Tag Archives: technology

hand-phone meld

A stark contrast

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Today is Father’s Day. My father-in-law wanted to go to White Spot, a very BC, Canada restaurant, and so my wife, her sister and brother-in-law, and her parents went for lunch. I couldn’t help but notice families at two other tables, which offered a stark contrast in dynamics. Both tables had a person who looked like they were in their 50’s. The woman at one table was with her father, the man at the other table was with both elderly parents.

The woman was fully invested in conversation with her dad. She kept eye contact on him and leaned forward again and again to hear what her father was saying. The conversation seemed to flow, and they looked like they were having a wonderful meal.

The man at the other table was on his phone. He didn’t let it go, it was an extension of his left hand. Even when he spoke to his parents, he did not look away from it. He was typing full paragraphs into it at times, and he scrolled. And he scrolled and typed, scrolled and typed. Food arrived and he occasionally shovelled food into his mouth but his phone stayed glued to his left hand. I wasn’t watching all the time, but at no time when I looked did I see him making eye contact with his parents. The woman at the other table was always looking at her dad.

Back at the doom-scroller’s table, parents had finished their meal and their son was only about half finished his meal, still typing and scrolling as his parents waited. I had to get up to let my brother-in-law head to the bathroom and I looked over at this man’s phone. He was on Instagram. After desert his parents pulled their phones out as well, but I didn’t really pay attention for how long they had their phones out too. I can say with certainty the man never once let go of his phone during the meal. The last time I looked over, his dad was paying for the meal.

It was so stark that I had to make sure that I was paying attention to my own table, not to be too distracted by the entertainment of seeing this contrast play out in front of me. Put your phones away at meal time, if you struggle with this, don’t take your phone to the table. Your family deserves more.

Happy Father’s Day!

Pedagogy and Activity

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“Here’s a great tool to help you…”

What inevitably comes next is a description of an activity devoid of pedagogy and purpose. As technology has crept into education, time and again I’ve seen the focus be on activity and ‘engagement’ but the so-called engagement is more about keeping a student’s attention rather than focusing on the learning intention; on the intended learning outcomes.

When achievement sneaks in, it’s not about student comprehension, but rather on improving test scores, a proxy for measuring success that is far from perfect. Again, this does not help with the practice of good teaching,

17 years ago I wrote that ‘Best Practice is still Practice’, and said, “What we don’t need is a bunch of processes labeled as ‘best practice’ to limit us from seeking something that is yet more effective.  Best practice is still just practice.” We also don’t need a lot of flashy new tools that pretend to be about our practice when really they are just activities that keep student engaged and occupied. Activities that don’t really focus on meaningfully engaging students as learners on a learning journey.

What’s the pedagogy behind the activity?

Not evenly distributed

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Futurist Richard Campbell came to speak with Inquiry Hub students today. He’s presented here a few times. I wrote about his visit in 2022, and what I really enjoyed about his presentation is that while I often think of the dystopian possibilities of the future, Richard’s message was that ‘The future holds promise‘. To start his presentation today, he quoted William Gibson, “The future is here – it’s just not evenly distributed“.

There are a lot of things Richard discussed that I might elaborate on in the coming days, but this quote immediately started to churn in my mind. I’d heard the quote before. I’ve even used the quote before, but often in reference the uneven distribution of change… which is often connected to new technology that will be fully adopted in the future. What got me really thinking about this, hearing the quote today, is my suspicion that this is more exaggerated now than it ever has been.

Zoom out of your everyday life and take a look around the globe and you’ll see a very uneven distribution of technological advances. I recently heard about a live stream of a robot doing package sorting for days on end, comparing this activity to the same being done by a human.

This sort of manual labour is something that will be replacing humans sooner rather than later. That said, it is going to be distributed very unevenly. It’s already happening in China where their one child policy was leading them to a shortage in the labour market. China is winning the robotics race and we are going to see a lot of progress and development from China.

Here is my wonder: Will there be a massive divide of have and have-not states? Will the distribution of future technology be even more unevenly distributed, or will we see the costs go down and the technology spread even more evenly in the decades to come? I think Richard and I would disagree on this topic, although I hope he’s more right than me.

UCI rather than UBI

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As AI and robotics continue to scale at unimaginable speeds, with AI getting exponentially smarter and robots increasingly more agile, we’ve got to realize how many jobs will disappear in a very short time period. This isn’t a gradual transition, it’s not a move from one field to another like farmers transitioning into factory workers during the industrial revolution. It’s a massive shift from human labour to machine labour that the world’s economies simply aren’t designed to absorb.

