The United Arab Emirates is rolling out an artificial intelligence curriculum from the earliest years in state schools as it seeks to become a regional AI hub and avoid the past “mistake” of not reacting to the spread of social media, its education minister said.
While many countries have introduced lessons about AI in schools, the Gulf country is investing heavily to position itself as an AI hotspot and the scheme partly aims to prepare students for the future workplace.
But “the trigger [for the AI curriculum] was how much we saw students impacted by social media, and how we did not adapt to that,” education minister Sarah al-Amiri told the Financial Times, referring to the struggle of dealing with the attention sapping power of platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. “We did not want that mistake to happen again.”