Blog Smith is inspired by the myth of Hephaestus in the creation of blacksmith-like, forged materials: ideas. This blog analyzes topics that interest me: IT, politics, technology, history, education, music, and the history of religions.
The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a growing crisis in the English monarchy, which was not resolved until the Glorious Revolution. The appeal to natural law, especially as formulated by John Locke, as the standard by which to govern political society, along with the idea of the necessity of the separation of powers to guard against tyranny, influenced not only English politics, but later, American revolutionaries.
Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, material objects, or the like. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. Personal identity has been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. Personal identity is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. And ‘self’ does sometimes mean ‘person’. But it often means something different: some sort of immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). The term is often used without any clear meaning at all.
Personal Identity: Crash Course Philosophy #19, 8:32
Today Hank is building on last week’s exploration of identity to focus on personal identity. Does it in reside in your body? Is it in the collective memories of your consciousness? There are, of course, strengths and weaknesses to both of these ideas, and that’s what we’re talking about today.
https://youtu.be/trqDnLNRuSc
1. How are they all the Doctor?
2. What is the one thing that remains constant?
3. What is our essential property?
4. Summarize some of the ideas philosophers have come up with.
5. Describe a thought experiment.
6. What did Locke contribute?
7. What problems does memory entail?
8. Does any of this really matter?
9. Do you believe you have obligations to particular people in your life?
What is the goal of the dialogue?
What does Miller contend?
What is the problem of the soul?
What is the memory view?
What are the two ways of thinking about the transporter works in Star Trek?
Which is correct?
In the third night what is reviewed about personal identity?
The Unimportance of Identity Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit discussing personal identity in the documentary Brainspotting, 9:24
How do we exist?
What are the four options on the checklist?
What happens after a brain transplant?
Are there one or two persons?
What happens with teletransportation?
Life after Death Terence Penelhum
Metaphysics deals with the study of the nature of reality. Since the Enlightenment, reality has been seen through the lenses of both religion and science, and frequently there has been a conflict between the views of the two. Following the horrors of the Second World War, the attacks on the views of religion became particularly vigorous with science on the offensive.
Canadian philosophers in the postwar era have attempted, in a number of ways, to resolve these conflicts and to legitimize religious belief. A variety of approaches have been used.
Some have attempted to address issues in the philosophy of religion by questioning underlying issues in metaphysics. Those following this approach within the analytic tradition include Kai Nielsen, Donald Evans (1963), and Terence Penelhum (1970).
Arguably, her most famous work is Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. In this book, Grace Jantzen proposes a new philosophy of religion from a feminist perspective. She also authored works on Christian mysticism and the foundations of modernity. Her approach was influenced by Continental scholarship, particularly that of Foucault.
In her final publication, Foundations of Violence, Jantzen, sketches the fascination with death and violence -- what she calls a 'necrophilia' -- that she believes has characterized much of Western culture from classical antiquity through Christianity to present paradigms. In Jantzen's view, this emphasis on violence and death comes at the expense of the physical body in the present (a denigration of the senses, sexuality and sensuality), and thus, establishes a yearning for mystical worlds beyond the here and now.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke
PHILOSOPHY - History: Locke on Personal Identity #1, 11:30
Part 1 of 3. In this Wireless Philosophy video, Michael Della Rocca (Yale University) explores some of the puzzles and problems of personal identity that arise from the revolutionary work of the philosopher John Locke.
What makes you the same person as the little kid growing up a number of years ago? Is the identity of a person tied to the persistence of a body or a soul or something else entirely? Can we even give any explanation at all of the persistence of a person?
A Treatise of Human Nature David Hume
David Hume on Personal Identity -Kiana Crawford, 5:05
Are persons just impressions?
Hume rejects what?
What is an impression?
How does he explain impressions?
How can we construct identity?
What does Hume note?
What is causation?
How does Hume disagree with Locke?
Do you agree with Hume's view on personal identify as he had three strong arguments?
How would you recap Hume's arguments?
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid (26 April 1710 – 7 October 1796) was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher, a contemporary of David Hume as well as "Hume's earliest and fiercest critic". He was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment.
