Group items tagged

"Robots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next 10 years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning, a leading educationist has predicted. Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, said intelligent machines that adapt to suit the learning styles of individual children would soon render traditional academic teaching all but redundant."

"White-collar workers, armed with college degrees and specialized training, once felt relatively safe from automation. But recent advances in A.I. and machine learning have created algorithms capable of outperforming doctors, lawyers and bankers at certain parts of their jobs. And as bots learn to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder."

"you can learn a lot from nature, but that imitating it is impossible."

"This is the biggest concern. I can't overstate how big of a problem this is. I'd be the first that wishes I could wave a magic wand and have an easy solution where all of this could be solved. A teacher I know says there's just 5 percent or 10 percent of her kids in Mountain View, Calif., who are just checked out. She can't get them to show up. She can even see that their language has degraded because they haven't spent as much time with adults or peers in an academic setting."

"The firm's software uses machine learning (ML), an advanced form of artificial intelligence, to detect patterns in user behaviour that could indicate attempts to cheat. Its technology can also automatically mark multiple-choice answers and mathematics exams. In addition, it checks each exam-sitter's identity using the webcam, to ensure that no-one else is sitting the test for them. The Better Examinations program also temporarily restricts access to the internet, or certain websites and applications on each person's computer. "

""Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it's to educate them," he says. "You are assuming that students are trying to cheat-rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn." He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring."

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."

"Yes of course. We are basically the last generation, or maybe there will be one more after us, who grew up without strong AI writing assistants. But these AI assistants are here now, especially in English. In German the systems are following suit, even though they're still much stronger in English. You get to a stage where someone who cannot write very well, can be pulled to a decent level of writing through machine assistance. And this raises important questions: Are we no longer learning the basics? In order to step up and really improve your writing, you will probably always need to be deeply proficient in the cultural practice of writing. But we need to ask, what proportion of low and medium level writers will be raised with the help from machines to a very decent level? And what repercussions does this have on teaching and learning, and the proficient use of language and writing? We shouldn't neglect our writing skills, because we believe machines will get us there. Anyone who has children can clearly see the dangers autocorrect and autocomplete will have for the future of writing."

"Let's return to my favorite analogy for thinking about issues surrounding youth and social media: cars. Cars can be incredibly dangerous! There's a reason we don't let kids drive them until a certain age, and even then, put all sorts of safety measures in place. Now, let's imagine every time you got into a car, you got a warning saying "This car might crash and kill you." This would certainly raise your awareness that cars are dangerous. It would scare you. But would it change your behavior? Now, let's say you added an "action" to the end: "This car might crash and kill you…but putting on your seatbelt right now will reduce the risk of death by 500%."   It's long been known that fear-based public health messaging cannot simply describe a threat-it also needs to recommend an action to be effective. First you learn what could go wrong, then you learn what to do to avoid it.  So, will warning parents that social media use "is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents" actually change their behavior? Will it lead to them more effectively limiting, monitoring, and/or managing their kids' social media use? "

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"The development of autonomous military systems - dubbed "killer robots" by campaigners opposed to them - is deeply contentious. Earlier this year, Google withdrew from the Pentagon's Project Maven, which uses machine learning to analyse video feeds from drones, after ethical objections from the tech giant's staff. The government insists it "does not possess fully autonomous weapons and has no intention of developing them". But, since 2015, the UK has declined to support proposals put forward at the UN to ban them. Now, using government data, Freedom of Information requests and open-source information, a year-long investigation reveals that the MoD and defence contractors are funding dozens of artificial intelligence programmes for use in conflict."

"His software is not labeled anything as grand as artificial intelligence. It's machine learning, facilitating and extending his own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what fledgling writers have always done - immerse themselves in the works of those they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped "The Great Gatsby" several times as a shortcut to that objective."

"Eck said machine learning, a powerful form of AI, will be integrated into how humans communicate with each other. He raised the idea of "assistive writing" in the future with Google Docs, the company's online word processing software. This may be based on Google's upcoming Smart Compose technology that suggests words and phrases based on what's being typed. Teachers used to worry about whether students used Wikipedia for their homework. Now they may wonder what part of the work the students wrote themselves, Eck said."

"Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide."

"The platform's automated tools may have mistaken the visuals of the burning building for 9/11 footage, according to Vagelis Papalexakis, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies machine learning used in similar systems."

"His team trained a machine learning algorithm to spot words and phrases associated with bullying on social media site AskFM, which allows users to ask and answer questions. It managed to detect and block almost two-thirds of insults within almost 114,000 posts in English and was more accurate than a simple keyword search. Still, it did struggle with sarcastic remarks."

"The underlying theory is that art evolves "through small alterations to a known style that produce a new one," which, as Ian Bogost (previously) points out, is "a convenient take, given that any machine-learning technique has to base its work on a specific training set.""