Tag Archives: future

Not Ready, and Ready

Leave a reply

I’m not ready to connect AI to my email, to have it view my calendar, to let it automate my communication, or write for me unsupervised. I’m not trusting AI to organize my life in any way.

But…

I am ready to share all my health data. I’m ready for AI to know everything about my health that I can provide it. I want to get a DEXA scan and share it with Chat GPT or some other tool for feedback.

Analyze and diagnose me, but don’t run my life.

That’s my current line… let’s see how it changes in a year.

Experience is something you get right after you need it.

Leave a reply

Ever notice how many jobs say, “Experience required”? Who are all these experienced workers looking for new jobs?

How many jobs want you to have a degree first? I understand a doctor, nurse, lawyer, architect, or engineer needing a degree, but how many corporate jobs really need a prospective employee to have a degree?

I love the quote, “Experience is something you get right after you need it.”

At some point in your life you are going to learn something on the job. You are going to figure it out either just when you need to… or just after you’ve messed up the first attempt.

Hiring is going to change. You aren’t going to see companies focusing on degrees and academic accolades. Instead, you’ll see people with micro credentials or niche skills being hired because they have learned skills that directly relate to the job expectations. Or you’ll see jobs being offered on a trial basis and companies willing to hire based on characteristics like flexibility, ingenuity, and creativity. ‘Come try this out for a 3 month contract, and we’ll see if you’ve a) Got a good head on your shoulders, and b) Fit with our community and values.’

Don’t worry about experience, you’ll get on the job. Just come with the right attitude and an affinity for the job. The first time you try something, that’s when you’ll get the experience. Before that, it’s not schooling or past experience, it’s evidence that you are a learner and you are willing to put in an honest effort. That’s what will get you hired.

“Oh no, AI is making us dumber!”

Leave a reply

Except it’s not.

People forget that we were worried about the internet and Google. And before that writing utensils:

“Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
~ National Association of Teachers Journal, 1907


“Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.”
~ From PTA Gazette, 1941

I pulled those quotes from a presentation I did 16 years ago. I did another presentation at that time where I shared a quote from 1842 discussing how books would become useless “when the pupils are furnished with slates”.

We are used to pronouncing ‘the sky is falling‘ when the next advancement comes along. Google was going to make us dumber. It didn’t. Smart phones were going to make us dumber, but they didn’t. They did however change the things we thought and still think about, and remember. For example, I used to carry around a few dozen phone numbers, memorized in my head, now I don’t even know my own daughter’s numbers. They are neatly stored in my phone.

AI will do the same. It will adjust what we remember, fine tune what we think about about and ask, and help direct our thinking… but it won’t make us dumber.

When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the smartest guy in the world. I can’t think of a question I asked him that he didn’t know the answer to. Sometimes he’d even bring me a file on the topic I asked about.

I remember absolutely blowing away a teacher and my fellow students on a project I did on harnessing the ocean for power. I had newspaper clippings, magazine articles, even textbook sources that I shared on the classroom overhead projector. It looked like I spent hours upon hours doing research. I didn’t. I asked my dad what he knew and he gave me a thick file with all the resources I needed. He was my Google long before Google was a thing.

It made me look good. It made my work a lot easier. It didn’t make me dumber.

I’ll admit that there is something fundamentally different with AI compared to advances like the slate, the pen, the internet, Google and other ‘technological advances’. As Artificial Intelligence becomes smarter than us, we can rely on it in ways that we couldn’t with other advances. And it will take a while for us to figure out how to create tasks in schools that utilize AI effectively, rather than having AI do all the work. It was hard but not impossible to ‘Google proof’ an assignment, and that challenge is significantly magnified by AI. But the opportunities are also magnified.

What happens when AI can individualize student learning and what we consider the ‘core curriculum’ can be taught in less than half of a school day? How exciting can school be for the other half of the day? What curiosities can we foster? How student directed (and thus more engaging) can that other half of the day be?

We are only dumber using AI if we decide that we will passively let it do the work for us, but let’s not pretend students were not already using ‘cut-and-paste’ to get assignments done. Let’s not pretend work avoidance wasn’t already a thing. Let’s not pretend that we don’t already spend a lot of time in schools teaching students to be compliant rather than to think for themselves.

AI will only make us dumber if we try to continue doing what we have done before, but allow AI to do the work for us. If we truly use AI in collaborative and inspirational ways, we are opening an exciting new door to what human potential really can be.

Progress and stagnation

Leave a reply

The invention of wheels made the movement of objects and ourselves so much easier. And they also assisted us in moving tools of war.

Machinery of mass production made life easier. And we also produce an over abundance of weapons that we use on both foreign and domestic lands.

The scientific method has led to innovations in fields like medicine. And we also make tools of mass destruction, with the soul purpose of maiming and killing each other.

We are innovative, technological, and creatively brilliant. And yet we are divided and we concoct global issues created by old religions, tribal lines, and broken ideologies.

Humanity chooses to be inhumane, and to develop propaganda to justify our actions. We do it for country, for money, for power, and for ideologies be they economic, political, or theological.

