Stephen Downes

This report (28 page PDF) focuses on four major ways the authors believe AI will serve education: personalized learning content and experiences; refined assessment and decision-making processes; optimization of teacher roles through augmentation and automation of tasks; and teaching both with and about AI. I'm not seeing this as especially visionary, despite the urgency of messages like "education systems must adapt to prepare young people for tomorrow's technology-driven economies." The meat of the report, I think, can be found in the nine case studies that form the second half of the report; I think they could all have been developed well before the current flurry of developments in AI (and indeed, probably were).

GÉANT is a "collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs)" that delivers "an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale." Today they announced their "decision to stop activities on the main GÉANT profiles on the X social media platform (Formerly Known As Twitter) as of 2 May 2024." Why? "We have seen Twitter go through radical transformations, changed ownership, morphing into X and into a completely different platform which increasingly amplifies hate speech, fake news, scams, extreme views, and illegal content. Verification badges that were once a symbol of trust have lost all meaning, essential features were dropped or limited to paying users, and costs seem to have been cut at the expense of security, privacy, and content moderation." If you are still using X/Twitter, you should ask, what are you supporting?

This is in response to a contribution to an OAS meeting distributed in my office this morning. It is of course my set of opinions only, and not reflective of any official policy or practice, though I would add that most of these have been undertaken to one degree or another by various levels of Canadian government organizations.

I want to say something like 'this paper describes a core tenet in connectivism' although of course we never conceived of it in anything like the richness and detail collective intelligence across 'scales and substrates' described here. This, in particular, is crucial: "collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and... an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales." The way networks work is tied up in the way evolution works, and these are tied up in how we describe learning and cognition generally. Or - how we should describe learning and cognition (as most people still labour under the mythology of folk-psychological information processing types of pictures such as 'executive function' and 'cognitive load' theories).

Drawing on an emerging new picture of animal consciousness,  a group of researchers have signed this declaration recognizing animal consciousness. "Subjective experience requires more than the mere ability to detect stimuli. However, it does not require sophisticated capacities such as human-like language or reason. Phenomenal consciousness is raw feeling—immediate felt experience, be it sensory or emotional—and this is something that may well be shared between humans and many other animals." My similar sentiment is expressed here. It may be thought that an ethics of animal rights and welfare follows immediately, but given the way humans treat each other, we need not fear the recognition of animal consciousness forces any new behaviours on our part (though it probably should).

I mean, it should be obvious why we don't want advertising in AI chatbots, right? They're supposed to be trusted advisors. Imagine you went to your lawyer for advice on selling a house and they said, "I'd be glad to help you, but first, let me take this opportunity to recommend a McDonald's hamburger." Yeah, no. This applies doubly as the technology, still under development, already has trust issues. " Advertising in these generative AI chatbot experience won't be a "sustainable model" long term, according to Jaffe, unless CPMs 'go way up.' Building a subscription model for Ingenio's chatbots also means the publisher will have more control over revenue, the user relationship and distribution, he added."