I’ve seen a growth in the number of people talking about the need for Universal Basic Income (UBI), but I fear this isn’t enough. I fear that the idea of giving millions if not billions of people a basic income, but no real means for most of them to supplement those incomes as an insufficient solution. We don’t need UBI, we need UCI – Universal Comfortable Income. It’s not going to be enough to give people a basic survival income. We are going to need to see governments, and maybe even companies, share their resources and wealth with people, or else who is going to have the resources to buy the products and services AI and robots will offer?

The potential for dissatisfaction and ultimately unrest seems scary to me. A world with a couple dozen trillion-dollar companies, and a handful of trillionaires running them, is also a world with vast populations of people eking out a subsistence lifestyle, unable to do more than meet their survival needs. A basic income, requiring additional sources of income to appreciate the offerings of a fully automated economy, will not survive without a revolt for too long.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are other solutions to this problem. Maybe I’m too bullish about to how far things will advance in a short time. That said, the potential for the scenario above to occur in the next decade is not zero. It might be a pessimistic bad-case or even worse-case scenario, but it’s possible… and scary. If things advance as fast as I think they will, we can’t continue to have UBI conversations, we need to move the goal posts and start really thinking of UCI.

So easy to cheat

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We aren’t far away from contact lenses that can do the same. The article, ‘Smart Glasses for Exam Cheating: Best Models, Prices and Risks in 2026’, shares multiple options that can provide AI delivered test answers, in seconds, via a small ear piece or even projected text answers which can only be heard or seen by the user. Banned? Of course. Easily detected? Not all models, with more sleuth and hidden models being developed every day. And as mentioned, what happens when these are as invisible as contact lenses?

Make no mistake, cheating has been around as long as tests have. In some respects this is not new. But most methods of cheating demand guessing what questions will be on the test in advance. Methods like these are responsive to every question asked. And the speed of responses are natural. While you are still reading the question, a response is already headed your way. No need to shift your eyes from the screen or test paper. No hidden notes to conceal, and no wrong answers unless you are choosing to get less than a perfect score, to not seem suspiciously smart.

I remember a friend telling me about him and his friends getting hold of their ethics exam a couple days before they had to write it. The irony of cheating on an ethics exam is not lost on me. They memorized the questions and answers, and all chose different ones to get wrong, while still achieving high ‘A’s. Then on the day of the test my friend was horrified when his friend raised his hand 30 minutes into a 3-hour exam, and shared a typo on a question that no one should have gotten to in such a short time. Despite this poor choice, they all got their ‘A’s.

That’s going to be the new challenge in cheating, how to not do too well to bring attention to yourself. A good problem to have for a cheater.

So here we are in a new era of cheating. Prescription glasses, hidden cameras and microphones, and curated wrong answers. And in all honesty, less and less opportunity for detection. Ultimately, it’s the tests that will need to change.

Way more Waymo

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Here is a statistic from the company Waymo:

“In less than two years, the company’s average weekly paid robotaxi trips have grown tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today.” Source: Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart

This is amazing growth. It’s not an isolated statistic. We are seeing this kind of growth in robotic focused manufacturing, and we are seeing it in the use of AI to do many jobs that humans used to do.

Are we ready for this? Are we ready for the gig economy to be eaten up by automation? Are we ready for not just blue collar but also white collar jobs to dwindle as AI takes over these jobs at an exponential rate? Are we ready for AI teachers, AI servants, AI drivers, AI delivery, AI accountants, AI lawyers, AI programmers, and AI in fields we thought would always need humans in them? Are we ready for way more of this kind of Waymo growth occurring simultaneously across many sectors?

We aren’t ready. Yet this is coming our way. It’s that simple.

Our responses in each case will be reactionary. For every current Waymo passenger there are probably a few potential customers thinking, ‘That’s scary, I’m not ready to put my life in the hands of a robot driver on the highway or the busy streets of downtown at rush hour.’ But those stats will dwindle. For every worker who thinks, ‘My job is safe, they’ll always need me,’ there are others who thought the same just a few years ago, and they are now looking for a job, often in a different sector than what they’ve been in.

Yes, there are limitations to this growth in some sectors. Yes, new jobs may come up that are uniquely human in nature. Yes, there are yet unharnessed opportunities for people to make a greater income (with less effort) in areas that they would not have imagined just a few months ago. It’s not all doom and gloom… but make no mistake, the exponential growth of AI powered advances will be drastically affecting all of our everyday lives sooner than most people realize. Waymo’s growth is emblematic of the kind of growth we will see in almost every aspect of our lives.

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Update: This video on LinkedIn is worth sharing here.

Who will get us there?

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Stephen Downes shared the following on LinkedIn:

“I was asked, “Please provide a brief abstract that summarises your views on the impact of AI on higher education.”

