Stephen Downes

Ethan Mollick reviews Google's new Gemini 3 AI model and reflects on how far the technology has come in the last three years. Contrary to the many people who have proclaimed that AI has stopped improving or reached a cognitive plateau, it appears that it's still getting better. "Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker." I'm still writing articles and OLDaily posts without AI assistance, and that won't change, but it's getting hard for me to imagine doing anything technical without AI assistance.

Cloudflare suffered an outage today, taking half the internet down with it. This is probably not news to most readers, but it offers an opportunity to once again point to the folly of running the entire internet through a single centralized gateway, no matter how well-meaning the company may be.

Eli Alshanetsky advocates "a bottom-up approach to governing AI: rather than trying to stop progress at the level of capability development, we secure how AI is allowed to enter and operate within human practices." In other words, 'AI in the loop'. Also known sometimes as 'Human Autonomy Teaming'. I'm in agreement with this, but would like to focus on a completely separate point, based on this: "An essay can be rough around the edges and still count as real progress if the student grappled with an idea. When the work no longer reveals the student's thinking, the teacher's feedback has nowhere to land." I see the merit of this point, but have to ask: what counts as 'grappling with an idea' and why is it valuable? There's a leap here from 'show your work' to 'where you went wrong' to 'effective intervention'. We presumes the effectiveness and efficiency of the student essay as a diagnostic tool, but that presumption may well be wrong, especially given the affordances writing with AI may generate.

I think it's important to understand the substance of this post in order to come to any sort of understanding of the world (and by that, I include most of what we know about how students learn, how to prepare them for the future, and how to explain AI). It's this: "through survival of the fittest and evolutionary patterns, our brains are hyper attuned to pattern detection. This means that when random or seemingly random things happen to us, we're allergic to the explanation that it was just arbitrary... when you look closely at the nature of causality, reality and existence, is that things that are bewildering are happening all the time, and we just ignore them." There's no single cause for anything; everything is a chaotic mash of causal connections. Sure, we can influence outcomes, but we can't control them.

Readers see this argument a lot on OLDaily and here it is again: resilient media is decentralized, a complex network of sites connected by protocol and not owned and managed by any individual or institution. "The Web is a commons, guaranteed by its protocol. I can build and manage a website and publish it to the world... I don't need permission to publish, you don't need permission to read, and there's nothing billionaires or governments can do about it because they can't get between us." That's not completely true, of course - they can interfere with open networks, but it's a lot harder when media is decentralized. The original version of this article is here, on the massive wiki. See also: The Blacksky path towards resilient social media (wiki version).

Alex Usher argues against banning Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP) grants to students attending for-profit institutions. Here's the argument, in a (tiny) nutshell: "it implies that ownership is the cause of bad results. And, frankly, I am not sure this is true." And poof! The entire left of the political spectrum has disappeared in a single sentence. Here's the real problem, as I see it: private institutions are fundamentally extractive. Decisions are made on the basis of profit or some similar self-serving motivation. They provide as little as possible for the revenue they receive. Public institutions, by contrast, are fundamentally constructive. They exist to promote the social good or (if we believe Mark Carney) serve underlying social values. This is not a guarantee of better outcomes, but intentions matter.