We have innovated. We have modernized. We have claimed to be civilized… but in the matters of being human we have stagnated. We have not evolved, we have merely advanced and innovated ways of perpetuating our barbaric tendencies.

Technology progresses. Humanity stagnates. History repeats.

The real alignment problem

Leave a reply

‘The alignment problem in artificial intelligence refers to the challenge of ensuring that AI systems act in accordance with human values and intentions. It involves making sure that these systems pursue the goals we set for them without unintended consequences or harmful behaviors.’

~ Auto-generated on DuckDuckGo

The real alignment problem is what human values are being aligned?

Do you want AI aligned with strict religious beliefs? Nihilism? Capitalism?

The point is, we can’t agree on what human values we want so how does AI align pluralistically? And furthermore, when AI achieves super intelligence, why would it bother to align with us?

The real alignment problem comes in two parts:

  • The what? Align with what human values.
  • The why? Why would a super intelligent AI want to align with our values?

The first part is something we will have to figure out. The second might just be decided for us, and not necessarily in our favour.

Teaching wisdom

1 Reply

We all know that one person who didn’t do well in school and isn’t ‘book smart’ but if there is a problem to solve he or she will figure it out. Or someone who’s a tinkerer, who dabbles in fixing anything from a small electric toy to a car engine… maybe they were good at school, maybe not, but they solve problems we would struggle with. This isn’t traditionally the kind of wisdom taught in schools. It’s born out of curiosity and ingenuity.

How can we make learning at school more like this? More like the problem solvers we are going to need. We aren’t going to out book smart AI. We aren’t going to write reports as well as a smartly prompted AI. But even a good AI isn’t going to figure out why a sink suddenly has low pressure any time soon.

Maybe that will come, but for now we are going to be able to out problem solve AI or at least be the ones that figure out what to ask AI to help us out.

So how do we maximize the learning at school to provide students with the kind of wisdom they need to be resourceful in an AI filled world? It won’t be with wrote memorization. It won’t be the review tests. It won’t be the book reports or the 15 math questions going home for homework.

What kind of learning experiences are we creating at school? Do they foster wisdom, systems thinking, and/or problem solving? Are we getting students excited about being learners and problem solvers? Are we creating environments for creators or compliant workers? Because the path of AI and robotics is quickly making compliant workers redundant.

I don’t know if we can explicitly teach wisdom, but we can create experiences where wisdom is valued and the right answer isn’t predetermined. We can design problems that require collaboration, creativity, and insight. And we can teach students to harness AI so that it serves us and we add value to what it can do with us.

Creating unique and challenging learning experiences, with students helping us design these experiences or even designing them themselves…. This is the path forward for schools. If a student spends the day only doing things AI can do better than them, what’s school really teaching?

Unprepared for the transition

Leave a reply

I just read, “From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?”
By Charis McGowan in the Guardian. It’s a series of stories about people who had secure jobs until AI replaced them.

Last week I saw a video of a car manufacturer in China that builds the entire car using robotics. They call these ‘Dark Factories’, fully automated buildings that don’t need lighting like most factories because the machines have sensors and don’t need the factory lit up like is required with human-filled factories.

Five years ago I heard of a shortage of workers that was inevitable as population growth decreases, but I now see that those fears were unwarranted. We aren’t going to need more employees in the future, but rather far less. AI agents and robots are literally going to steal jobs from a significant number of working people. It has already started but the scale of this is going to magnify considerably in the next 5-10 years.

How do we make the economy work when most countries will have unemployment rates exceeding 20%? What kind of jobs will a laid off 40-55 year old be able to do that AI won’t? What does a 30 year old with a liberal arts degree do as a former customer service employee who was laid off because AI can do their job better and cheaper?

10 writers for a website becomes a job for 1 editor who edits and ‘humanizes’ AI written articles. 10 tech support workers are replaced by AI support and just 2 human technicians. 10 people in graphic design are all replaced by the department boss who was a graphic designer before being promoted. Now he or she uses AI and pumps out the work of all 10 past employees. This isn’t science fiction, it’s happening right now.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for mass unemployment? What will the job market look like? What will all these unemployed people do? How does our economy survive?

On the bright side, here’s what I think we’ll see:

  1. Universal Basic Income – Every person gets a livable wage whether they work or not. Is it enough to live in luxury? No, but you can be unemployed for a long period of time and not have to worry about your basic needs.
  2. Reduced work weeks – If you work more than 30 hours a week, you are probably working for yourself. Think 6 hour days or 4-day work weeks.
  3. Less chores – From cleaning to yard work, to cooking… those things that consumed your time after work will only be done by you if you want to do it. Otherwise, you’ll have these done for you by affordable robots that have a lot more features and convenience than the Roomba that vacuums your floor while you watch TV.

So while conveniences and more idle time are coming, they are coming with a massive number of jobs lost. The question is, what is the transition going to look like? Who suffers during the transition? And will we get to these positive outcomes before too many people are jobless, unable to compete with AI, and not meaningfully able to contribute to or survive in our AI and robotics driven economy?

