Peter believes “we owe the next generation” what he calls “AI-powered education.” He explains how it can already work using the example of Khan Academy and the personal story of a young woman from Afghanistan named Sultana. It’s a great story!

Alongside healthcare, I can’t think of another field more in need of reinvention than education. Some teachers and schools have come out saying that using generative AI tools is a form of cheating, and others have banned them altogether. But as Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque notes:

“Education isn’t about competition. We made it a competition. It’s about actuation.”

An alternative vision of education powered by AI is about the learning process becoming more personalized and effective.

Revolutionizing How We Learn

Imagine a future where every student has their own personalized AI that is customized for them and looks out for them. Are you a visual learner? Do you learn best through listening? Are you dyslexic?

Imagine an AI that uses an iPad’s forward-looking camera to study a student’s facial expressions as a lesson is being delivered. If the student looks confused or bored, the AI can change tack, adjusting the lesson accordingly from a different point of view, or at a different level of complexity.

Imagine a future where a teacher’s AI assistant adapts to each student’s learning style and pace, offering personalized education, and incorporating a student’s favourite sports stars or movie stars into the curriculum. It can track a given student’s progress, identify trouble areas, and optimize on the fly.

Beyond AI alone, the combination of AI and VR together promises to make learning “experiential” and “immersive,” delivering lessons that are unforgettable and hyper-personalized.

I remember as a child going to Greek School to learn about my heritage, and then at MIT taking a course on ancient cultures covering Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Whatever way you cut it, reading historical textbooks about philosophy is difficult at best. Imagine instead, entering an interactive VR world set in ancient Greece, surrounded by a vibrant Agora, encircled by bustling crowds, lively debates, and the grand architecture of a flourishing city-state at the pinnacle of its cultural and intellectual achievements.

As you traverse the cobblestone pathways, an arresting figure captures your attention. Seated on a marble plinth, an elderly man exudes an air of wisdom. His physique is draped in the unadorned elegance of a white toga, a white beard frames his gaze. With a graceful rise, he beckons you forward and extends his hand. “Greetings, traveller,” he proclaims with a genial smile, “I am Socrates, your guide here in Athens. May I show you around and answer your questions?” Embracing his invitation, you find yourself wandering alongside the philosopher, meandering through the vibrant streets. As you walk, Socrates, with a storyteller’s flair, illustrates the daily routines of Athenian life, while recounting local politics and recent history. He guides you towards the Acropolis that rises like a crown above the city and introduces you to his many friends and pupils as you walk.

The generative AI imagery and experience are so immersive and compelling that you forget you’re in VR. It feels more like a real-life experience. Perhaps most importantly, everything this AI version of Socrates says and does is driven by a fully validated large language model (LLM) built upon historical consensus.

In this fashion, AI in partnership with VR will allow us to experience the greatest moments in human history ranging from the signing of the Declaration of Independence alongside Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to walking on the surface of the Moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Sultana’s Story

When I think about digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing education, one of the most impactful stories I’ve ever heard was told to me by Sal Khan, Founder and CEO of Khan Academy.

Sometimes a single individual’s story can best exemplify the power of a new technology to transform a field. This is one such story about a young girl in Afghanistan named Sultana who used Khan Academy to educate herself and change the course of her life. Sultana grew up in Afghanistan, and when the Taliban took over her town, they forbade all the young girls from going to school. Khan Academy became her lifeline. She studied everything from elementary school math to algebra and trigonometry, eventually moving on to physics, chemistry, and other subjects. Without access to school or teachers, she used Khan Academy’s free online lessons and courses, all from the safety of her home.

Here’s how Sultana later described the experience in a 2021 article in The Economist:

“Armed with an iPad, the internet and a free education website called Khan Academy, I taught myself English. And philosophy. And math. And science. And history. I wanted to understand the world in every way possible, and my place in it. Solving math problems gave structure to the uncertain world I was living in, even if just in my head. I felt liberated when I first learned to make a graph of a linear equation. On the page, drawing a two-dimensional coordinate plane and graphing an equation, the world was in my control.”

Sultana then decided that she wanted to be a theoretical physicist in the United States. So, she smuggled herself into Pakistan to take the SAT because the test wasn’t offered in Afghanistan. She passed. Soon after, she was admitted to Arizona State University, graduating with honours!

Where’s Sultana now? She’s currently a member of the research faculty at Tufts University studying quantum computing.

Since Sultana’s success, the Khan Academy has super-charged its platform using generative AI powered by GPT-4 from OpenAI. The new product is called Khanmigo, an AI-powered teaching assistant, that can amplify the power to educate and ultimately help humanity enable many more Sultanas in our future.

