not do? How do the capabilities of AI and robotics compare to those of humans? The OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched the Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Skills (AIFS) project in 2019 to address the questions above.

An ongoing programme of assessment for AI and robotics will add a crucial component to the OECD's set of international comparative measures that help policy makers understand human skills. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) describes the link between the education system and the development of human skills, while the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) links those skills to work and other key adult roles. A programme for assessing AI and robotics capabilities will relate human skills to these pivotal technologies, thereby providing a bridge from AI and robotics to their implications for education and work, and the resulting social transformations in the decades to come. This volume reports on the first step of the AIFS project: identifying which capabilities to assess and which tests to use in the assessment. It builds on an online expert workshop that explored this question from the perspectives of both psychology and computer science. The volume consists of expert contributions that review skills taxonomies and tests in different domains of psychology, and efforts in computer science to assess AI and robotics. It provides extensive discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and outlines directions for the project.

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