Self-interests in AI

Leave a reply

Yesterday I read the following in the ‘Superhuman Newsletter (5/26/25)’:

Bad Robot: A new study from Palisade Research claims that “OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off”, even when it was explicitly instructed to shut down. The study raises serious safety concerns.

It amazes me how we’ve gotten here. Ten, or even five years ago there were all kinds of discussions about of AI safety. There was a belief that future AI would be built in isolation with an ‘air-gap’, used as a security measure to ensure AI systems remained contained and separate from other networks or systems. We would grow this intelligence in a metaphorical petri dish and build safety guards around it before we let it out into the wild

Instead, these systems have been built fully in the wild. They have been give unlimited data and information, and we’ve built them in a way that we aren’t sure we understand their ‘thinking’. They surprise us with choices like choosing not to turn off when explicitly asked to. Meanwhile we are simultaneously training them to use ‘agents’ that interact with the real world.

What we are essentially doing is building a super intelligence that can act autonomously, while simultaneously building robots that are faster, stronger, more agile, and fully programmable by us… or by an AI. Let’s just pause for a moment and think about these two technologies working together. It’s hard not to construct a dystopian vision of the future when we watch these technologies collide.

And the reality is that we have not built an air-gap. We don’t have a kill switch. We are essentially heading down a path to having super-intelligent AI ignoring our commands while operating robots and machines that will make us feeble in comparison (in intelligence, strength, and mobility).

When our intelligence compared to AI is equivalent to a chimpanzee’s intelligence compared to ours, how will this super-intelligence treat us? This is not a hyperbole, it’s a real question we should be thinking about. If today’s rather simplistic LLM AI models are already choosing to ignore our commands what makes us think a super-intelligent AI will listen to or reason with us?

All is well and good when our interests align, but I don’t see any evidence that self-interested AI will necessarily have aligned interests with the intelligent monkeys that we are. And the fact that we’re building this super-intelligence out in the wild gives reason to pause and wonder what will become of humanity in an age of super-intelligent AI?

Seamless AI text, sound, and video

1 Reply

It’s only 8 seconds long, but this clip of and old sailor could easily be mistaken for real:

And beyond looking real, here is what Google’s new Flow video production platform can do:

Body movement, lip movement, objects moving naturally in gravity, we have the technology to create some truly incredible videos. On the one hand, we have amazing opportunities to be creative and expand the capabilities of our own imaginations. On the other hand we are entering into a world of deep fakes and misinformation.

Such is the case with most technologies. They can be used well and can be used poorly. Those using it well will amaze us with imagery and ideas long stuck in people’s heads without a way previously to express them. Those using it poorly will anger and enrage us. They will confuse us and make it difficult to discern fake news from real.

I am both excited and horrified by the possibilities.

The tail wagging the dog

2 Replies

I recently wrote, ‘The school experience’ where I stated, “I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence?” In that post I was focused on removing the kind of things we traditionally do with opportunities to experience learning in the classroom (with and without AI).

What’s interesting about this is that the change will indeed come, but not for the right reasons. The reason we’ll see a transformation of schools happen faster than expected is because with AI being constantly used to do homework, take notes, and do textbook assignments, grades are going to be inflated and it will be hard to discern who gets into universities.

This will encourage two kinds of changes in schools. On the one hand we will see a movement backwards to more traditional testing and reduced innovation. This is the group that wants to promote integrity, but blindly produces students who are good memorizers and are good at wrote learning. However, not producing students ready to live in our innovative and ever-changing world.

The second kind of school will promote competencies around thinking, knowing, and doing things collaboratively and creatively. These are the real schools of the future.

But I wonder which of these schools will universities be more interested in? Which practices will universities use? It’s easier to invigilate an exam that is based on wrote learning than it is to mark group projects in a lecture hall of 200+ students. So what kind of students are universities going to be looking for?

I fear that this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog and that we could see a movement towards ‘traditional learning’ as a pathway to a ‘good’ university… The race to the best marks in a school that tests in traditional ways and has ‘academic rigour’ could be the path that universities push.

This is a mistake.

The worst part of schooling is marks chasing. It undermines meaningful feedback and it misses the point that this is a learning environment with learning opportunities. Instead it’s about the mark. The score that gets averaged into GPA’s and meets minimum requirements to get into programs or schools of choice after high school.

The question I ponder is if universities will continue to focus on that metric and continue to wag the dog in this way, or will they start looking more meaningfully at other metrics like portfolios and presentations? Will they take the time to do the work necessary to really assess the student as a learner, or will they just continue to collect marks chasers and focus on accepting kids who come from schools that are good at differentiating those marks in traditional ways?

This could be an exciting time for universities to lead the way towards truly innovative practices rather than being the last bastion of old ways of teaching and learning… Old ways being perpetuated by a system that values marks over thinking, traditions over progress, and old practices over institutions of truly higher learning.

University entry is the tail wagging the dog, and so the way that universities respond to AI doing work that students have had to do will determine how quickly schools innovate and progress.