Education – Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of cataclysms

“Human intelligence is underrated”

Longtime readers of this blog who may have tired of my ruminations about AI imposing absolute reign over humanity should be overjoyed to hear that I am dropping the apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence thread for the foreseeable future.

That’s because this article in New Scientist has put my fears (mostly) to rest, with one of the pioneers of Deep Learning, Yoshua Bengio, saying, “[the machines] don’t even have the intelligence of a 6-month-old.” He is even quoted as saying “AIs are really dumb”—essentially answering my very question. Thanks Yoshua!

Bengio expresses himself in deceptively simple language, but that’s an exercise in humility, because . . .

Bengio is a recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of computing,” which gives his opinions great authority. He’s one of the originators of “deep learning,” that combines advanced hardware with state-of-the-art software enabling machines to train themselves to solve problems. Bengios’s high standing is enough to persuade me not to worry to excess until a contradictory view by an equally qualified AI expert comes out. Most of those sounding alarms about AI Apocalypse are not computer scientists, no matter how smart they are. Elon Musk, for example, discovered that robots in his Tesla factory were making stupid mistakes, and concluded, “human intelligence is underrated.”

Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part III: Yes.”

Too much, too fast, too fragmented. Is there more to it?

Ever since the internet began to deluge our brains with an unceasing flow of information—meaning both raw data, and raw data given structure in the act of “informing”—intellectuals have been sounding alarms over the impacts on our thinking processes. There is a consensus, even among boosters of new data-heavy technology, that we need to take a hard look at those impacts and what they portend for the future of our society.

Nicholas Carr devoted a book to the subject in 2010, entitled The Shallows. His book begins with Carr’s self-observations on how his internet information-gathering practices have infused his thinking with a shorter attention span, lack of follow-through on reading material, and a propensity to jump to shaky inferences based on short, superficial snippets of information. He makes the case that these phenomena have spread throughout internet userdom (now, most of our society), to the detriment of deep comprehension and wisdom. (I’m not sure Carr used the word “wisdom”—it might sound a little sententious, and I read the book years ago—but if he didn’t use it I doubt he’d object to my imputing the idea to him.)

Carr—and many others preaching similar messages —puts an emphasis on distraction as the main threat to deeper thinking. How can you concentrate on any one train of thought when there are so many intercommunicating trains crowding the station, tempting you to hop on board via hyperlink? And take you to yet another crowded station with yet more bright and shiny hyperlinks?

How right is he? Is Carr’s examination of The Shallows too shallow?

Continue reading “Hijacking the Reading Circuit: Are Screens Robbing Children of Comprehension?”