Artificial Intelligence and You

It's tough enough being a teacher in the AI age, so can you imagine what it's like training the teachers themselves? That's what Dwayne Wood, Associate Professor at National University of San Diego does. He is the Academic Program Director for the Educational Technology Master’s program there, so he’s front and center of the question of how teachers deal with AI in the classroom and has been working on addressing the current shortage of teachers.

We talk about the relationships between teachers and students, the shifting base of fundamental skills in an AI world, the skills needed by instructional designers, how to teach effective and safe use of generative AI, and how to place the guardrails around learners using it.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We are going big on the show this time, with astrophysicist J. Craig Wheeler,  Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book The Path to Singularity: How Technology will Challenge the Future of Humanity, released on November 19. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, has published nearly 400 scientific papers, authored both professional and popular books on supernovae, and served on advisory committees for NSF, NASA, and the National Research Council. His new book, spanning the range of technologies that are propelling us towards singularity from robots to space colonization, has a foreword by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who says, “The world is long overdue for a peek at the state of society and what its future looks like through the lens of a scientist. And when that scientist is also an astrophysicist, you can guarantee the perspectives shared will be as deep and as vast as the universe itself.”

We talk about the evolution of homo sapiens, high reliability organizations, brain computer interfaces, and transhumanism among other topics.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.

• Jose Luis Navarro IV is the leading coach and consultant at the Navarro Group. He previously served as a Support Coordinator, leading innovative reforms in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
• Zack Kleypas is Superintendent of Schools in Thorndale, Texas, and named 2023 Texas Secondary Principal of the Year by the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals.
• Jeff Austin is a former high school teacher and principal who now works as a coach for Teacher Powered Schools and Los Angeles Education Partnership.
• And Jose Gonzalez, Chief Technology Officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education and former Vice Mayor of the city of Cudahy near Los Angeles.

In the conclusion, we talk about whether students need to read as much as they used to now they have AI, fact checking, some disturbing stories about the use of AI detectors in schools, where the panel sees these trends evolving to, what they’re doing to help students learn better in an AI world, and… Iron Man.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're extending the conversation about AI in education to the front lines in this episode, with four very experienced and credentialed educators discussing their experiences and insights into AI in schools.

• Jose Luis Navarro IV is the leading coach and consultant at the Navarro Group. He previously served as a Support Coordinator, leading innovative reforms in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
• Zack Kleypas is Superintendent of Schools in Thorndale, Texas, and named 2023 Texas Secondary Principal of the Year by the Texas Association of Secondary School Principals.
• Jeff Austin is a former high school teacher and principal who now works as a coach for Teacher Powered Schools and Los Angeles Education Partnership.
• And Jose Gonzalez, Chief Technology Officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education and former Vice Mayor of the city of Cudahy near Los Angeles.

We talk about how much kids were using GenAI without our knowing, how to turn GenAI in schools from a threat to an opportunity, the issue of cheating with ChatGPT, the discrepancy between how many workers are using AI and how many teachers are using it, how rules get made, confirmation bias and AI, using tools versus gaining competencies, and whether teachers will quit.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter.

Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities.

In the conclusion, we talk about how technology shapes our psychology, how it enables mass movements, science fiction, the role of big Silicon Valley companies, and much more.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter.

Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities.

In part 1 we talk about what digital humanities is, how it intersects with AI, what science and the humanities have to learn from each other, Joseph Weizenbaum and the reactions to his ELIZA chatbot, Luddites, and how passively or otherwise we accept new technology. Caroline really made me see in particular how what she calls "technocratic rationality," a way of thinking borne out of a technological culture accelerated by AI, reduces the novelty which we can experience in the world in a way we should certainly preserve.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Cognitive architecture deals in models of how the brain - or AI - does its magic. A challenging discipline to say the least, and we are lucky to have a foremost cognitive architect on the show in the person of John Laird. Is cognitive architecture the gateway to artificial general intelligence?

John is Principal Cognitive Architect and co-director of the Center for Integrated Cognition. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, working with famed early AI pioneer Allen Newell. He is the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he was a faculty member for 36 years. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.

We talk about relationships between cognitive architectures and AGI, where explainability and transparency come in, Turing tests, where we could be in 10 years, how to recognize AGI, metacognition, and the SOAR architecture.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Cognitive architecture deals in models of how the brain - or AI - does its magic. A challenging discipline to say the least, and we are lucky to have a foremost cognitive architect on the show in the person of John Laird. Is cognitive architecture the gateway to artificial general intelligence?

John is Principal Cognitive Architect and co-director of the Center for Integrated Cognition. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, working with famed early AI pioneer Allen Newell. He is the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he was a faculty member for 36 years. He is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and the Cognitive Science Society. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.

We talk about decision loops, models of the mind, symbolic versus neural models, and how large language models do reasoning.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.