Tag Archives: thinking

Consciousness and AI – REVISITED

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In my post, Consciousness and AI, I postulated that consciousness evolves only after organisms have idle time:

“I have a theory about consciousness being on a spectrum. That itself isn’t anything new but I think the factors that play into consciousness are: Basic needs, computational ‘processing’, and idleness. Consciousness comes from having more processing time than needed to meet basic needs, along with the inability for processing (early thinking) to be idle, and so for lack of a better word desires are created.

Think of a very simple organism when all of its needs are met. This isn’t a real thought process I’m going to share but rather a meta look at this simple organism: “I have enough heat, light, and food, what should I do with myself?”

  • Seek better food
  • Move closer to the heat or light source
  • Try different food
  • Join another organism that can help me
  • Find efficiencies
  • Find easier ways to move
  • Hunt

At first, these are not conscious decisions, they are only a choice of simple processes. But eventually, the desires grow. Think decisions that start like, “If I store more energy I can survive longer in times of famine.” And evolve to more of a desire not just for survival but for pleasure (for lack of a better word): “I like this food more than other kinds and want more of it.” …All stemming from having idle processing/thinking time.”

Well, now Google is giving AI some idle time. They are calling it dream time, but it’s essentially time for metacognition… thinking about what it has learned. See this TikTok by @parthknowsai:

Later on in my post I say,

“Our brains are answer-making machines. We ask a question and it answers, whether we want it to or not. If I say what does a purple elephant with yellow polkadots look like? You will inevitably think of what that looks like simply from reading the question. I think that is what happens at a very fundamental level of consciousness. When all needs are met the processors in the brain don’t suddenly stop and sit idle. Instead, the questions arise, “How do I get more food?”, “Where would be better for me to move to?” Eventually all needs are met, but the questions keep coming. At first based on simple desires, but more and more complex over generations and eons of time.

So why did I title this, ‘Consciousness and AI’? I think one of the missing ingredients in developing Artificial General (or Super) intelligence is that we are just giving AI’s tasks to complete and process at faster and faster times, and when the processing of these tasks are completed, the AI sits idle. An AI has no built in desire that an organic organism has to use that idle time to ask questions, to want something beyond completing the ‘basic needs’ tasks it is asked to do.

If we figure out a way to make AI curious, to have it desire to learn more, and to not let itself be idle, at that point it will be a very short path to AI being a lot smarter than us.”

And I  conclude:

“If it’s idle time and desires that bring about sentience, then figuring out how to make AI’s naturally curious will be the path to artificial general intelligence… Because they are already at a place where they have unused processing time, which is continuing to grow exponentially fast.”

If my prediction is correct, this sleep/dreaming/processing/distilling, (ultimately ‘free questioning’), time is going to accelerate the true intelligence of AI. And so we are going to see at the very least general, if not super intelligent, artificial intelligence much sooner than might be expected or predicted.

The thinking that happens along the way

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Yesterday I re-watched an interview I did with Dean Shareski a couple years ago (and wrote about it). In that interview I lamented that social media and blogging are not what they used to be. I felt a bit of sadness thinking about how rich the conversations were that we had ‘back in the day’… When I’d post something on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and full conversations would happen in the comments and on Twitter, and how this would sometimes even inspire another blogger to write their own post… and this is one of those posts.

From Chris Kennedy’s blog post, Building Our Noticing Muscles:

“After my recent post about What We Notice, my friend Dean Shareski left a comment that challenged me to write some more on the topic. He wondered how much of our ability to notice the little things is inherent and how much is learned. He suggested that noticing, like delight, requires us to pause long enough to appreciate what might otherwise pass us by. And he wondered if we could actually build our noticing muscles.”

Later in the post, Chris wrote a section titled, “Thinking in Blog Posts”. It starts:

“Writing this blog has had a similar effect, although in a different way.

After more than 15 years of writing Culture of Yes, I often find myself thinking in blog posts. I will see something happening in a school, hear an interesting comment in a conversation or read something that makes me curious. I wonder about it. I want to know more. Sometimes I start connecting it to other things I have seen or experienced.

This post is a good example. It began with a comment I could easily have read, appreciated and moved past. Instead, it stuck with me. Many of these ideas go nowhere. They never become posts. And that is fine. The value is often in the thinking that happens along the way.”

