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"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive. BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."

"On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture). The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. To the three great technological revolutions-the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational-we will add a fourth: the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly. The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we've made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear."

"A robot, trained for the first time by watching videos of seasoned surgeons, executed the same surgical procedures as skillfully as the human doctors. The successful use of imitation learning to train surgical robots eliminates the need to program robots with each individual move required during a medical procedure and brings the field of robotic surgery closer to true autonomy, where robots could perform complex surgeries without human help."

"The tablets are scheduled to be introduced next year, and by 2028, teachers are supposed to be using these AI textbooks for all subjects except music, art, physical education and ethics. The government hasn't shared many details about how it will all work, except that the material is supposed to be customized for different speeds of learning, with teachers using dashboards to monitor how students are doing. In response, more than 50,000 parents have signed a petition demanding that the government focus less on new tech and more on students' overall well-being: "We, as parents, are already encountering many issues at unprecedented levels arising from [our children's] exposure to digital devices." Lee Sun-youn, a mother of two, told FT, "I am worried that too much usage of digital devices could negatively affect their brain development, concentration span and ability to solve problems - they already use smartphones and tablets too much.""

"Students using ChatGPT solved 48% more of the problems correctly, and those with the AI tutor solved 127% more problems correctly, according to the report. But their peers who did not use ChatGPT outscored them on the related tests. In fact, students using ChatGPT scored 17% worse on tests.  Kids working on their own performed the same on practice assignments and tests.  Researchers told The Hechinger Report that students are using the chatbot as a "crutch" and that it can "substantially inhibit learning.""

"MPs are to summon Elon Musk to testify about X's role in spreading disinformation, in a parliamentary inquiry into the UK riots and the rise of false and harmful AI content, the Guardian has learned. Senior executives from Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok are also expected to be called for questioning as part of a Commons science and technology select committee social media inquiry."

Instead, affiliate charter schools seek applicants for positions like a "High School Guide." These $50/hr employees will help design "creative, immersive learning experiences that teach students to leverage cutting-edge AI tools and innovative strategies," among other responsibilities. "Think of yourself as a brand consultant for 50 startups simultaneously, guiding diverse branding needs from business to personal expertise positioning," reads one job listing. Apart from students' brand development, the opening also stipulates candidates must possess "demonstrated expertise in social media management, content creation, and audience engagement."

"Concerns about giving voice to the dead do not apply to AI guest speakers who are someone with a specific job, an animal, an object, or a concept such as the Water Cycle. But is it sound pedagogy? Let's consider what teachers can learn about students and AI chatbots from the Eliza Effect. The Eliza Effect is the tendency to project human characteristics onto computers that generate text. Its name comes from Eliza, a therapist chatbot computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Weizenbaum named the chatbot after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion."

"Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor"."

"But Duolingo now seems to have changed its tune, at least in terms of hiring. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this week: "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are, in fact, continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it-and use it responsibly-the better off we will be in the long run." Though many language learners obviously appreciate the human touch on their materials, Duolingo isn't the only one leaning toward AI for language education. Last month, Google applied its flagship Google Gemini AI model to create three new tools, dubbed Little Language Lessons, accessible via the Google Labs page. However, Google did dub the new set of tools as "just an early exploration.""

"We typically begin the semester by asking students to reflect on the formulas they've learned in the past and to consider how those shape their writing. We now ask those same reflection questions about AI outputs. Student responses, as Jennifer has written elsewhere, are revealing: The kind of writing that Chat does, it's what our teachers try to get us to do. It's like five-paragraph essays, and perfect paragraph[s] that don't have any personality, which we were taught in high school. It does what school has trained us to do. Like write a perfectly formatted essay that is based on some random people's ideas."

"From this fact about language development, Chomsky posited an (abstract) innate module for language learning - not processing. From a neurobiological standpoint, the brain has to be ready to understand language from birth. While there are plenty of examples of language specialization in infants, the precise neural mechanisms are still unknown, but not unknowable. But objects of study become unknowable when scientific terms are misused or misapplied. And this is precisely the danger: conflating AI with human understanding can lead to dangerous consequences."

"This figure compares a traditionally trained algorithm to Aarabi and Guo's heuristically trained neural net."

"The performance of LipNet compares incredibly favorably to human lipreading experts on GRID corpus, the largest publicly-available sentence-level lipreading dataset. In fact, where human experts got just 52 percent, LipNet scored 93 percent. Its sentence-based approach to lip-reading also smashed the best previous attempt by a machine, which managed 79.6 percent accuracy on the same dataset."

"Now, the number of combinations of these columns grows exponentially with the number of columns. So if you have many, many columns-and we do in modern databases-you'll get up into millions and millions of attributes for each person. Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features-if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age-what's the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I'm getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe."

"Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?""

""Each time we build new ways of doing something close to human level, it allows us to automate or augment human labor," said Jeremy Howard, founder of Fast.ai, an independent lab based in San Francisco that is among those at the forefront of this research. "This can make life easier for a lawyer or a paralegal. But it can also help with medicine." It may even lead to technology that can - finally - carry on a decent conversation. But there is a downside: On social media services like Twitter, this new research could also lead to more convincing bots designed to fool us into thinking they are human, Howard said."