He obtained his doctorate and wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). He and his colleagues founded the 'Aberdeen Philosophical Society' which was popularly known as the 'Wise Club' (a literary-philosophical association). Shortly after the publication of his first book, he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith.
He resigned from this position in 1781, after which he prepared his university lectures for publication in two books: Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788). Reid was buried at Blackfriars Church in the grounds of Glasgow College and when the university moved to Gilmorehill in the west of Glasgow, his tombstone was inserted in the main building.
Reid believed thatcommon sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind. By contrast, Reid claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis are built justify our belief that there is an external world.
Week five of the University of Edinburgh's "Introduction to Philosophy" (INTROPHIL) open online course. Dr Allan Hazlett School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences University of Edinburgh
https://youtu.be/GSDMIXAg3Zc
When should you only trust testimony according to Hume?
How does Reid challenge Hume's assumption?
How do Reid and Hume agree?
What is innate according to Reid?
The Renaissance represents a discovery and rebirth of the glories of antiquity, as well as the dawn of the modern world. The great universities of Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were products of the Middle Ages, and had initiated the study of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers in relation the tenets of Christianity. The rise of humanism during the Renaissance represented a challenge to the scholastic thought of the Middle Ages: it was a strain of humanism which resulted in the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church responded by convening the Council of Trent, which initiated the Counter-Reformation.
In the wake of the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the corresponding collapse of political cohesion throughout Western Europe in the fifth century, there arose numerous small kingdoms whose rulers came to rely on bishops and other leaders of the Church to help provide regional administrative order. The growth of royal power and the close interactions of Church and state officials gave rise to two fundamental political issues of the Middle Ages, which remain relevant even today: what constitutes the appropriate relationship between secular and spiritual authority, and what is the proper relationship between government and the governed.
For two millennia, great artists set the standard for beauty. Now those standards are gone. Modern art is a competition between the ugly and the twisted; the most shocking wins. What happened? How did the beautiful come to be reviled and bad taste come to be celebrated? Renowned artist Robert Florczak explains the history and the mystery behind this change and how it can be stopped and even reversed.
Slavery and the slave trade were among the most important economic, political and cultural issues of the Romantic period. Although doubts about the justice and humanity of slavery had been raised as far back as the seventeenth century in the English-speaking world, and earlier in the Spanish, it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the trade in slaves received widespread condemnation, and it was not until well into the nineteenth century that slavery itself was successfully challenged and finally abolished. While some defended the slave trade as a necessary evil, by the late 1780s many European nations saw the emergence of popular movements for abolition and emancipation with clear majorities opposed first to the slave trade and, later, to slavery itself. In Britain, antislavery sentiment was widespread between 1780 and 1833, particularly in the 1780s and early 90s, and again in the 1820s and 30s. As such, antislavery can be identified as one of the key movements of the Romantic era. This centrality is reflected in the cultural productions of the period: poets, novelists, philosophers and political writers joined hands with dramatists, artists, printmakers and musicians both to reflect and to influence public opinion, and in many cases writers and artists were the leaders of local and national antislavery organisations.
In point of contrast, in the remainder of the world, e.g., in Islamic areas the practice of slavery continued.
Because internal growth of the slave population was not enough to fulfill the demand in Muslim society, massive numbers of non-Muslim slaves were imported, resulting in enormous suffering and loss of life from their capture and transportation.
The Muslim Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007. However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.
Chatbots for College:
Chatbots prove how far the technology has progressed in a relatively short time. Your time at college provides the first introduction to having to deal with many responsibilities at once without oversight, and the chatbots listed here can help ease the learning curve.
How many may need housing at some point? Consider a housing bot: Ems
How many have lost files? Try: Findo.
How many are overwhelmed with checking email and could use an assistant to prioritize communication? Astro
How many of you eat? Forksy
How many could use assistance in job hunting? Jobo
Rose is a chatbot, and a very good one — she won recognition as the most human-like chatbot in a competition described as the first Turing test, the Loebner Prize in 2014 and 2015.
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test.
This chatbot is one the best AI chatbots. It is the winner of a recent Loebner Prize. You can talk with Mitsuku for hours without getting bored. It replies to your question in the most humane way and understands your mood with the language you’re using.