As far more than the language models that have captured the attention of the world over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) represents a significant increase in human capability, augmenting and sometimes exceeding our natural capacities to perceive, reason, create and remember. Ubiquitous access to these capabilities changes the definition of what it means to learn and to be educated. Skills once reserved to the domain of experts are now in the hands of everyday people, while most every discipline is devising new models, methods and pragmatics of work alongside, or teaming with, these new tools. This challenges educators along a number of fronts, impacting how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach. Today’s educator in a world of AI is responsible for far more than passing along knowledge (indeed, the machine can do most of that). We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care.

Thoughts?” ~ Stephen Downes

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Although my thoughts align with K-12 education as well as higher education, these thoughts come to me in the form of a question:

Who is going to get us there?

Who is the ‘We’ that Stephen is talking about when he says, “We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care”?

Because I love this vision of what teaching can become, I just don’t see a clear path to take us there.

‘We’ won’t get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business, products, and tools… their locked-in subscriptions will tout measures of success that don’t align with this vision, even when they say that they will.

‘We’ won’t get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge.

‘We’ won’t get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum, or even new guidelines that somehow redefine for teachers, “how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach”.

I hope I’m not coming off as a pessimist. I’m excited about what’s possible. I just fear that ‘we’ aren’t going to get ‘there’ any time soon unless ‘We’ align philosophy, policy, and economic support for the transformation of schools into something different.

Short of that, I fear that ‘We’ will be having the same ‘20th century schools in a 21st century world’ conversation in another 10 years… which I’ve heard since getting into education in the late 1900’s.

The worst it will be from now on

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I used Google’s Notebook LM in September 2024 and I was impressed with the podcast it created, sharing a summary of my blog. A month later I had it do the same for a video I created with Joe Truss. This is a novel theory, not a general knowledge concept and yet the AI grasped the majority of the concepts and did a very good summary.

Today I went back to Notebook LM because I heard it can now do video summaries. Again, I was impressed. While the accompanying visuals were not ideal, (we discuss complex geometry), the audio summary was excellent and it was valuable to see what takeaways were summarized and how the ideas were structured.

I then explained some of the geometric issues and the AI produced a pdf with the correct geometry. Joe and I then tried creating a slide deck, another new feature. The resulting text was excellent again, but some of the images were not quite accurate, yet we could see the possibilities in correcting the details and providing other sources to make it give us impressive results.

Reflecting on these improvements it occurred to me just how good this tool is now, and yet this is the worst version it will ever be. Artificial Intelligence and robotics are both advancing exponentially in capabilities. It’s exciting to think that what we are capable of using these tools for now will be considered simplistic if not archaic in just a few years.

Today I saw a video about a Chinese company that is selling a three and a half foot tall humanoid robot for the price of a new iPhone. It is not a simplistic toy, it is extremely agile and comes with a fully programmable operating system, meaning it is completely trainable for skills it doesn’t come with. That same company is expecting to reach 1,000 units produced a month by the end of this year.

We are in an era where advances happen daily, and what we marvel at today will be commonplace tomorrow. Every day the advances get a little better and so we are perpetually living with the worst technology we’ll ever know.

Enshitification

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I asked Copilot to search my blog for, “posts where technology improves while systems (work, economy, institutions, structures) get worse.”

It shared the following summary:

 

The reason I asked for this is because I wanted to look back on posts that reminded me of this skit out of Norway. It is, as the Threads post suggests, “utterly brilliant”!

You can find the video and more information on the website at the end of the video.

We aren’t imagining this, things are getting intentionally worse. On social media we are not the customer, we are the product sold to advertisers. And even when we are the customer, we don’t buy anything outright anymore, no, we get locked into subscriptions.

Copilot didn’t find the one post I was looking for, but I found it to share here:

Sometime technology s(UX)

I’ll end here with a couple paragraphs from that post, no need to try writing something I already said,

“I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.

I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.”

Robots, robots, everywhere

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In the world of robots two things are happening at lightning speed:

  1. Capabilities – A year ago humanoid robots were clunky, unstable, and for lack of a better word, robotic.
  2. Production – A year ago if a company could produce 5,000 robots in a year, they were industry leaders.

Have a look at this video and you’ll see just how much farther along robots and their production have advanced: ‘China’s New AI Robots Shock Everyone With Impossible Skills’

It might be cliche to say, but the future has arrived. First in factories, then in homes! If one thing is certain about our future it is that humanoid robots will be all around us. We’ll have to wait and see how this impacts work, chores, and even social interactions, because there isn’t going to time to think of long term implications before they arrive… everywhere very quickly.