As the semester winds down, I can tell you our students are not all right and neither are faculty. More than a quarter of students are suffering from absurdly high rates of chronic absenteeism. As the NYT reports: “The pandemic changed families’ lives and the culture of education: ‘“Our relationship with school became optional.”’
If you go back and reread Marc's initial posts from more than a year ago, it's clear that his initial phase of guarded optimism and amazement at what these genAI tools can do and the possibilities they offered for education have been, if not supplanted, at least significantly tempered by the pace of change and range of models and abilities that are coming at us faster than even the most engaged AI watchers can handle. And I completely share his observation that the vast majority of those in education - whether it's K-12 or higher ed - are mostly oblivious, either deliberately so or simply as a result of not having the bandwidth to deal with it. I've been listening to Ezra Klein's series on AI and his most recent guest, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, quite casually talked about a rate of scaling and model improvements over the coming months and short term years (1-3, 2-5) demonstrating higher and higher capabilities at an exponential rate. I realize that predictions on genAI abilities are all over the map, but if he is even half right - and there is nothing that seems to indicate things are going to slow down anytime soon - the power of AI models and platforms which will continue to surge into our daily lives in the near term will be truly staggering. I think the fears of cheating are really going to be beside the point (though of course they will be main way most educators continue to encounter AI) but I am really curious, fascinated, and a little terrified to see what the landscape is going to look like 12 - 18 months from now.
Thanks, Steve! I'm indeed increasingly concerned. Even if we entered a so-called AI winter and GPT-5 doesn't show remarkable improvements, education and broader society would still be forever changed by the current capabilities of these systems. We just haven't had time or capacity to fully gauge what's been rolled out the past 24 months.
I am also flummoxed as to what kind of PD to do (or run!) this summer. Most of the folks I've talked to are so far behind the curve that I really don't know where to start. I am going to attend the 3 day AI Summit at MIT in late July (https://raise.mit.edu/events/ai-education-summit/). I will be interested to see where things stand then, especially if GPT-5 launches beforehand.
We can justifiably expect the next generation of students as AI users to become managers of this system of ideas and their use, rather than their education still being about what things are and do without any means for their derivation by computational means. If this is a bad thing it can only be due to the amount of electronic brain-washing our AI minds have sadly been manipulated and absorbed.
Let's keep in mind where all these disruptive tools are coming from. An accelerating knowledge explosion. Universities are a big part of the fuel for that explosion, by design.
What I'd like to find are academics who are thinking and writing about the "more is better" relationship with knowledge philosophy that forms the foundation of the modern world. In the following article I propose that "more is better" is a simplistic, outdated and increasingly dangerous 19th century philosophy.
It's a loser's game to worry about particular emerging technologies one by one because while we're trying to meet one challenge the knowledge explosion is generating three more.
Example: 75 years after the invention of nuclear weapons we still don't have a clue what to do about them, and now we have AI and genetic engineering to worry about too. And before we figure out how to make any of those things safe, five more threatening technologies will leap out of Pandora's box. And the hits just keep on coming...
The simple answer to this nuclear threat mentioned by Phil, is to develop better and more effective weapons ourselves, and to hold them ready for use with the knowledge being spread of how suicidal it would then be. The we put our trust in the belief that no national leader is so crazy as to start a war using such deadly means and to take over all of the remaining humanity, because there would be none left!
That is pretty much the plan currently. This plan fails to take a few things in to account.
1) On multiple occasions both the US and Russia have come within minutes of launching their arsenals... BY MISTAKE.
2) If we were sane, we would have never mass produced these weapons in the first place.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume the nuke problem was solved. The knowledge explosion would replace the nuke problem with some other problem.
Thanks Phil. That mistake never did happen and the reason is that when it really comes down to it our leaders do have enough sanity as to stop it from happening. How long will this continue to last? nobody really knows and so we all have to do what Oliver Cromwell claimed one should do, in the days when the worst kinds of weapons were muskets with gun powder. Pray to God and keep your powder dry.
In the case of the mistakes, luck is what saved us. In one case what saved us was a low level Russian employee who risked everything to make the right call, and paid the price for doing so.
I’m on board with everything said here, and that’s why I’m putting AI literacy at the forefront of my high school English class. I’ve only been able to do so much, but next year I plan to embed it in every essay/project that we execute. AI Literacy should be a core competency grades 6-12.
Separately, I need to wrap my mind around the agents debate. This has come up three times in the last week in different education conversations. Thanks for sharing the report.
I think the time we still have to fight for PauseAI is what we have now. The overwhelming majority of Americans(82%!) do not want this forced down our throats and if we are a democracy, our opinions should matter.
