Stephen Downes

From where I sit, this article is an excellent example of why philanthropic foundations shouldn't be the ones who decides what the future of education looks like. Not only do they lean heavily toward a privatized system, they view education from a very specific perspective. This is from an interview with Sara Allan, formerly of at the Gates Foundation, and now president of the Valhalla Foundation. "The outcome we want: kids leave high school with stackable credentials that hold real labor market value, because they've already figured out their path and taken the first steps toward their future. Assessment would need to be entirely reengineered around that outcome—and it has to be competency-based." Education is and ought to be about far more than labour market preparation. And in the age of AI, we should be at least contemplating a post-work future.

This is important: "To say there is a definitive checklist approach to AI detection is unreliable, and at times dangerous." I would also add that our confidence that we can detect AI versus non-AI writing is probably misplaced. Having said that, I think this is at least partially true: "I was able to gain a direct sense of how each student writes in their own, authentic voice - how arguments were organized, evidence was cited and personal styles were manifested." It feels to me that if you read a lot you can feel a sense of narrative arc - or reasoning, story-telling, movement toward an end - that just isn't present in AI writing, not because AI inherently can't, but because of current context-window limitations. Articles I spot as overly-long AI pieces go from one topic to another to another, each related to the other, but none of them leading to any overall point. Again, though, I would hesitate before pronouncing with certainty that anything is AI or not.

This post announces the closing of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), the self-described "world's first and oldest academic social network". It will also be the final year of the final year of the HASTAC Scholars, the student version of the network. "A social network is costly and tremendously complex to run and, after more than 25 years, is no longer sustainable.  Rather than let HASTAC dwindle and die, we are sunsetting it with dignity and enormous pride in a quarter century of thinking together about, through, with, and sometimes against new technologies and their application in society." I don't see why running a network is so 'costly and complex' - real networks, like (say) the RSS blogging network - are decentralized and distribute cost and complexity across participants, rather than being centrally managed. See also: Cathy Davidson: How to Lead an Academic Social Network.

I've been doing some background reading on the concepts of collective experience, collective consciousness, and collective mind. Mostly, I don't think there are any such things, at least, not in the way they're talked about in this paper and also in Garriy Shteynberg's Psychology of Collective Consciousness. It's based on what's called 'autonoetic cognition', the idea that inherent in any experience is the idea that "I am" having that experience; in the same way, collective autonoetic cognition generates an experience that "we are" having that experience. This paper takes the idea of representing 'our' experience further, on the one hand, arguing for the "necessity of collective mind representations," and on the other, offering empirical arguments "identifying a social context, the synchronous arrival of information." Like I say, I disagree - if there are collective minds, they're more likely to be described as in Dynamics of collective minds in online communities, originating in network interactions in communities, and not based in some form of common experience or consciousness. But there's much more to read and to say about all this.

OpenAI has launched Dots, "a customizable AI assistant capable of browsing the web, making purchases, generating documents, tracking goals, and more." This article frames it as a response to Meta's AI assistant called Muse. The plan seems to be to get people addicted, then upsell. "OpenAI notes that conversations with your Dot won't count toward ChatGPT usage limits. 'In the future, you'll be able to add more dots, and scale the output of each dot by either increasing its speed or the total amount of work it can take on per month.'" For most of us, there's not much value here - access is limited to people paying $100/month or more.

Matt Webb is feeling some qualms about the way the fruit fly connectome (ie., the full map of neurons and the connections between them) of the fruit fly is being used for fun and games on the internet. "Do I imagine that the simulated fruit fly is someone being trapped and tormented, again and again and again, in a software prison? No, the fruit fly connectome is unlikely to be sentient. (But) at some point on the scale, sentience starts to be meaningful." Future AI might be based on a kernel of very real connections and weights, something that - perhaps - requires our ethical consideration. Suppose you copied your cat's connectome to create an AI. Suppose you copied your nephew's. Your own.