Announced in March 2023, Khanmigo adopts an AI-powered Socratic, narrative-driven approach to engage students. It promises to make learning easier and more efficient, functioning as a personal tutor that engages students interactively, assisting with meaningful exercises, diagnosing mistakes and encouraging understanding over memorization.

Khanmigo is designed to understand students’ reasoning, a departure from traditional rote methods of learning. It contextualizes learning to a student’s interest, asking probing questions to reveal practical applications of academic concepts.

Khanmigo’s integration into the educational process is showcased through interactive features such as reading comprehension aids, AI memory for ongoing interactions, and narrative progress reports. Future updates will soon include voice interaction and multi-user activities.

Khanmigo is not a replacement for human teachers. Instead, it serves as an assistant to educators, allowing them to focus on fostering critical human skills such as judgment and creativity. It also provides recorded AI conversations for review, while supporting grading, lesson planning, and providing personalized guidance, aiming to reduce teacher workload.

Why This Matters

Given how fast everything is changing, we need to keep the world from revolting at the rate of disruption. This means giving people access to high-quality education and helping them believe that they have a future that is compelling and abundant. AI in education creates a compelling way to teach and learn, independent of where you live and how wealthy you are. If that’s not democratization in learning, what is?

What follows comes from the pen of Professor Ioannis Pitas who is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis lab at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. He believes a large number of academics, scientists and business people are demonstrating technophobia in response to the emergence of LLMs.

Professor Pitas’ is also the Board Chair of AIDA, the AI Doctoral Academy, a global portal where you can find the latest AI research. He believes the current work on AI should continue, but what is needed is for all of us including the laypeople, academics, scientists, and those in business to become better educated so we can embrace what this technological advance brings to the collective table for all humanity.

I have taken the substance of Professor Pitas’ submission to present to you and welcome your comments. Remember, this is the first part in the AI conversation. So more will follow.

Overcoming AI Technophobia

Currently, there is a public surge of interest in AI topics, especially in Large Language Models, like ChatGPT. This is not a random development.

AI is here to stay and will have huge social and economic implications, seen as both a blessing and a curse. In view of its potential dangers, many AI scientists have expressed concern over AI developments that border on technophobia. But there is a means of defending ourselves from the dark side of AI as expressed in dystopian science fiction.

What can be done? One approach which many are advocating is to apply guardrails and regulations to AI development, something that the publisher of this blog site has written about and advocated. But I believe a better approach would be to educate the public about AI to know the risk and benefits.

Citizen Morphosis 

AI is a technology that has arisen out of humanity’s response to an increasingly complex, globally interconnected world, and to the crises in our natural and human-engineered environments. The growth process of physical and social complexity is deep and seemingly unstoppable.

Today, data increases exponentially while knowledge grows linearly. This has to change. The need to make knowledge grow exponentially through educating the public is what I call “citizen morphosis,” citizen formation, a Greek term that emphasizes the need to equip all of us with critical thinking, precise multimodal communication skills, imagination, and emotional intelligence. This morphosis will give us the means to understand, adapt, and ultimately harness the tremendous technological and economic possibilities that lie ahead in the 21st century.

Our need to change how we are educated permeates all levels of society. It is simply not sustainable that one-third of humanity understands and benefits from scientific progress, while the remaining two-thirds are impoverished and technophobic. All should reap the benefits of knowledge including the people of the Global South and North, or we may eventually face a catastrophic social implosion similar to what happened with the demise of Rome and the dawning of the Middle Ages in Europe.

Fortunately, the basic concepts necessary for understanding AI and Information Sciences (e.g., data similarity, clustering, classification) are simple and can be taught at all educational levels. If properly taught, these concepts can easily be grasped.

But to change education requires political will and follow through from primary grades to secondary and post-secondary, and then through ongoing learning after joining the working world.

Today, many countries have adopted STEM curricula. STEM stands for the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But mathematics needs to go beyond sciences and engineering and into the humanities. Mathematics has a place in the social sciences. And so does another subject, informatics.

The term informatics is usually associated with computer science, but in this case, informatics embraces far more than bits and bytes, code, and circuit boards. That’s why I propose the creation of Schools of Information Science that feature departments that cover informatics, mathematics, computer Engineering, AI science and engineering, and Internet/Web science.

In China, as you can see by the graph at the top of this article, there are already post-secondary undergraduate programs embracing AI in far greater quantity than anywhere else on the planet.

