Artificial intelligence, 21st century competences, and socio‐emotional learning in education: More than high‐risk?

Over the last two decades, 21st century competences and socio‐emotional skills have become a major focus in educational policy. In this article, skills for the 21st century, soft skills, as well as social and emotional skills, are contextualised in the context of technological change, machine learning, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. The use of data‐driven AI technologies to model and measure these skills—in this article defined as non‐epistemic competence components—can lead to major social challenges that have important implications for educational policies and practices. A moratorium on the use of data on these competence components in machine learning systems is proposed until the society‐wide impact is better understood.