Insomno bot is for night owls. As the name suggests, it is for all people out there who have trouble sleeping. This bot talks to you when you have no one around and gives you amazing replies so that you won’t get bored. It’s not something that will help you count stars when you can’t sleep or help you with reading suggestions, but this bot talks to you about anything.
Moving to off-campus housing is a major milestone for students, but it can also take time away from coursework, especially when scheduling real estate showings.
Ems is a London-based chatbot that learns about housing preferences, makes suggestions based upon them, keeps an eye out for possible matches and lets busy students book viewings with just two taps on a smartphone screen, without ever talking to a human.
Also, you don’t have to download an app to use Ems. Simply go to the website and start chatting in the pop-up window on the right side of the screen.
Students have dozens of file transfer apps, online storage lockers, and document creation helpers to assist them through the school year. But the plentiful technological opportunities can become problematic when you have to search through all those third-party solutions to find misplaced files.
Advertised as a “smart search assistant,” Findo sorts through emails, computers, personal clouds, and more to retrieve desired files.
Frazzled students can also request searches using natural language, even when they can’t remember the details, by saying things such as “Find me the paper I wrote for that biology professor during freshman year.”
The aptly named FindoBot is the chatbot aspect of Findo. It integrates with services like Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Slack, and delivers search results directly into those interfaces to save time.
Astro is what results when artificial intelligence enhances email. It works with Android and iOS platforms, plus Mac computers and even Alexa. Students can connect it with any Gmail or Office 365 email account and enjoy features like an AI-powered priority inbox, which tells them which emails to read first, and a snooze function that empowers students to respond to some emails later.
When unread newsletters start clogging up an inbox, the bot can send reminders about unsubscribing to mailing lists that generate emails you no longer want to get.
There’s also a mute feature you might use when an email conversation shared among dozens of classmates gets too chaotic to follow constantly. Customized notifications when emails arrive eliminate unnecessary distractions, too.
So, what does the Astro chatbot do? It monitors users’ email habits in the background. After it learns what they do, it starts running those tasks automatically for greater efficiency. The bot can also scan a person’s contact list and the resultant network to determine the best individual to introduce them to a department head, the university president, or another bigwig, helpful for a student trying to make connections.
College dining halls and the all-you-care-to-eat nature of many of them wreak havoc on students’ waistlines. And if those scholars are under stress, the problem could become even more severe.
Enter Forksy, a chatbot that recognizes pictures of menus, dictated speech about what you ate, and even food emoji.
Students can simply add Forksy as a “friend” on Facebook Messenger or Viber and ask it to count calories through the day. Also, if a student is seeing a dietitian or fitness trainer, they can get feedback from that health expert about food choices, directly in the chatbot.
Some college students depend heavily on employment to help them make ends meet throughout the semester.
Jobo is a job-hunting chatbot that looks for work around the world. Once a user provides basic employment preferences, Jobo starts hunting for income possibilities around the clock. A student can even apply for a job directly through Facebook Messenger after filling out a career profile.
Personalized job alerts clue students in to open positions they might otherwise miss. There is also a built-in capability for saving searches and looking at them later.
Orai for iPhone is designed to help you become a better speaker. Orai gives people the confidence and skills to speak powerfully when on stage, in front of a room, or in everyday life. Orai uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to offer instant insights on your speech so that you can practice daily and become an effective communicator.
Luther once said of Zwingli, “I have bitten into many a mutt, believing it to be good, only to find it wormy. Zwingli and Erasmus are nothing but wormy mutts that taste like crap in ones mouth!”
In his treatise Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, he urged the princes with these words,
“Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.”
As a result, the peasants were brutally suppressed.
The Protestant historian H. A. L. Fisher wrote,
“The manner in which he [Luther] dissociated his movement from the peasant rebellion . . . and the encouragement he gave to a course of repression so savage that it left the German peasantry more defenseless and abased than any social class in central or western Europe, are serious blots upon his good name. The German peasants were rough men and rough fighters; but their grievances were genuine, and their original demands were just and reasonable.”
Here are some other quotes by Luther on the matter:
“Like the mules who will not move unless you perpetually whip them with rods, so the civil powers must drive the common people, whip, choke, hang, burn, behead and torture them, that they may learn to fear the powers that be.”