But what I propose goes beyond teaching AI courses. There needs to be a fundamental shift to information and knowledge in an independent subject called Information Science and Engineering to be treated on an equal level as learning the hard sciences like physics and chemistry. We have to expand the past association of the word informatics beyond computer science to encompass for example AI and Network/Web science and engineering. This new Information Science and Engineering curricula will be the mother science of all other information-related disciplines.

If you question this fundamental principle, let me remind you that in the 19th century, the move away from classical education and the physical sciences to engineering gave birth to our modern world.

Humanities Should Mine the Mind

I further propose a creation within humanities curricula of courses that mathematize the social sciences. Currently, the humanities face the greatest pressure from AI advances (ChatGPT can write an essay, a book report, a test, and more, and get pretty good grades). Indeed, the mathematization of classical subjects such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology would lead to new curricula such as philology/linguistic science and engineering, social science and engineering, and more. Being a fan of classical studies, though an engineer by training, I believe there is merit in retaining non-STEM studies, but with a twist.

The health sciences need to be rethought to incorporate advances in bioscience and engineering with new curricula covering subjects like genetic engineering and systems biology.

And there should be mandatory courses on mathematics and computer science in all the sciences. Simply, one or two courses in statistics or programming do not meet current needs.

Given the inertia of the global educational system, I am not naive to believe that such ideas can be implemented without pushback or overnight. But I am hoping that in starting this conversation it will reach the eyes of political leaders, academicians in universtieis and colleges, and those in the business world globally so that we can generate a society where knowledge growth keeps up with technological advances to embrace what is best in them to help humanity progress in the 21st century and beyond.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intimidating to many people, let alone children. To explain it clearly to the latter, it is best to use real examples that kids understand. This can be accomplished using three simple steps:

1. Define AI
2. Provide good examples
3. Direct them to sites to investigate

Defining AI

AI is a computer program capable of accomplishing a task that requires intelligence. The type of tasks we are talking about are something a person or intelligent animal can do such as learning, planning, and problem-solving.

Provide Good Examples

The most relevant AI applications for children to understand are computer games. Children are adept at playing games, and it is most likely a popular activity for all ages. Take for example:

Pac-Man, unquestionably this game is a timeless classic and lots of fun. It needs no introduction to most children. The game set is a maze. The human player takes control of Pac-Man, whose mission is to consume all the dots within the maze while avoiding four different ghosts.

It’s worth noting that the four ghosts each have their personality governed by the AI built into the software. Binky, the red ghost, is the boss and always follows Pac-Man. Pinky, aptly pink, is sluggish but can predict Pac-Man’s moves to lay in ambush. Inky, the cyan ghost, is shy and follows Binky. Finally, Clyde, the orange ghost, is timid and flees as soon as Pac-Man approaches. 

Pac-Man is a basic game, but the AI’s actions may be seen and understood in practice. Most other computer games contain include similar AI capabilities. An AI controls the opposing team in computer football games like FIFA. Characters in simulation games like The Sims are also handled by AI. AI is pretty much in almost every game that children and adults play.

Help Children to Learn More Through Online Investigation

AI may very well be the most powerful technology ever invented by humans. Many in the field refer to it as the “new electricity.” And just like electricity, it can without knowledge prove to be potentially deadly. That is why children need to understand AIs strengths and limitations and learn to use it as a tool. 

There are numerous online resources for parents to introduce the subject to children. Search engines are a good place to start. A good article for parents to read that I found is entitled, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: A Guide for Parents, written by Nisha Talagala in 2019. It remains relevant today. It covers all the essentials including:

• What exactly is AI.
• AI neural networks versus biological intelligence
• .How AI learns compared to humans.
• The need for proper data to train AIs.
• What AIs excel at including image recognition, medical diagnostics, and gaming.
• What current AIs find challenging including understanding emotions, or dealing with unexpected events.
• AI challenges such as autonomous car decision-making.
• Whether AI poses a threat to human jobs.
• The use of AI in military applications.

How AI is Changing The Role of Teachers

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2025, many businesses will have adopted machine learning, a type of AI, to help them in the provision of services, the creation of products, and in promotion. That is why the business sector is turning to educators to develop curricula and skillsets focused on both STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) as well as non-cognitive soft skills. Microsoft has forecasted that advancements in AI will likely generate substantial disruptions within the global workforce, with automation replacing impacting 50% of jobs in the United States alone. 

That’s why it is important to get students working with AI as early as in elementary grades. Many children are already familiar with digital technology before beginning school which should make it easier to introduce the skillsets they will need in the digital workplace they will enter in the future.

