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Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
The White House, 2023/10/31

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The bulk of this executive order on Artificial Intelligence is devoted to implementation details. The main policy implications of U.S. President Joe Biden's directive is the set of eight principles outlined at the start of the document. These are (quoted/paraphrased):

• AI must be safe and secure
• Promoting responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration
• A commitment to supporting workers
• Advancing equity and civil rights
• Consumer protections
• Privacy and civil liberties must be protected
• Manage risks from government use of AI
• Lead global societal, economic, and technological progress

I think these principles are OK, so far as they go. But they seem to me to lack any sense of what we're supposed to do with AI (beyond 'progress'). Mostly the principles are about mitigating harm. Mitigating harm is good, but understanding where we want all this to lead us would be even better. See also: Politico, Digiday, Emory Craig, O'Reilly,

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The app that revolutionized money transfers in Nigeria
Sekinat Motunrayo Ojeniyi, Rest of World, 2023/10/31

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In an environment that is probably the definition of zero-trust it's interesting to see a financial app gain a foothold. "OPay uses money transfer technology that doesn't rely on the traditional banking system, meaning anyone can transfer money via OPay." You can see the appeal. According to their about page, "Over 60% of people in Africa remain unbanked and can't access the most basic financial services to invest in their education and businesses." An app like this addresses that gap, and backed by Opera (the browser), OPay has definitely attracted interest. Watch this space. It may not seem like edtech, but it will certainly impact edtech.

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Bats Use the Same Brain Cells to Map Physical and Social Worlds
Joel Sartore, Quanta Magazine, 2023/10/31

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"As a bat navigates its physical environment, it's also navigating a network of social relationships... these maps overlap. The brain cells informing a bat of its own location also encode details about other bats nearby — not only their location, but also their identities." This is a really important thing to understand about neural networks generally. Neurons don't 'stand for' some particular thing; they can be affected by any given experience, which means that our knowledge of one thing is intermingled with our knowledge of a very different thing - in this case, knowledge of the physical environment overlaps with knowledge of social relationships.

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Edtech products now expected to incorporate AI, say investors
Helen Packer, The PIE News, 2023/10/31

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I honestly don't really care what venture capitalists (VC) want to see in edtech products, but I guess this particular itm is a sign of the times. "Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing director of Avalanche VC, said AI 'needs to be embedded in every product that is going to be successful... We expect that any technology based business model will have an AI component to drive efficiency or effectiveness of that product.'" Part of this desire I'm sure is to just keep up with the trends, but part i also because AI is actually useful.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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