Yes, I think developing empathy and the ability to see things from other perspectives should be a major goal of education in a pluralistic world. You do that with stories and relationships with people who are different, not by mastering information.
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From my perspective Consciousness and the soul have been the great discussion of many religions and teachings through time and we should focus on understanding this. At the end of the day Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life no comes to the Father but through Christ. Blessings.
Yes, I agree with you that AI using the socratic method would be a very effective tool for teaching. I also see advantages for independent tutoring that will allow those that excel to progress while others like me would plow through it at my own pace, Just the same, I still believe that it would be better to limit screen time of any kind for the first 8 years or so and focus on the arts creative expression visualization and imagination developing emotional and intuitive intelligence.
Of course, it can be a drug like video games, or it can be an inspiration. They can ātalkā to AI and express their ideas and AI can shape and mold them into exciting adventures. AI can channel a childs ideas into mainstream thought or it can show them where thier ideas hold merit and how to explore those ideas everyone else thinks is a useless. Imagine if that idea even you think your child has is childish and it turns into a new theory of science?
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Well, I am not sure that it is working right now. Test scores are down and there are physical and mental health issues with our children like never before. I agree that we need to evaluate what is working and what is not particularly with AI in mind. I think that when we consider the environment that we grew up was very different than the environment that children now face. Perhaps in many ways that environment that we grew up in was a more natural one for development than the environment we are now exposing our children. This current environment may pose significant challenges to a significant portion of the youth unable to adapt to this environment particularly if we are just pushing STEM as not everyone is meant to be a scientist or engineer.
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I agree with you. Nothing can replace a great teacher. We all know that a vast majority of communication is unspoken. A great teacher has a passion and magnetism that draws us in and connects with the student. I like you have been blessed with a number of great teachers through my life for which I am grateful!
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great post Christyā¦this is a topic where I am in total agreement with you.
Its just a really shame that technology must be defended against conspiracy theoriesā¦we could all do that with pretty much anything if life i think. There is so much good that can be done with AI, just that the famous one liner is so very true here
āwith great power comes great responsibilityā
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given that research is now largely digital, how do you suppose that library of knowledge is to be accessed if not with AI? (fundamentally, it doesnt really do the work for you anymore than a dictionary does)
An easier example might be a calculatorā¦it just makes a task much faster to complete with more consistent accuracy. However, it only spits out based on what the user inputs. Obviously the aim is to attempt to program error out of the response in a similar fashion to spell and grammar checkers ā¦thats the idea.
The Socratic method isnt the issue hereā¦AI doesnt choose which method ones usesā¦its a tool. Its not making abstract moral choices here, thats still up to the user.
Its going to be pretty difficult for an AI to make moral choices when data scientists code the AI in the first place and the way humans actually use it is still fundamental to the AI decision making process!
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One weakness in teaching is that the kids do not get a sufficient amount of individual support. The best pupils can cope in all circumstances but many need individual tutoring. Public schools cannot afford a sufficient number of good teachers. There would be a need to have at least two per class room, the other teaching the class, the other(s) helping pupils that need more guidance to understand or to concentrate.
A well planned personal AI assistant might help some of the pupils that need more individual guidance. AI can be a very tolerant assistant, so no fear that the assistant gives up when learning takes time. That would be a potential task where AI could make a difference when there is not enough of resources for hiring humans.
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Consciousness and the soul are not where preschool and elementary children are at. They are concrete thinkers. Better to focus on what it looks like to be kind, what it looks like to care about justice, and how to notice what is beautiful.
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AI uses the method built into it. There has already been AI built to do certain kinds of counseling/therapy that uses methods very similar to the Socratic (and some is turning out to be more effective than human therapists manage!).
Moral choices? Iām not sure how that applies. Socratic teaching has next to nothing to do with morals.
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I couldnāt make it as a public school teacher; my ideal class size was between four and twelve students, not thirty (or even thirty-six as in one of my classes when student teaching).
This is something I really liked about the packet-learning-based school I visited near Chicago: studentsā standings on the various subjects were posted, and any student who was having trouble could grab someone who was at least a half dozen packets ahead and ask for help. It turned all advanced students into tutors, which helped both tutor and tutee!
I can see that working with that packet school, where a tutor canāt figure out how to get something across so the two students go to the AI for help.
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Thank you. This is an interesting point about the imaginative process and visualization. my question is whether internal visualization say by reading a book and visualizing the books story is the same as the external visualization maybe more just perception that would occur in the AI generated story? Would this have the same impact on the brains wiring and connectivity? Consider someone like Einstein that had a extreme developed brain wiring from his youth that was able to generate and visualize his famous thought experiments? Or what about all the art and even poetry that AI is now generating? Can this be said to be developed from the individual and would it benefit the individuals brains development?
Of course teaching or discussing consciousness and the soul in the younger age is not appropriate. That is a lifetime thing! however the overall goal with an overall understanding ofvconsciousness should be to create an individual that is optimally prepared to expand their consciousness and soul through their life. Definitely basic moral ethics and principles of good and evil should be taught all through their education. I like the traditional method that has been done for thousands of years of storytelling like mythology from all cultures around the world that generates empathy visualization and understanding. What I am calling emotional intelligence is really the heart that the Bible and many other teachings discuss its importance. It is essential for our education to develop this emotional intelligence by the means that I have described to prepare the Way for a higher consciousness in humanity.