Great links to visit include the Educational AI Resources for Children with a wealth of resources. For younger children try Bricks4Kidz. If businesses want to keep up the children try the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme. 

AI Nannies in Our Future

There has been much discussion about how robots will take over jobs and our lives. It has even gotten to the point where some are looking to hire them as nannies. Although I would not want a robot as a nanny for my children, the recent talk given by Bill Gates at AI Forward 2023, has the former co-founder of Microsoft talking about AI assistants in our and our children’s future. 

The qualities a robot lacks include emotion and empathy. A current state-of-the-art robot can carry out tasks it is trained to do. A Deep Learning robot can learn by studying vast amounts of unstructured data to teach itself. But having a nanny AI that is not living is not my ideal. Although a robot will always be on time, you won’t have to pay it, and it will always be accessible to fit with your schedule, these abilities do not outweigh the disadvantages.

Having said that, in China where there is a scarcity of nannies, don’t be surprised to see robotic versions soon. Chinese researchers are already putting robots in charge of looking after embryos in artifical wombs. Why not have them care for babies after birth?

A 2021 article appearing in Wired, entitled The Future of Robot Nannies, describes how children may learn to love an AI robot even when the latter isn’t programmed for emotional attachment to them. What the robot can do is read to a child, or determine how it feels by using algorithms designed to interpret facial expressions. 

Editor’s Note: Pepper, a robot from Softbank Robotics can do exactly what Mark describes in his last sentence of this posting. Is this getting creepy or what? 

In today’s world, the places to go to gain knowledge after high school are the tens of thousands of universities and colleges around the globe. The Centre for World University Rankings lists 19,788 of these institutions in 2022. That’s a lot of institutions of higher learning. So with all of this brain power, why haven’t we cured cancer, beaten malaria, solved world hunger, and collectively solved global warming just to name a few remaining challenges?

As much as university academics collaborate in doing studies and experiments together, the driving force behind all this higher learning is a competition to attract students, find financial backers, support endowments, and gather the brightest minds or best athletes for bragging rights. Do these activities help to tackle global challenges in the most effective way? No!

The Idea of a Global University

At the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, a Brazilian professor and climatologist, Carlos Nobre, suggested in a speech that “What the World Needs Now” (sorry to steal your song title, Burt Bacharach, who recently passed away) is a university for all the planet, an institution that he believes should be situated in his home country. He wants to call it the Amazon Institute of Technology (AMIT) and locate it in the heart of “the lungs of the planet,” the Amazon Rainforest. AMIT would be a physical and virtual gathering place for the best and brightest researchers, scientists, educators, policymakers, and social activists from around the world. Its singular focus would be to address climate change from every angle.

Another academic upon hearing this idea likened it to President John F. Kennedy’s speech in September 1962 when he proclaimed that America needed to aspire to a bigger challenge stating,

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

He continued.

“We choose to go to Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.”

Placing a global university in the heart of the largest remaining rainforest on Earth is a daunting challenge without tackling climate change. It will be hard, not easy as Kennedy proclaimed. It will be powerfully symbolic because saving the Amazon is an important step in the fight to mitigate climate change, a mission we cannot afford to see fail.

Presenting the idea to the attendees of WEF, many of them billionaires, and many political leaders and policymakers, Nobre was speaking to the right target audience. Money and the power to make things happen all resided in that room.

Until now annual meetings like COP, the G7, the G20, and WEF have not led to actions that can solve global warming. If anything these annual gatherings contribute to the problem when attendees fly in from all around the world, many on private jets. And lots of good words are spoken, good intentions expressed, and then very little happens.

As Nobre envisions, AMIT would be a small ecological footprint university but a giant collaborative learning and problem-solving institution. It would include along with those willing to learn, multi-disciplinary experts and the brightest minds to exchange research and knowledge freely for the purpose of achieving clearly defined targeted goals. And it would include people and governments with deep pockets prepared to pay.

AMIT would be a place of concentrated, fast-paced innovation designed to bring the best scientific and technological advances to the global community faster than the way we currently see progress in traditional academia.

What comes out of AMIT would be globally shared. Where Kennedy used the Cold War competition between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the motivator to achieve the Moon landing, AMIT’s motivation would be the preservation of global civilization, humanity and the planet regardless of nationality.

Finding the Money for a Global University

AMIT funding would come from national governments, existing university endowment grants, corporate sponsors, non-government organizations (NGOs), and wealthy philanthropists from around the world. The money would help to bankroll moonshots, novel technologies and research aimed at saving Earth. AMIT would be supported by other universities that would lend their best and brightest. It would have the backing of private and government research laboratories, and businesses that would be working to turn the best ideas into the best solutions.

