OLDaily

A Student’s View: Teachers Form Unions to Negotiate How Their Schools Operate. Why Shouldn’t Students Do the Same?
Gregory Wickham, The 74, 2021/03/15

I would like to assure the editors of The 74 that I think a students' union is a great idea, and that it's something that should be applied widely in schools, colleges and universities everywhere. Indeed, I think it should become so widespread that it would be inconceivable that anyone would think of it as a novel or unexpected idea. And yes, I think the powers of a students' union should be real, and that students should "negotiate their class sizes, workloads and class-time limits" and even "take control of our educations and our schools."

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The Changing Nature of the Liberal Arts in the Digital Economy
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2021/03/15

I think it's a fair point to say that we've been overlooking the role of the sciences (I won't say 'STEM') in the liberal arts. My own experience points to the value of a grounding in the hard sciences, even if one's interest is in philosophy. But I think this column takes it a step too far in suggesting we should reinterpret the liberal arts as, shall we say, application areas for the hard sciences. Think, for example, doing big data analysis to track the decline of morality in the literature of the 1800s. Sure, tech can be a tool in the humanities; I spent time in my graduate years running neural net simulations. But it isn't the same as the humanities.

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Why Accenture lists ‘digital twins’ as top-five technology trend in 2021
George Lawton, VentureBeat, 2021/03/15

This article references an Accenture report (107 page PDF) which, after 17 pages of pandering to 'leaders', actually offers some interesting insights into future tech trends. The format reminds me a lot of the Horizon Reports, but with more specific predictions and a mechanism to relate past predictions with current predictions. The idea of a 'digital twin' is to create " virtual replication of a real-world entity, like a plane, manufacturing plant, or supply chain," though as Laura Hilliger suggests, we didn't really need a new term for what is an old idea. The Accenture report uses the Apollo 13 simulations as an example, and we also saw the same concept used in The Martian. The other four concepts are strategic stacks, the democratization of technology, bring your own environment, and multi-party systems.

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Moving fast and breaking us all: Big Tech’s unaccountable algorithms
Ellery Roberts Biddle, Jie Zhang, 2021/03/15

"Many of the world’s most powerful algorithms are accountable to no one," write Ellery Roberts Biddle and Jie Zhang. "Companies do not have oversight over how their own systems work." And yet "They decide who passes and who fails in secondary school. They decide who gets arrested and who goes to prison. They decide what news you see first thing in the morning as well as what news you won’t see." I think both sides of this statement are exaggerated, but am nonetheless supportive of the main point of the article, which is to call for a human rights framework for algorithms that would "not just set forth standards for how to 'do no harm' or 'be ethical,' but it would help hold companies accountable for those standards, by providing mechanisms for risk assessment, enforcement, redress when harm has occurred, and individual empowerment for technology users."

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The Extra Ingredient
Richard Brown, Joseph LeDoux, David Rosenthal, Biology and Philosophy, 2021/03/15

Most of the discussion around Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) is focused on identifying the minimal state of consciousness that would distinguish, say, a dog from the ball it's chasing. That's what we see, for example, in this 2016 discussion from Bronfman, Ginsburg and Jablonka. The latter two authors offer a significant expansion of the idea in their book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness (read Birch's review and a good short article by Birch, Ginsburg and Jablonka).

What interests me in this discussion is that the eight markers they identify (global accessibility and broadcast, binding/unification, selective attention and exclusion, intentionality, integration over time, evaluative system, agency and embodiment, registration of a self/other distinction) are all also markers often held forth to distinguish between natural and artificial intelligence. They are the markers of some sort of understanding that proponents say a machine can never possess. That's why this response by Brown, LeDoux and Rosenthal is important. Birch et al "offer no argument that their proposed features do jointly suffice for the presence of conscious experience,beyond saying that many theorists will accept it." The arguments against artificial consciousness similarly lack substance.

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Our Response To Canada’s Copyright Term Extension Consultation
Brigitte Vézina, Creative Commons, 2021/03/15

Creative Commons Canada has posted a response to consultations on impending copyright term extensions in the country created as a result of recent trade agreements. Citing some court briefs, they argue that "the costs of a term extension outweigh the benefits." But even if the extension is unavoidable, "Canada’s copyright policy should still strive to promote a robust and universally accessible public domain." One way we could do this, I would suggest, is to adopt a policy similar to that in the United States where government publications are entered into the public domain rather than protected under crown copyright. Image: U of A.

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