“Peasants are no better than straw. They will not hear the word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whiz of bullets and it is only what they deserve.”
“To kill a peasant is not murder; it is helping to extinguish the conflagration. Let there be no half measures! Crush them! Cut their throats! Transfix them. Leave no stone unturned! To kill a peasant is to destroy a mad dog! If they say that I am very hard and merciless, mercy be damned. Let whoever can stab, strangle, and kill them like mad dogs.”
“I, Martin Luther, have during the rebellion slain all the peasants, for it was I who ordered them to be struck dead. All their blood is upon my head. But I put it all on our Lord God: for he commanded me to speak thus.”
The Enlightenment’s elevation of reason and diminution of traditional authority posed challenges and presented opportunities to Christianity. The Christian response to the Enlightenment locates the mystery of humanity in the mysterious nature of the Creator of the universe in Whose image man is made.
Rome achieved its singular dominance over most of the known world in the course of a century. Polybius, a Greek historian conquered by the Romans, attributes this remarkable achievement to three principal elements of the Roman regime or way of life in his noted work, The Histories. He argues that the greatness of the Romans is due to their unique constitution or system of government, to their moral culture or mos maiorum, and to their practice of religion. Defined most distinctly by the concept of pietas—(the duty and devotion due to the gods, ancestors, and the fatherland, a composite of love and reverence)—the Roman character lies at the heart of the Roman legacy to Western Civilization.
As we continue explore free will, today Hank considers a middle ground between hard determinism and libertarian free will: compatibilism. This view seeks to find ways that our internally motivated actions can be understood as free in a deterministic world. We’ll also cover Frankfurt Cases (we have a selection by Frankfurt in Part 5: The Principle of Alternative Possibilities
Harry Frankfurt) and Patricia Churchland’s rejection of the free-or-not-free dichotomy and her focus on the amount of control we have over our actions.
Was that man's really horrible behavior a matter of free will? Or, was it determined: by what turned out to be a medical condition? Was it neither, both?
What are two options?
What is the third option?
What is soft determinism?
What do compatibilists say?
How are examples about mental illness or alcohol instructive?
What is Harry Frankfurt's challenge? What are these called?
Are you responsible without being able to do otherwise?
What does Churchland point out? How much control do I have?
What do libertarians point out?
https://youtu.be/KETTtiprINU
Libertarian Free Will - the belief that some actions are freely chosen. Hard Determinism - the belief that all events are caused by past events such that nothing other than what does occur could occur. Compatibilists believe, somewhat like hard determinists, that the universe operates with law-like order, and that the past determines the future. Compatibilists say that action is determined--that is, it couldn't not happen--but when the action of an agent is self-determined or determined by causes internal to themselves, the action should be considered free. Internal factors vs. External factors Deterministic Nature of the Universe vs. Subjective Feeling of Freedom Feeling free = having control
Free Will Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.
Nagel is well known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. Continuing his critique of reductionism, he is the author of Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness.
- Free will, determinism, and predetermination are encountered by Perceiving Reality. The structure of our "I" is explained as embedded within four factors that determine our characteristics and behavior from within our genes and from our environment.
Why don't we know which of our actions are actually free?
What are the four factors?
What can we learn from a seed of wheat?
What is our single point of freedom?
Kabbalah (Hebrew: קַבָּלָ×”, literally "parallel/corresponding," or "received tradition") is an esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought that originated in Judaism.
https://youtu.be/UJj6PzyOucU
We are blind to the laws and forces that manage us.
Four factors: first factor, the bed, second factor, the cause and effect that stem from itself, thirdly, the inner cause and effect and how well the stalk of wheat grows depends on specific external factors that work directly on its essence, finally our family and upbringing.
Free Will and Determinism W. T. Stace
Walter Terence Stace (17 November 1886 – 2 August 1967) was a British civil servant, educator, public philosopher and epistemologist, who wrote on Hegel, mysticism, and moral relativism. He worked with the Ceylon Civil Service from 1910-1932, and from 1932-1955 he was employed by Princeton University in the Department of Philosophy. He is most renowned for his work in the philosophy of mysticism, and for books like Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) and Teachings of the Mystics (1960). These works have been influential in the study of mysticism, but they have also been severely criticised for their lack of methodological rigor and their perennialist pre-assumptions.
