Stephen Downes

Some interesting points are raised in this longish and fairly dense article. Artificial intelligence is being used by a "large percentage" of people in the office, and it's making them more productive. These benefits, however, aren't being realized at the organizational level. "To get organizational gains requires R&D into AI use and you are largely going to have to do the R&D yourself," writes Ethan Mollick, adding that most companies "have outsourced their organizational innovation to consultants or enterprise software vendors." For example, there's little incentive for employees to operationalize their AI use. Maybe "they received a scary talk about how improper AI use might be punished," maybe "companies see productivity gains as an opportunity for cost cutting," or maybe "any productivity gains will just become an expectation that more work will get done" for the same pay.

This is yet another example of why we should be more wary of the companies that make the technology than we are of the technology itself. The problem, isn't the tech, it's the business model. Here what we have is a man who depends on a $100,000 exoskeleton for mobility that stopped working because of "a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton," a tiny problem the company refused to fix. "After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Michael Straight posted. "The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money."

The whole world is gushing over work released this week in Nature of the complete fruit fly connectome (that is, the complete set of neurons and connections in the fruit fly brain). There's a set of nione papers overall along with some websites, data, and applications. The FlyWire project built a consortium comprising researchers spread over 127 institutions, supported with artificial intelligence and 10,000 volunteers verifying data in an online game. In the 140,000 neuron connectome they identified 8,453 annotated cell types (4,581 of which were new) connected with some 50 million synapses. View the Connectome Data Explorer. See also: Colossal.

This article, I hope, makes it clear why I am watching Mozilla's ad technology initiative quite closely. It takes only a small leap to imagine similar technology being used by educational institutions. After all, data is the lifeblood of any learning analytics system. And if you can get it directly from the browser, that elimiates one reason to be dependent on a learning management system. According to this article, "the true challenge lies in transforming data into actionable insights that can inform decision-making and improve student outcomes." I'm not really sure that's true any more.

This article provides an overview on Mozilla's Anonym advertising technology (Mozilla acquired Anonym a few months ago). Basically, in involves creating a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) in the browser that exports encrypted and anonymized data to the ad platform, which aggregates it and forwards it to the advertiser. What data? Well, that's not exactly clear. And can we turn this off? That would seem to me to be pretty important.

This feels like such an odd article. The title reads at once like a tautology and in a difference sense granting exclusive agency to teachers. It references the 2023 GEM Report but nowhere in the 547 page document do we find the quote from Chinese Vice Minister of Education Wu Yan to the effect that "even the most advanced technology cannot replace teachers' warm encouraging teaching method." It's nowhere in the article either; the pull-quote appears from nowhere. I'm also led to question the existence, in most cases, of a "teachers' warm encouraging teaching method." It certainly wasn't my experience! I get that the article is celebrating World Teachers' Day, and we certainly appreciate the contributions teachers have made, but let's not overstate them.