Thanks to Chris, I now realize that it wasn’t so much the conversations themselves I enjoyed about the old days of blogging, it was the thinking that happened along the way. And that hasn’t disappeared for me, I just find it in different places. It took a post on ‘noticing’ to help me notice what I couldn’t see. I was stuck on the ideas of lost discussion on blogs, lost engagement on social media, and didn’t notice that I still find these things. I still have my thinking changed by friends, and bloggers like Chris and Dean. I still have my thinking changed on social media, but more likely on TikTok rather than on Twitter.

For years I’ve felt like we passed the golden years of blogging and something was missing. Now I can see that while things changed, I’m still finding ways to push my thinking, and inspire my writing. I feel like I’m seeing both the past and present with new eyes, noticing the differences without placing judgement that ‘things were better back in the day’.

Chris ends his post (well worth reading) thinking about schools and how we need to slow things down sometimes so that students can notice things too. I feel this. I read the post this morning, started ‘thinking in blog posts’ and wondering how to put these ideas together, but I needed time to let it brew in my brain, for me to notice the connections I wanted to share. And so this post became about the thinking along the way, and not just about the nostalgia of the old days of blogging.

I owe Chris and Dean gratitude for helping me to reframe my thinking, and notice that while the sharing, engagement and connections have changed, there are still many wonderful ways that my thinking is challenged. I need not feel remorse for the loss of the way things were… there are a lot a great ways to excite and inspire my thinking and blogging today.

Students choose, AI delivers

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Thinking about AI use in schools, the vast majority of assignments are currently pretty easy to use AI to assist. Students can use this to extend their learning or to do the work for them/make the work significantly easier to do. And then teachers become police… not teachers, trying to figure out how a student is using AI to cheat.

Two big takeaways, one being a positive shift the other being a challenge:

  1. Process matters more than final products.
  2. Students will choose if they want AI to help them or do the work for them. Will they choose to have AI assist their thinking or do the thinking for them?

We have control over whether we focus on process or content. Students have the choice as to whether they use AI to help them think or to think for them. A focus on process can reduce how much a student relies on AI… but a student can always get AI to assist them with the next step.

I’m excited about how students will use AI to dig deeper and extend their learning. I’m equally concerned for students who are choosing to use AI to take the friction out of leaning… opting out of thinking for themselves. Whichever of these approaches students choose, AI will deliver.

Is Artificial Intelligence Reducing Our Intelligence?

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Joe Truss shared a great article with me, ‘The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier‘, by Shai Tubali on Big Think. Towards the end of the article, Shai shares this:

“[Sven Nyholm’s] deeper worry is not that AI will outperform humans, but that it will appear to do so, especially to non-expert eyes. “Current forms of AI threaten meaningful activities,” he argues, “because they look far more intelligent than they are.” This appearance invites trust. People begin to treat AI as an oracle, mistaking an impressive engineering achievement for understanding. As misplaced confidence grows, judgment weakens. Skills develop less fully. Capacities are handed over too easily, and with them, forms of meaning that depend on effort.

Nyholm links this directly to the value of processes, including confusion, detours, and lingering with complexity. He punctures the idea that everything should be fast and efficient. Speed may feel pleasant, he concedes, yet it undermines patient thinking and reconsideration. He points to an Anthropic advertisement promising a paper completed in a single day: brainstorming in the morning, drafting by noon, polishing by afternoon. What disappears in this vision is the slow work of searching, getting lost, following the wrong thread, and returning with insight. “Many ideas,” Nyholm says, “come from looking for one thing and finding something else instead.” When AI delivers tidy, unified answers, it spares us that work. In doing so, it risks weakening our capacity to break complex problems into parts, examine assumptions, and think things through with precision.”

AI reduces the productive effort and struggle that makes both learning and understanding stick. Accessing information is profoundly different than understanding information, and directs the learner towards an answer instead of a learning process. This article reinforced some ideas I’ve already shared.

In ‘Keeping the friction‘ I said, “Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.”

And in ‘What’s the real AI risk in education?‘ I said, “Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.”

I see this in my own learning. There are times I sit and read a full article, like the one shared above, but there are other times that I don’t bother and just throw a long article into an LLM and ask for a bulleted summary of the key ideas. However, I remember articles I read far better than articles where I only read the AI summaries.

How deep would my learning and understanding be if I only went as far as to read AI summaries? How much will my confidence and my belief in understanding grow, without the depth of knowledge to support my confidence and understanding? Would I be creating a kind of false fluency in topics where I lack true depth of understanding?

