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The flak I caught yesterday regarding SafeAssign got me thinking about term papers in the 21st century. Information and communications technologies make it easy and rewarding to share information. More recently, however, ICTs are allowing people to build creative and innovative products from the information available. We’re evolving into a “cut-and-paste society.” Some examples of which are:

• YouTube, which allows anybody to share videos that interest them with anybody in the world for free
• Mogulus, which allows anybody to create their own TV station for free (something that very recently required a sizable staff and millions of dollars of funding)
• GarageBand, which provides people with tools to record, mix and publish their own music
• Hip-hop, which often mixes, juxtaposes and generates new meanings from music, images and texts

Academic culture and traditions have not caught up to 21st century society. What real meaning is there for society if we were to continue to place heavy focus on traditional term papers, and police the content to make sure no influence is present from modern society?

Creative work, also, is being generated increasingly by machines. Two examples are Brutus and the 20th century’s MINSTREL (see Noah’s comments). Why should we worry about originality in student work if we are perhaps only a couple years (or months?) away from machines that will be able to write original essays, theses, novels, etc., for them? …and what if these machines could write these documents better than –and vastly outperform– most students?

Is there something else schools should focus on?

Australia’s Computerworld jumps on the futures bandwagon, and provides insight into the 21st century (in stark contrast to what others are writing on the future). In an interview with British Telecom futurist Ian Pearson, a few daring predictions emerged:

1. “Thinking” is going to seem very alien to many people:

We will probably make conscious machines sometime between 2015 and 2020, I think. But it probably won’t be like you and I. It will be conscious and aware of itself and it will be conscious in pretty much the same way as you and I, but it will work in a very different way. It will be an alien. It will be a different way of thinking from us, but nonetheless still thinking. It doesn’t have to look like us in order to be able to think the same way.

2. Some machine intelligences will outsmart humans by 2020, and they will begin winning Nobel Prizes.

This raises an important concern. Our schools are not preparing students to thrive in an environment with a plurality of creative and intellectual modalities. Rather, through regimes such as No Child Left Behind, they are being transformed into cookie-cutter automatons. The irony is that as machines become much more intellectually-capable and creative, human capital is becoming more mechanistic. Which has the better potential to thrive through this century?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the SIAI blog, posted his observations of the emergence of three “logically distinct” schools of thought related to the Singularity:

1. Accelerating change (Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler, John Smart): “technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates” along a predictable curve.
2. Event Horizon (Vernor Vinge): “Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.”
3. Intelligence explosion (I.J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky [and, I'm sure, many others]): “the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.”

All three interpretations of the Singularity, Yudkowsky argues, require specific delineation to avoid being mashed into –and interpreted as– a single, apocalyptic metanarrative in popular discourse. Perhaps to better prepare educators for seemingly more absurd, ambiguous, and chaotic futures, we ought to build Singularity awareness, acceptance and preparedness by serializing our conversations:

First, change is accelerating. The good news is that we can plot out, reasonably predict, and prepare for much of it. What changes are our schools prepared for?

Second, a smarter society will start to build smarter things. Human intelligence hasn’t increased, but distributed knowledge across society will help us build improved humans, successor species and machines that will outsmart us. Students enrolled in schools today will likely face a future where “natural” humans are no longer the most intelligent species on the planet. How can we prepare them?

Third, our future could be very, very weird. Period. Are we doing anything to prepare students for futures beyond anyone’s imagination?

Two articles related to the Singularity Summit have appeared on preparing for the Technological Singularity:

First, Jamais Cascio writes on a Metaverse Roadmap Overview:

In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may play out over the next decade. But what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

The scenarios explored are:

1. Virtual Worlds: the combination of simulation and intimate (highly personalized) technologie
2. Mirror Worlds: the intersection of simulation and externally-focused technologies
3. Augmented Reality: the collision of augmentation and external technologies
4. Lifelogging: brings together augmentation and intimate technologies to record the experiences and histories of objects and users (what Cascio refers to as “participatory panopticon“)

Read more at Open the Future…

Second, Bryan Gardiner writes on the Wired blog that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, multi-millionaire Facebook backer, and the president of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund, is devising a Singularity-aware investment strategy based on two, polarized scenarios in a near-future world where machines will become smarter than humans:

1. Negative scenario: where machines won’t need us and humans become expendable
2. Positive scenario: where humans would still have a positive outlook

Regardless of the two scenarios, Gardiner points out that the volatile booms and busts over recent years are indicative of the market’s attempts to align itself with near-Singularity transformations:

In essence, he argues that each of these booms represent different bets on the singularity, or at least on various things that are proxies for it, like globalization. What’s more, we’ve been seeing them now for over 30 years.

The markets are catching on to accelerating change. Why not bet on the Singularity in our schools as well?

The semantic web approaches!

Powerlabs, which will launch in early September, utilizes Powerset, a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search and takes advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language, according to the company. At the moment, they’re accepting sign-ups for pre-release experimentation.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) has launched a blog covering research and outreach updates, videos, articles, papers, events, goals, and relevant science and technology news.

SIAI is a not-for-profit research institute in Palo Alto, California, with three major goals: furthering the nascent science of safe, beneficial advanced artificial intelligence (self-improving systems) through research and development, research fellowships, research grants, and science education; furthering the understanding of its implications to society through the AI Impact Initiative and annual Singularity Summit; and furthering education among students to foster scientific research.

Ah, yes… now for a moment of shameless displays of pride and self-promotion ! Desk copies of my “Chaordic knowledge production: A systems-based response to critical education” article, published in Theory of Science vol. XV/XXVIII/2006, no. 3, pp. 149-162, arrived last week.

Drop me a line if you’d like a PDF of the scanned article!

Abstract

Proponents of critical education and critical pedagogy call on us to question the “oppressor vs. oppressed” relationships that the global mainstream “banking” system of education enforces (see esp. Freire, 2000). This practice produces learners that do not have the knowledge and skills to solve their own problems and maximize their individual potential. Systems thinking is the contextual analysis of an organization or process as a whole (Capra, 1996, p. 30; von Bertalanffy, 1968). A future-oriented, systems approach to the examination and redesign of critical education theory yields a chaordic, coconstructivist metatheory that maximizes each individual’s ontological potential. By building upon an example that employs automated information technology as a mediator in a coconstructivist system, this paper suggests that not only are coconstructivist critical knowledge systems plausible, but the design of the systems themselves need not be designed complexly to exhibit complex, transformative behavior.

Technology Review has an interview with Danny Hills, cofounder of Thinking Machines. In the 1980’s the company sought to develop the world’s first real artificial intelligence. They failed. Why?

We look to our own minds and watch our patterns of conscious thought, reasoning, planning, and making analogies, and we think, “That’s thinking.” Actually, it’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. When early AI researchers began, they assumed that hard problems were things like playing chess and passing calculus exams. That stuff turned out to be easy. But the types of thinking that seemed effortless, like recognizing a face or noticing what is important in a story, turned out to be very, very hard.

Read the entire interview…

From KurzweilAI.net:

Abstracts and PowerPoints are now available online for the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute’s (AGIRI) first workshop, May 20-21.

The workshop looked at breaking AI technologies out of specific, task-oriented functions into a more general form. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) development takes a transdisciplinary, systems-oriented design perspective with the ultimate goal of creating an intelligence that resembles, or supasses, human intelligence.

From the IST program:

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.

With funding from the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world – one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture.

Read the full article.