SAIL: What's left for humans?
Welcome to Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL) a regular look at how AI is impacting education. I'm in Anaheim for the ELI conference. I have a talk tomorrow on "The space for humanity in the age of AI". We're all somewhat grappling with questions about the unique human attributes that remain untouched by the growing incursions of AI. I've positioned this partially as a move from "epistemology to ontology" (knowing to being). Our university system isn't well equipped to address the beingness part of this. We expect a substantive skills-based education where we complete a degree, with practical and usable skills. Education seems fluffy when we focus on developing the mental health and character of our students as well as their capacity to succeed in complex settings. The prevailing view seems to minimize the scope of a student to mainly skills and employment, rather than expansive development as a type of intelligence in an ecosystem of many intelligences. I see three areas where humans remain unique: beingness, complex and networked problem solving, and consciousness. I haven't thought of the consciousness aspect of this much, but it's in the space of qualia and likely needs more thoughtful exploration (the area of noetic studies is new to me - thanks Bill!).
Figuring this out is a rather urgent challenge. We don't yet know the types of people we should be in an AI age. Until we know that, we won't know what and how we should teach and learn.
AI and Education
Hugging Face is the prominent open source AI community. They are starting to offer courses, including Deep Reinforcement Learning
Google is also launching generative AI courses.
Recent special issue, lead by Shane Dawson, has been published on learning theory in the AI era.
The online education space is slowly confronting predatory behaviors of some service providers to the sector.
Edtech giant Byju is developing their own transform models: "The transformers will touch nearly all aspects of a student’s journey". They need some wins as BlackRock just cut their valuation by 2/3.
AI will impact work: mediocrity will be automated. "AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level". Of course, we've heard this before with not-quite accurate results after a decade.
AI and Technology
This is roughly the biggest deal in human history if it's true: "government possesses ‘intact and partially intact’ craft of non-human origin". Not much being shared though.
If there's one company that educators should pay attention to as models that universities might adopt (i.e. social systems interactions), I'd say it's Meta. Here's their new AI infrastructure.
50% of McKinsey staff are using AI (scroll down a bit for that section)
AI and Regulation
AI and Global Governance "we attempt to shine some light on [questions] considering literature on AI, the governance of computing, and regulation and governance more broadly"
Social Implications
This doesn't feel right. "empowers organizations to identify risk and take action before the projected risk becomes a consequential event or incident". Read that slowly. It's as sinister as it sounds.
AI chatbots are not landing well in the banking sector: ""A poorly deployed chatbot can lead to customer frustration, reduced trust, and even violations of the law". Duh.