Stephen Downes

This article gets at some of my own frustrations with the educriticoblogosphere. Jasmine Sun writes, "analysis around how AI will fit into our human world remains rudimentary... many of the strongest thinkers about society and politics - the people I want most guiding diffusion - continue to believe that LLMs are buggy auto-complete." It's not that, of course. As Sun comments, "AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the 'r's in 'strawberry', which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing." See the illustration. But "Many tech critics have become so terrified of 'critihype' that they've abdicated their actual job, which is to anticipate and examine how frontier tech may change society in ways good and bad. And yes, that requires some speculation about things that haven't happened yet. Hype-busting is useful but cannot be the whole game!"