At a technical level, replacement is already feasible. Functions such as personalised instruction, emotion recognition and response, and knowledge delivery are relatively mature. Consider the Nadine social robot already “employed” by NTU. Large-scale adoption may simply be a matter of time.
Questions framed as “Can AI replace this profession?” are really questions directed at every industry: what value do human beings possess in relation to machines?
When students and teachers make a special journey to the classroom and give one another 45 minutes at a time, what are they looking for?
Surely it is not only the transmission of knowledge. The teachers who benefited me most at university are not memorable because of a particular fact they taught. What stayed with me was the feeling that they had opened up a new perspective and sense of possibility. From this point of view, the classroom is closer to a third place where students and teachers meet. Its central function is two-way exchange. What people truly seek is real contact, not the recitation of a script.
A large proportion of students in China do not learn by listening to their classroom lectures. They absorb knowledge through online courses instead. The first advantage is flexibility: they do not have to study in a fixed place at a fixed time. The second is that the market has already filtered many online courses. Students can easily access high-quality classes produced by leading universities and recorded by respected teachers, at a very low cost relative to university tuition.
Few teachers in China recognise this function and genuinely put it into practice. Universities abroad increase its likelihood through institutional design. In my own classes at NUS, teachers were more inclined to let students speak and then offer guidance. I do not believe teachers like these will be replaced. Even if the conventional teaching post disappears one day, they will continue to create value in emerging roles such as learning management and academic guidance.
In other words, what students really want is the space and opportunity to communicate with teachers. Today's education model allows mounting academic and employment pressure to squeeze that “third space”. Teachers sometimes have no choice but to finish the prescribed lesson plan or create distinctions through final grades. If AI can release some of that pressure, and if schools can offer more varied third spaces beyond the classroom, then teachers will not disappear; they will provide value in a more humane form.
I also have an observation from psychology: human beings want the other party to communicate with them consciously. We want the other to possess feelings, motives, and lived experience of their own. An interaction with AI may be perfectly fluent, but we know that no genuine subjectivity or feeling lies behind it. At the same time, not every person knows how to respect and understand others. People can misunderstand, discriminate, isolate, and hurt. Some of those who hope AI will completely replace teachers and other professions may simply believe that AI will at least give them a predictable response, instead of forcing them to gamble each time on whether another person will treat them kindly.
Ideally, I want AI to be integrated into education and used to rebuild a comprehensive, flexible, personalised platform centred on the student. I oppose the complete replacement of teachers by AI, just as I oppose the complete replacement of any profession concerned with human beings. If technological inequality is one day compensated for only by economic inequality—if different social classes can access different grades of AI—that would be a deeply frightening future.