AI doesnāt ācreateā anything. It repackages data and imitates the products of human creativity. If AI is fed good quality human generated material, it can now produce pretty good replicas of it. Some of those replicas can be useful. I think the real cause for alarm is the way AI companies (run by human intelligence) are stealing intellectual property and ignoring the permissions and informed consent for use on existing data sets as they scrape the internet for content to train their AI on.
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This is a very specific example, but I think it describes a best case situation. Best case scenario is that generative AI simply becomes another way of expediting intellectual labor, kind of the same way that most students beyond a certain grade level use a calculator for most of their calculations even though they were taught to calculate earlier. An example of this with AI could be that, at first, students are required to write essays on their own so they know what a good essay looks like and how to recognize a good argument. After a certain grade level, above which they are expected to have this skills, it will be expected that they are using generative AI to expedite their work the same way we assume high school and college math students are expected to use calculators. This would of course require English teachers to be more clear about the actual value of writing essays and figure out how to crackdown on students cheating with generative AI (require in-class essays without internet with only pencil and paper?). The value of knowing how to write and form an argument is something I think has not been communicated well, which is why so many students just use generative AI to write their essays.
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Yes, I totally agree that an AI tutor can be extremently valuable to helping both the less and more advanced students progress. I really like the idea of using students to group interact for all subjects. I dont like competition until much later but just evaluation of achievement. We have to understand that student will have certain predispositions some for math, some will be more emotionally intelligent preferring the arts and some will have a greater imagination and visualization skills and the early childs education should focus more on the the later two.
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One (significant?) difference I see though is that humans (again - in ābest caseā) are generally held responsible for information they disseminate, at least in broad strokes of cultural expectation. Sure - the āwhataboutistsā can kick into high gear with all the high profile exceptions to this these days all the way up to the top of our present regime itself; but I think my broad point still applies that if I lie to or even mistakenly mislead somebody, I can be confronted with and held responsible for my deceipt or my error. But an AI is not considered a human agent, and the culture doesnāt assign any moral responsibility to it. And since it is not any kind of moral agent (that we know of) I no longer have any recourse to holding it personally responsible for information I get from it, like I can expect to apply to a human source. So any responsibility then falls to the receiver to ācheck upā on what they learn from an AI. And how often is that done?
Unlike a calculator giving me a wrong sum, which I should be able to verify and fix on the spot, trying to check an AIās bias in how or what information it chooses to share with you may not be a trivial task, or one that even an average educated person could easily suss out in any thorough-going way. Fact-checking is one thing - and how do we even just go about that without going to Google - i.e. - just a different AI? But ābias checkingā for most of us will just be a reflex response of checking to see if it offends our own personally preferred biases that we ourselves have. So ā¦ yeah ā¦ thatās gonna work! (/sarcasm).
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You raise another interesting Thing about AI creating eXciting adventures like an avatar personal video game. We are already seeing AI chatboxes being used by people for companions, friends and confidants for emotional support and more. Metaās Mark Zuckerberg has been developing an artificial reality world he calls the Metaverse that he would like to get people sucked into this artificial fantasy world very much like we saw in āReady player oneā. Once again this artificial reality meta verse world and artificial friends will de humanize and degrade humanity from our natural path of development.
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I realized the potential usefulness of AI āartā a couple of weeks ago, just before the Sunday service.
The person responsible for the computer and video asked if the speaker giving the talk (sermon) had a picture with the title of the talk to project on the wall. The speaker told ānoā but a pastor stepped in and asked about the topic and outline of the sermon. The speaker told that she will utilize the case in the scriptures where the widow in Zarephtah gives a small loaf of bread to prophet Elijah (1 Kings 17:8-16).
Within a minute, we had the first picture versions of a hand with a bread, drawn by an AI. The first versions gave us good laughs but with a couple of additional instructions, the picture became usable. Our main problem was that we did not remember what was the English name of the type of bread used in that area (the AI demanded instructions in English). As we were in a hurry and did not have time to search for the correct word, we decided to use the name āpitaā. So, we got a realistic picture of a hand of an old widow giving a small pita bread. The sleeve on the arm looked like a cloth that the widow in Zarephtah could have used.
Making and adjusting that picture to be the title picture of the talk took less than five minutes. Most of that time went to trying to find the correct words for instructions to the AI, so that we could get such a picture we wanted. The picture demanded only a few correct words to describe to the AI what kind of picture we wanted.
After that incident, I understood why the pastor always has nice pictures on the slides of his talks. Yesterday, he talked about the difference between the āfamily treesā of Adam and Jesus. The picture included two trees side by side, the other an autumn tree that looked almost withered and leafless, the other a vigorous tree of early summer, with background clouds and lights such that they emphasized the differences between the two trees. Probably did not take many minutes to ask such a picture from the AIā¦
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