The Principle of Alternative Possibilities Harry Frankfurt
Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002, and previously taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.
The Capacities of Agents Neil Levy
Neil received a PhD in Continental Philosophy in 1995 and a second PhD, this time in analytic philosophy, in 2006. He was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, from 2002 to 2009. In 2010 he moved to the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, where he was Head of Neuroethics and an ARC Future Fellow. From 2006 onwards, he has held appointments at the University of Oxford, where he is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor. From 2016, he will be half time at Oxford and half time at Macquarie.
Associate Professor Levy was recently interviewed on ABC 612 Brisbane Afternoons by Kelly Higgins-Devine on the nature of luck.
What is luck? What is the nature of luck? Do things happen at random chance? Are people lucky? Are athletes lucky? How is skill involved?
https://youtu.be/Auj3cc1rtRI
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise, which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.
The end product of his labours was the Enquiry. The Enquiry dispensed with much of the material from the Treatise, in favor of clarifying and emphasizing its most important aspects. For example, Hume's views on personal identity do not appear. However, more vital propositions, such as Hume's argument for the role of habit in a theory of knowledge, are retained.
This book has proven highly influential, both in the years that would immediately follow and today. Immanuel Kant points to it as the book which woke him from his self-described "dogmatic slumber". The Enquiry is widely regarded as a classic in modern philosophical literature.
David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Part 1, 2:55
In this two part series, we will examine David Hume’s treatise titled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In this first lecture, we will discuss Hume’s empirical epistemology and the problem of induction. In the second lecture, we will explore the consequences of Hume’s theory of knowledge.
https://youtu.be/5p7gcRireKk
David Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Part 2, 4:49
In this two part series, we will examine David Hume’s treatise titled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In this first lecture, we will discuss Hume’s empirical epistemology and the problem of induction. In the second lecture, we will explore the consequences of Hume’s theory of knowledge.
https://youtu.be/Sagxx_yVhMU
The Dilemma of Determinism William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labeled him the "Father of American psychology".
Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, James is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, and has even influenced Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience, which also included the then theories on mind-cure.
William James: Founder of Pragmatism, Father of American Psychology, and One of the Most Influential American Philosophers Of All Time. This video offers a brief introduction to William James's positions.
Are some cultures better than others? Or are all cultures and their values equal? Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza, who was born in India and moved to America, explains.
The emergence of the polis as a political form distinguished Greece from its neighbors in the ancient Near East. The polis was a small community—originally grouped around a citadel—governed by a council and a public assembly, and defended by a hoplite phalanx. Oikonomia (household management) was structured in such a way as to enable full political participation of the household in the city, through words and deeds worthy of note. The individual man who engaged in reasoned speech (logos) thus had an importance in the Greek community that was unusual compared to the other civilizations of the Near East, which were generally organized as hydraulic societies based on irrigation and public works, governed by a sacral monarchy, and administered by a bureaucratic class using the technology of syllabic script.
The “Big Idea” - talks that make one or two very strong points that are relevant and important
The big idea is that educational technology is going to transform higher education dramatically.
TOPIC: short descriptive sentence of your overall topic
OVERVIEW: 4-6 sentence description of the topic, points and flow of your presentation
TAKEAWAY: what you hope your audience walks away with at the conclusion of your talk.
1. Higher education will reestablish itself with deep learning, big data, and artificial intelligence.
2. Many
experts have noted that higher education has changed dramatically
recently but this is only the beginning. Several factors have created
the perfect storm: top heavy spending, doubts over the value of rising
tuition, and the inability to produce graduates with requisite job
skills. David Gelernter stated in the WSJ in January 23, 2017 “Over 90%
of U.S. colleges will be gone within the next generation, as the
higher-education world inevitably flips over and sinks.” On the other
hand, what I maintain is that successful higher education will
reestablish itself with deep learning, big data, and artificial
intelligence. The three critical characteristics of higher education:
the creation of new knowledge, the distribution of existing knowledge,
and the preservation of knowledge, will be radically transformed by
emerging educational technology. As a result, the existing models of
learning will collapse and give way to personalization resulting in a
new model of higher education.
