Bibs & bobs #6

 Delegating work to nonhumans

A good deal of academic and student work involves coming to terms with publications which can prove tricky and time consuming if you are unfamiliar with the genre and or content. This online app does a fair job “explaining” chunks of text from any paper you submit to it.

And for the music oriented folk, an app for forming musical ideas: Note. 

This post by Stripe Partners opens the delegation issue further. Specifically it explores the shift of humans as craft people to expert technicians and then, with the advent of AI, to users. Having machines do all the heavy lifting involved in a task that once required significant technical skill results in non-expert users “self-serve”. The shift is represented thus:

It’s an important framing of what we are going through re all the AI apps that have  appeared. What keeps nagging at me though is the observation that E. O. Wilson made as reported in an opinion piece in the NY Times by Tristan Harris:

A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and renowned father of sociobiology, was asked whether humans would be able to solve the crises that would confront them over the next 100 years.

“Yes, if we are honest and smart,” he replied. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Bruno Latour

If you had not already joined the dots, a big influence, probably the biggest in my puzzling about the delegation of work to nonhumans is Bruno Latour who sadly passed away recently. There have been a number of tributes about Latour’s work and contribution to intellectual life but I think Stephen Muecke’s post on Aeon recently has been one of the better ones I have come across. 

Educating at scale, tutoring and the digital 

I’ve been participating in a local biweekly conversation based at Griffith, the curriculum collective, convened by the always thoughtful Steven Hodge. The group as been working through what might thought of a recent collection of publications in and around theorising curriculum.  

The problem of how to pass on what might be judged to be good, useful, valuable, important or just interesting to the next generation is something the species has muddled through since it emerged on the planet. That we are able to do so has meant that Homo Sapiens and not cephalopods run things. 

Over time circumstances have determined that humans have used, and at a times experimented with, a variety of formal and informal modes of educating the young while at the same time mulling the bigger questions of why, what and how.

We now live in an era dominated, at least in terms of student numbers, by what is sometimes called mass schooling. Mass schooling requires a crude application of a one size fits all logic. It is in play in many parts of formal education, e.g. age-based schooling, special needs schooling, year level teaching of a discipline in universities etc. 

Two posts helped to open up the curriculum question for me. Erik Hoel writing about how geniuses used to be raised and Henrik Karlsson musing about GPT-3 augmenting human intelligence.  There is much to be said here. The connection between a history of curriculum and the emergence of mass communication comes into view. The emergence of AI systems that support a notion of curriculum that begins to resemble some aristocratic tutoring is, to say the least, intriguing. 

I’m not holding my breath in this respect given the massive investment in systems of mass schooling, the conservative nature of formal education systems and the sorry history of curriculum reform. Nevertheless, it’s a possibility that is worth keeping an eye on.