Much of what is needed to make AMIT a reality is already in place through a universal and ubiquitous Internet. Creating this global university would give the planet a 21st-century pathway to achieve the moonshot of this generation: a contract to save civilization and life on Earth. And what better place could there be for such an institution to come into existence than the Amazon rainforest?

Envisioneering involves critiquing science fiction and extrapolating from it a future containing design elements of a universe not yet here.

Futurecrafting involves analyzing science fiction and finding examples of compelling technologies that could become real.

The topical coverage of this course included the future of matter, energy, medicine, food, cities, brains, emerging nations, sex/gender, commerce, politics, transport, aging, entertainment, design, religion, and more.

Students were asked to read a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy books and watch a number of films. Discussions in class introduced concepts such as digital fabrication, machine vision, speculative design, blockchain technology, mobility, learning, socio-tech, smart wear, interface design, machine learning, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.

I have read science fiction from a very early age. My first exposure was to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. As I entered my teen years my bookshelf was filled with Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke novels and short stories.

When Stanley Kubrick gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Steven Spielberg, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was in my element. For me, these books and movies were more than an attempt for me to escape the reality of the present, but an affirmation of what could be in the future.

Star Trek in its many iterations populated its stories with future stuff, some of it, eerily similar to inventions that soon appeared in my present. It seemed science fiction could turn imagination into invention like nothing before. The Star Trek communicator of the 23rd century became the flip phone of the 20th. The health-tracking apps of today’s smartphones very much mimic the Star Trekkian Tricorder.

An entire industry has arisen in recent times, through the XPrize and similar global competitions focused on futurecrafting solutions to intractable problems. Many are inspired by science fiction and have produced breakthrough technologies.

That’s what futurecrafting is all about, working on the big problems of our time, exploring and prototyping to address challenges like curing disease, solving climate change, living on other worlds, communicating with non-human intelligence both animate and inanimate (AI) right here on Earth, and searching and finding intelligence and technical civilizations elsewhere beyond our planet.

A friend of mine, Chris Smedley, is in the process of developing a Futurecrafting Earth primer. His goal is to engage people around the world who seek to change the planet through positive collaborative solutions with purpose and inspired by science fiction.

“What begins as a story, a fantasy can be turned into a reality,” states Chris in the preamble of his primer. He has been in pursuit of the future for much of his life and is the creator of the founder of Digital Habitats. The goal is to stage content related to the futurecrafting of Earth and the launch of the World Builders Guild.

In a call to action as if it were coming from beyond Earth, Chris has issued an urgent help wanted by the third planet from the Sun in the Solar System, a place called Earth. He notes that the primary technologically advanced species on this planet, known as homo sapiens or humans, are in notable distress and in need of assistance to solve planet-threatening problems including:

• through population growth and exploitation of natural resources humans have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet to continue to maintain their civilization,
• the activity of humans is causing global climate change and threatening other species with extinction,
• through human conflict and negative interactions, lethal weapons capable of destroying the advanced technological civilization these humans have created represent another extinction threat.

Scientific and Medical Journals Respond to ChatGPT

The kerfuffle over ChatGPT’s use has roiled the waters of science and technology publications. In an editorial appearing on January 31, 2023, the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) and the JAMA Network, addressed the implications of non-human authorship and ChatGPT specifically.

In instructions to author submissions, JAMA asked for full disclosure on any content created where a tool to assist in the writing was used. (Does that include spell and grammar checkers?)

JAMA asked that the information regarding ChatGPT use should appear in the acknowledgements and describe how the content was created or edited. If another language modelling tool was used, it should also be revealed.

Having said that JAMA’s publisher noted that submissions created using AI should be discouraged. Going beyond ChatGPT, it also discouraged the use of AI tools to produce images appearing in submitted papers. It concluded that AI tools are “transformative, disruptive technologies” that “create promise and opportunities as well as risks and threats for all involved in the scientific enterprise.” Obviously, the perceived threat in JAMA’s estimation outweighed the promise.

The journals Science and Nature have also introduced rules for the use of generative AI with ChatGPT mostly in mind. Science warns researchers that they could be charged with professional misconduct if they submit manuscripts that use ChatGPT or any other large language AI model.

In its editorial policies, Science states “text generated from AI, machine learning, or similar algorithmic tools, cannot be used in papers published in Science.” It doesn’t even want to consider crediting ChatGPT in authorship. Nature states it will not accept any paper that lists ChatGPT or other AI software as contributors. It goes on to describe the need for full disclosure when using any large language model (LLM) tool. Both Science and Nature describe the use of ChatGPT in works submitted as “plagiarism” noting the need for full accountability based on the principle that all submissions must be human-created original works.