3. For the first time technology exists that will radically transform higher education.
Artificial Intelligence Expert Shares His Vision of the Future of Education
AI
will dramatically change the way we deliver healthcare, entertain
ourselves, conduct warfare and, of course, teach college students.
EDTECH: How fast is AI technology developing?
QUALLS: AI is going to come far more quickly than even I can predict.
Look at personal assistants: A year ago, they were nowhere, and they
are everywhere now. So, the changes are coming and they’re coming fast. I
tell people that AI is a wave, and it’s here now. You are either going
to surf that wave or it’s going to crash on you. It’s not going to be 10
years from now — it’s today.
EDTECH: Do people understand how fast these changes could arrive?
QUALLS: No, and that’s what scares me the most. I fear there will be a digital divide because people just weren’t thinking about AI.
Businesses will go out overnight, new businesses will be formed, some
people will be left behind just because they are so afraid of the
technology. I believe millennials and future generations will adapt.
It’s the previous generation I am not so sure about.
EDTECH: Big Data can be
overwhelming without a method of analyzing the data to determine what it
tells you to do. Is that why AI is so valuable?
QUALLS: That’s what drove the military to embrace
AI. They have sensor technologies on drones, but you have 18-year-old
kids who can’t read or understand the data coming in. That’s where we
can introduce our AI and say, “There is an explosive right there on that
road,” or “There is something going on over here.” Now that soldier is
equipped with the tools and the right information. He’s not trying to
interpret the data, because it takes a guy who’s got 50 years of experience to look at that data and understand it. So we take his knowledge and put that inside of an AI system.
Look at what Facebook is doing with targeted ads. Companies like
Amazon are trying to use AI to figure out what kind of shopping
experience they can give you. Can we eliminate shopping and give you the
product you need at any given time? That’s what Amazon is trying to do
with the Dash buttons. Once they have enough data, they can start giving you products you never even thought about.
You can’t go anywhere or do anything nowadays without interacting with
some form of AI. You may not recognize it as AI, but it’s there.
EDTECH: Is AI a form of thought, or just a series of mathematical algorithms?
QUALLS: I will probably make many AI people mad when I say that it’s just algorithms.
Recently, I was asked, “When will we see conscious AI?” That’s when you
interact with something and you can’t tell if it’s human or not — like
the Turing test. If you want to talk about a life form, it won’t be
created by a human. It will be AI systems writing new AI in ways we have
never thought about. That’s when you will have a system that’s thinking
on its own and forming its own agenda to do whatever it chooses to do.
Currently, there is no AI system on the planet that I know of that does
that.
There is high-end research trying to create an AI system that can create more AI systems,
but it’s still in infancy right now. I give that another five years
before you will start to see published results and some interesting
things, but will it be usable anytime soon? Probably not, because most
corporations have a task they need AI to do. You write a simple system
for that task, and it can’t branch out and do anything else. So, yes, AI
is still on the algorithm side. But, like I said, everything changes in a yearly cycle right now, so I could be completely wrong come next year.
EDTECH: What AI applications might we see in higher education?
QUALLS: You are going to see a massive change in
education from K–12 to the university. The thought of having large
universities and large faculties teaching students is probably going to
go away — not in the short-term, but in the long-term. You will have a
student interact with an AI system that will understand him or her and provide an educational path
for that particular student. Once you have a personalized education
system, education will become much faster and more enriching. You may
have a student who can do calculus in the sixth grade because AI
realized he had a mathematical sense. That personalized education is going to change everything.
Think about things the military has started to do. Instead of putting
a war fighter on the battlefield, they are using virtual reality
helmets to walk around cities to understand the cultural mindset of
wherever they are going. You can’t hire enough people to teach a war
fighter that, but an AI system can have thousands of those going at one
time. Now you’ve got a war fighter who understands the culture and the
background of the area he is going into, and that was AI teaching him.
That aspect of leveraging AI to teach is the next frontier of education.
EDTECH: What is the role of the educator in this scenario?
