Unmaking Sense

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”.

Episode 7.18: The world won’t change to make things easy; listen to your friends and neighbours.

Two takeaways from Darren McGarvey’s 2022 BBC Reith Lecture. 1: Don’t fall victim to the belief that you have to wait for the world to change before you can make headway in it. 2: Become an empowered individual and social voice that owns its agency by listening to what your local, distributed and global friends and neighbours suggest you can best say and do for them.

Episode 7.17: Beyond left-wing and right-wing alternatives. Darren McGarvey’s Reith Lecture 2022.

We need something better than the choices that we are currently presented between the left-wing and right-wing versions of human thriving. Darren McGarvey delivered the third of the 2022 BBC Reith lectures “Freedom from Want“ on Wednesday, December 14, 2022. There he speaks about a third way, which we pick up on in this episode.

Episode 7.16: Giving offence. What does it entail? Can and should it be avoided?

There are two sides to taking offence. One is the person who deliberately or inadvertently gives rise to offensiveness. The other is the person who finds someone else’s behaviour, whether or not it is deliberate, offensive. Here we deal with the first - with occasioning offence - or some aspects of it.

Episode 7.15: Mad, Bad or Sad: what’s the difference?

Someone who doesn’t share our choices of goods and values is likely to behave in ways that we find strange, possibly even unacceptable. Typical responses are to describe them as one or more of mad, bad or sad, but is there really a difference between the three? If someone behaves according to a set of rational principles that we do not understand because the choices choices upon which that rationality are based are different from ours, when are they not likely to appear any one or more of mad bad or sad?

Episode 7.14: Why are human beings violent, cruel, repressive of things that they don’t like?

Moving towards a potential central theme for another series: the origins of cruelty, violence and human destructiveness.