More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Yea, it’s the thing I find myself repeating to anti-AI peeps (of which I count myself) … you don’t realise how behind you are.

Not behind on missing out on knowing how to use AI, but on how much things have shifted and the world turned and how much heavy momentum is involved and far back the facilitating patterns go.

Same with the fediverse to be honest. It’s a reaction to the state of social media in ~2010.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.

And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.

Ah! Yea, resonates strongly with where I was coming from.

Something, I suppose, like “not all good things can be scaled and mechanised, and not all scaled and mechanised things are good”.

I don’t know anything about this, actually! What’s the controversy?

Education system

Maybe a bit more spicy. And I’m not against education itself. Just seems like an obviously contingent system that’s got a monopolistic lock on “demand” while having glaring issues around its quality.

Yea … it’s the bit I don’t get why people don’t care about this more.

If we’re replaced, there’s nothing really left for us in the terms of the way we’ve conceived our whole world for centuries. Sure maybe we go native again or something, but let’s be real, that is a massively tough transition even if it’s viable.

Thank you and interesting!

I’ve only skimmed the paper, but this line in the conclusion captures my impression so far:

the results should not lead to premature decisions in school practice or completely replace other existing teaching methods. In fact, digital tools show the largest positive effects on student learning outcomes if they are used in addition to non-digital material. Despite the potential of using digital tools in mathematics and science classes, teachers should always assess additional benefits in regard to the context they want to use it in, and learning content should still take center stage

…

there was only one variable that significantly influenced the overall effect due to differences between content-related categories, which was teacher training.

Additionally, their analysis highlights that the following are more impactful: simulation/ smart-tutorial tools, getting students working together (rather than using tools solo), and shorter durations of tool use (or, studies that ran for shorter times had better results).

All of which indicates to me that this study may well support the notion that digital tool use in schooling can be overdone and that a correction could very well be reasonable, especially if prior policies have focused on student-laptop provisioning all encompassing digital platforms.

Beyond all of that (and general scepticism I’d naturally have with any reaearch) … I’d still wonder whether it’s reasonable to combat the negative effects of saturated computer usage by leaning into non-digital education approaches, however “worse” the educational outcomes may be. Especially if digital education could be optimised with specialised and intermittent exercises and tools.

Interestingly, I don’t share your presumption. Personally, I’d start from the opposite end and ask where is the evidence that using computers is good for education. Anything that’s computer specific can be taught with computers as necessary. But generally everyone has computers now and so the basics likely don’t need to be covered by forcing complete use across the board.

I think they mean in parallel, as in the government steps in and regulates with guarantees etc, not that these reforms would come from the AI itself.

I hear what you’re saying … but earning a living may be a necessary priority after coming out of academia.

And it certainly is a weird time to set course for a new career.

Ya Rayah by Rachid Taha

wikipedia page

Loved it on first listen and it made me a fan of Taha’s. It’s kinda Arabic pop rock but with traditional instrumentation.

If you like this, maybe checkout the album Diwan 2 afterwards.

It’s an old conversation and it’s not you.

I don’t have links to anything on hand, but you’re not the first and won’t be the last to wonder about this and (maybe) start criticising it.

I also can’t give you the technical details (I’ve even forgotten a lot since I last cared about this), but basically, IIRC, it’s as you intuit … The platforms can be in the fediverse and still do kinda their own thing such that platform interop is not well guaranteed, arguably at all.

In the end, I convinced my self it’s a core problem of federated social media and failing at it was a huge missed opportunity to have an awesome feature that the commercial platforms lacked. “Federation happened in the client” was my way of trying to capture this perspective.

BlueSky probably doesn’t do any better but they architecture and protocol might point in the right direction.

Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.

Yea I got the general or vague impression that this was reminiscent of their initial maps roll out.

Are any heads gonna roll for this?

I agree. Multi communities are great. But managing a community’s connectivity with such features makes a lot of sense too!