If you go back and reread Marc's initial posts from more than a year ago, it's clear that his initial phase of guarded optimism and amazement at what these genAI tools can do and the possibilities they offered for education have been, if not supplanted, at least significantly tempered by the pace of change and range of models and abilities that are coming at us faster than even the most engaged AI watchers can handle. And I completely share his observation that the vast majority of those in education - whether it's K-12 or higher ed - are mostly oblivious, either deliberately so or simply as a result of not having the bandwidth to deal with it. I've been listening to Ezra Klein's series on AI and his most recent guest, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, quite casually talked about a rate of scaling and model improvements over the coming months and short term years (1-3, 2-5) demonstrating higher and higher capabilities at an exponential rate. I realize that predictions on genAI abilities are all over the map, but if he is even half right - and there is nothing that seems to indicate things are going to slow down anytime soon - the power of AI models and platforms which will continue to surge into our daily lives in the near term will be truly staggering. I think the fears of cheating are really going to be beside the point (though of course they will be main way most educators continue to encounter AI) but I am really curious, fascinated, and a little terrified to see what the landscape is going to look like 12 - 18 months from now.
Thanks, Steve! I'm indeed increasingly concerned. Even if we entered a so-called AI winter and GPT-5 doesn't show remarkable improvements, education and broader society would still be forever changed by the current capabilities of these systems. We just haven't had time or capacity to fully gauge what's been rolled out the past 24 months.
I am also flummoxed as to what kind of PD to do (or run!) this summer. Most of the folks I've talked to are so far behind the curve that I really don't know where to start. I am going to attend the 3 day AI Summit at MIT in late July (https://raise.mit.edu/events/ai-education-summit/). I will be interested to see where things stand then, especially if GPT-5 launches beforehand.
"The proper study of man is Man" (Pope).
We can justifiably expect the next generation of students as AI users to become managers of this system of ideas and their use, rather than their education still being about what things are and do without any means for their derivation by computational means. If this is a bad thing it can only be due to the amount of electronic brain-washing our AI minds have sadly been manipulated and absorbed.
Let's keep in mind where all these disruptive tools are coming from. An accelerating knowledge explosion. Universities are a big part of the fuel for that explosion, by design.
What I'd like to find are academics who are thinking and writing about the "more is better" relationship with knowledge philosophy that forms the foundation of the modern world. In the following article I propose that "more is better" is a simplistic, outdated and increasingly dangerous 19th century philosophy.
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/our-relationship-with-knowledge
It's a loser's game to worry about particular emerging technologies one by one because while we're trying to meet one challenge the knowledge explosion is generating three more.
Example: 75 years after the invention of nuclear weapons we still don't have a clue what to do about them, and now we have AI and genetic engineering to worry about too. And before we figure out how to make any of those things safe, five more threatening technologies will leap out of Pandora's box. And the hits just keep on coming...
The simple answer to this nuclear threat mentioned by Phil, is to develop better and more effective weapons ourselves, and to hold them ready for use with the knowledge being spread of how suicidal it would then be. The we put our trust in the belief that no national leader is so crazy as to start a war using such deadly means and to take over all of the remaining humanity, because there would be none left!
That is pretty much the plan currently. This plan fails to take a few things in to account.
1) On multiple occasions both the US and Russia have come within minutes of launching their arsenals... BY MISTAKE.
2) If we were sane, we would have never mass produced these weapons in the first place.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume the nuke problem was solved. The knowledge explosion would replace the nuke problem with some other problem.
Thanks Phil. That mistake never did happen and the reason is that when it really comes down to it our leaders do have enough sanity as to stop it from happening. How long will this continue to last? nobody really knows and so we all have to do what Oliver Cromwell claimed one should do, in the days when the worst kinds of weapons were muskets with gun powder. Pray to God and keep your powder dry.
In the case of the mistakes, luck is what saved us. In one case what saved us was a low level Russian employee who risked everything to make the right call, and paid the price for doing so.
I’m on board with everything said here, and that’s why I’m putting AI literacy at the forefront of my high school English class. I’ve only been able to do so much, but next year I plan to embed it in every essay/project that we execute. AI Literacy should be a core competency grades 6-12.
Separately, I need to wrap my mind around the agents debate. This has come up three times in the last week in different education conversations. Thanks for sharing the report.
I think the time we still have to fight for PauseAI is what we have now. The overwhelming majority of Americans(82%!) do not want this forced down our throats and if we are a democracy, our opinions should matter.
https://theaipi.org/