QUALLS: For the next 20 years, your professors will be there to step in when the AI is not ready. Eventually, we may go the way of the dinosaur. Our role may change from educating a student to educating an AI. Our role may become research-oriented,
while still paying attention to what’s happening to the AIs themselves.
You will probably see systems come online and students interacting with
them within 10 to 20 years. I have a daughter who is 2 months old, and I
think her education is going to be vastly different from anything we
sat through. I’m of the view that she will have a far better education.
EDTECH: If personalized
education becomes the norm, will we ask why we ever thought students
should all learn the same material, in the same way, at the same time?
QUALLS: When we look back, we will probably consider
that education out of the Dark Ages. If we could do one-on-one with our
students today, we would. But there are far more students than professors, and that’s where AI can come in.
I look at some of these lecture halls with 300 students in a class, and
I wonder, “Are they actually learning?” But resources are always a
problem. I think that’s what’s going to eventually drive AI to enter the
education workforce: necessity.
EDTECH: Is there anything human educators can provide that AI cannot?
QUALLS: Currently, yes. AI is still just algorithms. AI doesn’t have intuition. That’s what a human teacher can provide, so even if AI provides the bulk of the education, you will still have a human watching,
interacting with these systems, providing the intuition behind that AI.
But if you have massive amounts of students in your class, you are back
to square one: You can’t provide that one-on-one experience, so the AI
is just as good.
EDTECH: Are there any AI applications for public safety, which is a concern for college campuses?
QUALLS: There is research into allowing AI systems
to determine intent. For instance, if a large crowd of people is
gathering, what is the likelihood the crowd will turn violent? The idea
originated in the Iraq war, to help redirect troops from potentially
hostile operations. One area involves collecting meta information from
other sensors and social media — for example, the crowd may be gathering
for a celebration over a sports game. The second area is recognition
within crowd dynamics. Large groups of people can cause tight swirls to
form, causing people to become agitated, leading to people fighting and
spiraling out of control. Can an AI predict and locate hostile swirls
before they escalate?
EDTECH: In 2016, a Georgia
Institute of Technology professor used an AI personal assistant to
respond to routine questions, and students couldn’t tell the difference.
QUALLS: That’s nothing new. How many times have you
had a telemarketer call and you questioned whether you were speaking to a
human? Most telemarketers nowadays are glorified chatbots, and they are
very good. I like it when they call my house. I start asking weird
questions — that’s how you break these types of systems — and the
computer can’t figure out what to do, so it just hangs up on you. A
human operator will tell you off. You interact more with AI systems or chatbots than you may realize.
If you use a support chat online, most of the time an AI system is
answering your questions. When you interact with it, your questions are
very specific toward that chatbot, and that’s why it’s able to help you
pretty easily.
EDTECH: What about AI applications for campus transportation, such as driverless cars or shuttles?
QUALLS: This is an active discussion on most
campuses. The question is, would people ride in an autonomous vehicle?
The answer seems to be a 50 percent split. The people who say they will
not ride in an autonomous car say they must be in control of the vehicle
at all times. This is where I point out, have you flown in a plane in
the last five years? Most commercial airlines are on autopilot now.
There is potential for campus transportation to be autonomous,
but the private sector is beating the universities to the punch. Look
at what Uber is doing with autonomous cars. In the future, you’ll just
walk outside and pull up your phone, and the car is right there to take
you where you want to go. That’s what AI will do: It’s going to provide
services for us to make our lives better.
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Information Week: Business Innovation Powered by Technology:
Infostor: The Leading Source for Enterprise Storage Professionals;
Infrastructure Insite: Bringing IT Together;
Insurance Technology: Business Innovation Powered by Technology;
Integrated Solutions: For Enterprise Content Management;
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Tech Net: The Microsoft Journal for IT Professionals;
Tech Partner: Gain a Competitive Edge Through Solutions Providers;
Technology & Learning: Ideas and Tools for Ed Tech Leaders;
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A tax on toilet paper; I kid you not. According to the sponsor, "the Water Protection and Reinvestment Act will be financed broadly by small fees on such things as . . . products disposed of in waste water." Congress wants to tax what you do in the privacy of your bathroom.
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