SAIL: We're not doing ok.
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL) - a regular look at what's happening in AI and what that means to education.
Postman, Ellul, McLuhan - these three formed key nodes in my early understanding of technology in education. McLuhan simply because it was impossible to get very far in mid-2000s, as web 2.0 was raging, without hearing a media quote from him. Ellul because he introduced power dynamics that I had previously not seen. Postman because he offer broadly accessible insights into the society, technology, education intersections: "A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided."
Technology, the current digital version, has given us global connectivity, ease of communication, access to the world's information, effective and life changing education, and endless memes. It has also taken some of our humanity and our kindness and our awareness of the lived experiences of others.
Into an already emotionally frayed post-covid world, AI is likely going to amplify both creative potential (as I'm looking at AI generated art hanging my living room wall) and also accelerate isolation and disconnection. A quick skim of "mental health challenges in higher education" on Google News reveals a plethora of articles and opinions.
We're not doing ok. Our students are not doing ok. The USA Surgeon General says "Given the significant health consequences of loneliness and isolation, we must prioritize building social connection the same way we have prioritized other critical public health issues such as tobacco, obesity, and substance use disorders."
We, as a higher education system, need to respond to this challenge. New literacies, new capabilities, and a new focus on beingness and development of the whole person is required as are new methods and approaches to developing these aspects of our faculty and our students. Our technology-induced loneliness, isolation, depression, and anxiety will not self-heal. We will need to respond educationally, systemically, connectively. Outside of AI, this feels to me like the most important work of our generation.
AI and Learning
US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology, has released Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Learning. The report acknowledges that "opportunities and issues of AI in education are equally important in K-12, higher education, and workforce learning", but focuses on K-12
Our Denver AI in Education workshop is fleshing out nicely. We have the agenda posted and will have speakers and panelists listed next week. Register now! Your wildest dreams will come true.
Onboarding your AI intern "perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of our current AI moment is that several billion people just got free interns." See also: Meet your new finance intern.
OpenLecture: "a ChatGPT plugin that allows you to search through university course materials to find timestamped lectures, notes, and course readings. Currently focused on MIT OpenCourseWare content."
General AI
Does AI need enormous amounts of data? Not always, according to Andrew Ng "But once those models are pretrained, it takes very little data to adapt them for a new task...Now that it's possible to build and deploy machine learning models with very few examples, it’s also increasingly possible to build and launch products very quickly"
ChatGPT is going to use Bing for web search. Available to free accounts as well.
Anthropic raises $450m. I'm expecting by end of year, we'll start seeing AI in education funding ramping up (not at this level, but it's coming)
We live in times of near limitless potential: "developed an algorithm which translates..signals into instructions to move leg and foot muscles..after a few weeks of training he could stand and walk with the aid of a walker"
AI and War: "Which of our special forces units are closest to enemy tank positions and have sufficient supplies of Javelin missiles to mount an offensive? And which specific tanks on the battlefield are most vulnerable to attack?"
AI according to Rodney Brooks: "What the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be."
Legal Things (and policy)
Everyone is into regulation these days. Here's a summary of USA side of this.
OpenAI is, ever humble, in the game "it’s conceivable that within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains, and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations.
In terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past. We can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there."US updates its National AI Strategy Plan "This plan defines the major research challenges in AI to coordinate and focus federal R&D investments." Education makes an appearance somewhat regularly, but mainly around workforce development and reskilling. Strategy 2 (Developing the Science of Human-AI Teaming) is a critical one for the education sector)