Are Governments Missing in Action on ChatGPT?

Is ChatGPT among other technological and disruptive innovations outracing the guardrails of regulatory oversight? No government agency or committee in the U.S. and Canada today is looking at the implications of ChatGPT entering the public realm.

In October of last year, the U.S. Office of Science & Technology Policy issued its blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. OpenAI hadn’t yet revealed ChatGPT to the public. Hence, nothing in this Bill of Rights references large language models. The document acknowledges that unchecked algorithms can be problematic and focuses on:

• ensuring that AI usage is safe and effective,
• that its usage doesn’t lead to discriminatory acts against people,
• that the data it parses isn’t used for abusive purposes,
• that when it is used by designers there must be full disclosure,
• and that if used, there should be opting-out provisions.

I think in light of ChatGPT the Bill of Rights needs to be updated.

In a very different type of response to the arrival of ChatGPT, an article in the January 26, 2023 issue of The Conversation, asked if an outright universal LLM ban makes sense. It posed a question. Couldn’t the incorporation of this type of tool enhance the quality of academic papers and journalism? The article suggested that a ChatGPT or other LLM could be used to generate acceptable content to help organize and explain material more cogently than a human author alone. It went on to state that with the arrival of AI LLMs “there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle” so why not embrace the technology rather than rejecting it outright? It argued that a tool like ChatGPT “could help democratize the research process.”

Detecting ChatGPT in Authored Works

The Register took a different stance in an article it published this week that posed the question, “Can editors and publishers detect text generated by LLMs?”

Coming up with an AI LLM detector has become the goal of the editors of both Science and Nature, as well as many universities, colleges, and high schools. In the case of the two aforementioned journals, the editors have invited software tool creators to send them their LLM detection software. They shouldn’t have to wait long because even the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI has built an LLM detector that although not 100% effective, works fairly well. Joining OpenAI are many others in business and academic circles.

The editors of Science and Nature remain adamant in their opposition to ChatGPT. They will not accept that authors require an AI to write papers and articles for their publications. Machines have their place. They are useful as tools for formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. Machines can compute large amounts of data and can help parse the results. But without exception, machines shouldn’t become wordsmiths and write the copy. That the editors say is the exclusive purview of human authors.

I only have one comment for the editors at Science and Nature. I read many of the papers that appear in your publications and I only wish that the authors of them could learn to be good writers. I don’t single out these two publications for being at fault. Because science and technology journals today seem to be filled with content seriously lacking in quality prose. The writing is jargon rich, awkward, and sometimes unintelligible. I don’t know what this says about the peer review process and often wonder if the reviewers are equally incapable of writing a coherent sentence let alone a paper.

Technology is rapidly changing the way we work and learn. For educators and students, it is an avenue for improved engagement and interaction providing students with new ways to learn and grow whether through online learning, virtual reality, educational apps and adaptive learning software.

In this post, we explore how technology impacts student engagement and success and discuss potential benefits and drawbacks. We include some of the latest research and case studies in the field and consider what the future of learning will be like as new technological innovations are invented.

How Technology Impacts Student Engagement

In 2010 Apple published research on how technology could support learning for students with sensory and learning disabilities. This inspired me to look at how this could relate to any student engagement focused on collaboration and communicating among classmates and teachers in new ways. The following lists six ways technology is changing the learning environment for students.

1. Improving Motivation – Interactive and multimedia-rich learning experiences, such as simulations, games, and virtual reality, are making learning fun, engaging and more participative in classroom settings.
2. Encouraging Collaboration – Educational technologies can facilitate communication and collaboration among students and teachers using online resources such as discussion forums, video conferencing, and document sharing. This creates a sense of shared community and teamwork.
3. Personalizing the learning experience – Adaptive learning software allows students to learn at their own pace which helps tailor the educational experience to their needs and abilities.
4. Increasing Information Access – Technology has made access to information ubiquitous. Where textbooks have increasingly become prohibitively expensive, the onset of e-books, video, and interactive multimedia content is breaking down the economic barriers to make learning universal regardless of where you live and what you can afford.
5. Improving Assessment – Teachers can benefit from educational technology using it to track a student’s understanding and progress, do interactive assessments, quickly identify areas where a learner is struggling and provide instant feedback and immediate additional support.
6. Creating Flexible Learning Environments – Learning with technology is no longer limited to a brick-and-mortar classroom. Online and blended learning options allow students to learn anytime and from anywhere. This is particularly beneficial for students unable to attend traditional classes such as those with physical or learning disabilities or students in rural or remote settings.

