Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.10: How can we safeguard against the abuse of chatbots like chatGPT to control thinking?

When asked how Adolf Hitler would use AI, chatGPT answered “to manufacture better propaganda”. We consider the chilling implications.

Episode 8.09: How chatGPT facilitates personalised learning, assessment and accreditation.

The educational establishment will try to deny that personalised learning, assessment and accreditation are possible because they sound the death-knell of a multi-trillion dollar industry. But they will be good for humanity, and good for every individual enabled to define their own educational trajectory in pursuit of their own unique life without reference to an educational behemoth that tries to dictate what we should learn, at what level of difficulty and depth, in what order and when. We each become our own AlphaZero, effectively self-educating, learning what interests us at our own pace in our own time to whatever level of depth and difficulty we can manage.

Episode 8.08: How chatGPT heralds an unprecedented revolution in personalised education.

Since the dawn of human history, we have been forced to do education through older human beings teaching younger human beings what they know, often in institutional centres of learning. Until the invention of printing, access to resources was severely restricted both because of their scarcity, and because of their value, and only with the advent of the computer and the Internet has that really changed m. We no longer needed access to physical libraries then, and now we no longer need human experts because chat bots will be able to provide better information more quickly and a way that is far more tailored to the particular interests and abilities of each individual pupil. Assessment can similarly be personalised or even become unnecessary. The world of education has suddenly changed.

Episode 8.07: Why an AI like chatGPT makes mistakes. Some of the less obvious mistakes explained.

Further detail on why chatGPT and any other neural net AI will almost certainly make mistakes. Training data, overfitting, interpolating, inferring and generating errors by inference. Why increasing the complexity of a model to avoid such problems may allow the neural net to overfit to include noise in the training data, and so introduce another source of potential error.

Episode 8.06: The Singularity and the significance of OpenAI’s chatGPT in the debate about it.

We discuss three kinds of singularity before turning to “The Singularity” in terms of superhuman intelligence and solving intractable problems.

Episode 8.05: ChatGPT isn’t a program, doesn’t store facts in words, and makes mistakes. Explained!

We look at some of the ways in which the chatbot doesn’t operate like an ordinary program such as some of us would know how to write. It doesn’t store information in atomic units, such as the name of the 44th president of the United States. And it does make mistakes, even though it claims that it can’t. We explain all these things, and indeed, why it makes mistakes, and how to some extent they are unavoidable given the way in which a neural net operates.

Episode 8.04: AI chatbots like chatGPT mark a sea-change comparable to the invention of printing.

A potted history of language, printing, computing and why AI chatbots like OpenAI’s chatGPT mark a major shift in human history akin to the invention of printing.

Episode 8.03: Changing from an individual-based world view to a collaborative world-view. ChatGPT.

Education has been based upon an assumption of the individual as the fundamental unit, but we are now seeing an enforced shift to a collaborative model. How chatGPT illustrates the principle and moves us in that direction.

Episode 8.02: More reflections on OpenAI’s chatGPT and more on what it means for education.

We look at analogies with speech to text software since the 1990s, and see how sooner or later this kind of technology will be integrated into human learning and the way human beings conduct themselves, and we argue that the conservative educational response of wanting to re-trench in the ways that we have been educating for the past few thousand years are mistaken and shortsighted; they could ultimately lead to the end of, the death of institutional education as we know it.

Episode 8.01: OpenAI’s AI chatGPT and implications for human learning and education.

Reflections on recent conversations with the OpenAI chatbot called chatGPT: implications for the motivation to learn; why learning this way is better than learning from some humans; why we need knowledge inside our heads, not elsewhere on a server to be accessed “just in time”.