How Current Technology is Enhancing Learning 

The arrival of smartphones and tablets has had a revolutionary impact on communications with opportunities to change how we learn. Mobile devices not only put information resources in our hands but give us access to a growing body of educational apps for students and teachers.

What are these?

1. Learning management systems (LMS) are software platforms that allow educators to create, manage, and deliver online course content.
2. Gamification employs gaming and game design elements in a non-game learning context.
3. Adaptive Learning is software designed to help meet the individual needs of learners.
4. Online Tutoring provides real-time instruction and feedback using human resources that can be accessed through the Internet.
5. Mobile Learning is more than learning apps that can be accessed from a mobile device. It also considers the aspect of mobility as a methodology for learning experiences beyond the physical classroom
6. Social and Collaborative Learning occurs through interaction with others in online communities or collaborative learning environments.
7. Simulation and Modelling use programs to help students understand complex systems and compare the real world to computer-generated scenarios.
8. Robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are technologies that can be used to enhance learning delivery to students. And despite the latest controversy over AI, with ChatGPT, the positives of using these technologies in education outweigh the potential negatives.
9. Virtual and Augmented reality are two immersive technologies that can be useful teaching aids. And like gamification, their use can motivate students who would normally struggle to learn using traditional classroom techniques and settings.

A Final Word

Technology has already had a significant impact on student engagement and success. It is making interactive and personalized learning experiences possible. It is improving communication and collaboration among students and teachers. It has made education more accessible 

It is important to note, however, that technology works best when combined with traditional teaching methods rather than as a replacement.

In the Global South, the biggest challenges are technology accessibility and affordability. But the deployment of worldwide mesh networks like SpaceX’s Starlink and the increasing availability of inexpensive mobile devices will contribute to levelling the learning playing field this decade. 

Let’s first look at the growth of computer-based and online video gaming. Just how many gamers are there today? Active gamers continue to grow. By 2023 over 3 billion will be playing online games.

And according to Mike Allen at Axios, gaming is on course to move to the centre of the entertainment and pop culture universe this coming year. Today the industry does U.S. $184 billion. The growth of online gaming is one of the reasons Facebook has turned itself into Meta in an attempt to dominate a near-future virtual world. It is why streaming services like Netflix, HBO and others are adding video gaming options for customers. Gaming has become multi-generational. The parents of today were the children in the 1980s who were the first gamers. And they have passed along their interest to their children.

Where Gaming is Headed

The COVID-19 pandemic may have proven to be the best thing that ever happened to video games as people found themselves isolated and using the Internet to stay connected to friends, business associates, and family. Playing online interactive games helped pass the time for so many.

Not for me. I haven’t played video games for quite a while. During the pandemic, I have been reading lots of books and magazines, researching and writing articles like this, watching lots of movies, streamed media, and television, and doing crossword and jigsaw puzzles. My first exposure to gaming began with Pong, Space Invaders, and eventually Flight Simulator. I must admit I enjoyed the latter two. But when we got a promotional gift of an X-Box and tried the games that came with it, I just couldn’t get into them and quickly lost interest. The X-Box has long departed.

The same was true for me in trying virtual reality environments like Second Life. It never invoked much excitement. So I am a dinosaur when it comes to the world of gaming. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t see the merits of gaming.

The technology behind video games continues to evolve both in hardware and software. Players today compete in real-time across the world. Artificial intelligence (AI) entities have joined with human players adding a whole new dimension to the gamer experience. And game designers are increasingly using AI to enhance their offerings.

Gaming is also revolutionizing education. Video games were first introduced into classrooms in the 1980s. I remember titles like Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and Reader Rabbit, the latter was particularly popular with my daughter.

Gamification is a descriptor for how gaming elements and principles get used in education whether in classrooms or on the shop floor. Minecraft, Kahoot, Quizzizz, and ClassDojo are free gaming environments that can be used by parents, teachers, and employers to gamify learning experiences. And gameplay describes a brain process by which players enhance their critical thinking, planning skills, collaboration and communication through the playing of video games.

So although I may not be the quintessential gamer,  I recognize the value that video games bring to our world. Now if we can only get young boys and increasingly girls out of basements and outside to appreciate what is in the real world, I will be that much more accepting.

Online Betting is Another Matter

Online gaming and betting have grown hand in hand, and it seems this year has turned sports into nothing more than a place for online bets.

I remember when betting was bingo at the local church or synagogue, poker nights, mah jong tournaments, horse and dog races, bricks-and-mortar casinos, and government lotteries. But now with the Internet combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, gambling has increasingly taken over the virtual world.

There has always been betting on sports. And in the past betting was illegal. That’s why we had behind-the-bar bookies. And there were scandals. Baseball had the Black Sox World Series fiasco. The NBA in the early years saw players accused of shaving points for bookies. Boxers took dives so gamblers could get big paydays. And half the Irish Sweepstakes tickets ever sold were counterfeit.

But today gambling is legal and ubiquitous. This season broadcasts of football games whether Canada’s CFL or the U.S. NFL, are preceded by betting line discussions. Who will win? What will be the over-under, the point differential? What players will pass, run and catch their quota of yards? I used to enjoy the talking heads that preceded football games. Not anymore, because now the discussion is less about analysis and more about the odds.

As I previously stated, gaming and gambling are inextricably linked because both have grown on the Internet. Today, online gaming is popular and even online gamers are bet on. Our smartphones provide access to thousands of gaming apps offered by Apple and Google’s online stores. Placing bets has never been easier. And as one recent television commercial describes it, our world is just “a series of bets.”

Just how big is the online gambling world, and how much bigger is it going to get? Worth U.S. $57.54 billion in 2021, it is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 11.7% from today to 2030. And along with this growth has come a parallel increase in cybercrime. Then there is the rising addiction to compulsive gambling. And as we continue to be preyed upon by “legal” bookies and enticed by games of chance that once were the domain of mobsters, we are all being gamified.

It states further that protecting children’s health requires the medical profession to understand the harms that climate change and air pollution are causing. Fossil fuel combustion is responsible for aerosols in the atmosphere that contain fine particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), mercury, and volatile chemicals responsible for ground-level ozone. A billion children today are continually exposed to high levels of these aerosols.

In addition, rising temperatures represent a threat to infants and young children, far greater than to adults because the former’s thermoregulatory systems aren’t fully developed. And where adults may be aware of the significance of a hot day, infants and young children are not or are less likely to recognize symptoms that indicate they are at risk.

The NEJM article describes the “threat multiplier” effects of climate change which include:

• heat stress (a recent US hospital study noted 3.8 million extreme heat emergency department visits),
• extreme weather events (Hurricane Katrina in 2005 affected 7,258 children causing post-trauma that remained with 41% of them after one year),
• air pollution (a 12% greater risk of preterm birth, higher asthma and respiratory disease levels, decreased cognition, and immune system dysregulation),
• food insecurity and safety (nutritional deficits and wasting in young children), freshwater quality and quantity (diarrhea, respiratory illnesses, stillbirths, low birth weight),
• vector distribution of infectious diseases (Zika in South America associated with microcephaly in fetuses),
• and social and mental health consequences (impact on education in Southeast Asian children with prolonged exposure to higher than normal temperatures).

Children Need to Know the What and Why of Climate Change

Are children being taught about climate change in schools?

Apparently too much for kids in Florida. The state recently rejected math textbooks that included problems using the prohibited subject of climate change. The reason that 54 textbooks were tossed was stated as a concern for the socio-emotional state of the children. So much for real-world examples that go beyond:

Solve the following: A train travelling at 40 miles per hour leaves St. Louis, Missouri. At the same time, a train leaves Chicago travelling at 50 miles per hour. The distance between the two cities is 280 miles. When would the trains meet?

What you cannot do, says Florida’s Department of Education, is ask students to solve a mathematics problem whose subject matter has anything to do with climate. For example, it’s a no-no to have a problem in a textbook that asks a student to determine the percentage changes to precipitation and air temperatures over a period of a number of years because that would be about climate change.

A recent article published by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, notes that not teaching children about climate change perpetuates climate inaction. It states:

“Fewer students attain a thorough understanding of the climate threat, and fewer still talk to their parents and extended family about it. Students stay uninformed and parents remain misinformed.”

When children learn about climate change in school, according to a study done at San Jose State University, they make better environmental decisions such as “what car to buy, what foods to eat, how to dispose of waste,” and more. And then they go on to embrace climate change solutions in daily behaviours, and in their jobs and career choices.

And when you consider what the NEJM study shows, that children are more vulnerable than adults to the effects of climate change and air pollution, it would seem the least we can do is educate them to understand the threat and help them to figure out how to adapt and mitigate it. The San Jose State study noted that students who took courses on climate change reduced their individual CO2 or equivalent emissions by 2.86 tons per year. Multiply that number by the one billion children at risk and there is a mathematics problem worth solving.