The convenience of using AI might not just be changing how we learn, it might be changing what we believe learning is… Perceiving learning as having access to information rather than having a deep understanding of a topic that needed to wrestle with to be truly understood. In this way, the convenience of using AI to think for us might just be reducing our intelligence.

What’s the real AI risk in education?

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I read a great article on LinkedIn by Ken Shelton. He looked at two articles:

“On one side:
AI as productivity infrastructure.
On the other:
AI as compliance enforcement.

But in both cases, the conversation centers on efficiency and policing, not on whether learning itself has been redesigned for an AI-rich world. Using historical context, one could reasonably make similar arguments around the implementation of technology as well. If students are learning to “sound human” to avoid detection…If institutions are investing in increasingly sophisticated surveillance tools…If teachers are primarily using AI to move faster within the same structures…Then we have to ask, as I have shared in previous posts:

Are we adapting learning?
Or are we simply optimizing and defending legacy systems?”

I found his article more interesting than the two he shared. I especially loved his final paragraph:

“The risk isn’t just that AI is moving too fast. The risk is that our response remains reactive, oscillating between efficiency and enforcement, without addressing purpose, power, and pedagogy. Therefore, the real inflection point isn’t technological, it’s analytical and philosophical.”

My thoughts: In education, go ahead and use AI to make teaching and lessons better, use it to help students learn, and also help them understand how to use AI to enrich their learning. But don’t use it to make learning easier. Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.

So educators need to do two things: First, they need to use AI to make what they are doing even better. And secondly, they need to shift the learning experience to one where they no longer need to worry about policing and compliance. For example: The work isn’t finished with an essay, but with students defending their points in the essay against other students with slightly different points or different perspectives. The students who wrote the essay with AI and didn’t fully comprehend the topic can’t argue their perspective as well as the ones who were willing to do the work… and if they did use AI and can then argue the points better than their peers, that only proves that they understand how to use AI as a learning tool and not a tool to do the work for them. Because the real risk of AI in education is that the AI is doing the work, the struggle, and the learning for the student.

The problem we face is how learning can be circumvented by AI. And so the challenge for educators is to make it more challenging to use AI inappropriately, and to use AI to aid in making learning experiences more challenging. This is not an easy task, but it’s one we need to figure out and do well if we want our students to be learners who will have significance in a world where AI is all around us.

_________
Update: Just found this LinkedIn post by William (Bill) Ferriter, and it has two awesome images to fit with the above.

Update 2: I forgot about this post: Thinking Requires Effort

“Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.“

Thinking Requires Effort

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I recently read a great article by Alec Couros, The Radical Act of Thinking. In it he said, “The challenge isn’t finding the tool anymore. The challenge is avoiding it. We’ve reached the point where AI is the path of least resistance for almost every task.”

And then he concluded with this:

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

Here are a few ways that I see teachers doing this at Inquiry Hub:

  1. Community video or podcast challenges. Part of the challenge might include creating the video in a specific genre, or a meta part of the presentation where students explicitly describe what they have learned.
  2. Personalized inquiry projects. This is offered through a course designed around the process of learning, not content. So it doesn’t matter if a student is learning to code, designing a website, publishing a book, learning a specific skill in art, composing a song, starting a business, or even learning to crochet… the inquiry is designed around students learning skills they want to learn.
  3. Solving problems in class. I’ve questioned the value of homework for over 15 years now. Watching our senior math teacher teach Math & Physics, I see him focusing on the why of questions. I see his students working in pairs and groups to solve problems together on white boards. I see students actively struggling and learning in class, where they have access to support, and the focus is on the struggle and understanding the problem.

Something else that we do is to be careful not to add things to students loads unnecessarily. I can’t tell you the countless times I hear well-intentioned educators say, “You know what would be a good project for your students to do?” Followed by a legitimately good idea. But we are not an alternate school, we are a regular school with an alternative approach. Our students still need to fulfill the entire regular curriculum on top of the inquiries they do for credit. As good as other ideas may be, they become make-work activities that not all students are interested in, and this just invites students to use AI or to feel like the work is just busywork.

Will Richardson asks, “Every time you’re about to implement a new program or pedagogy or technology or initiative or building project or anything else, ask and answer this simple question: “In service of what?””

When we add anything to our schedule, it’s to serve one of two purposes:

1. Integrate curriculum or make the curriculum more engaging. Our students go on to universities, colleges, and technical institutes, and they need the required courses to get there and do well. But the required curriculum doesn’t need to be taught in a linear, boring fashion. When a project is added in class, the intent is to meaningfully cover more curriculum in less time.

2. We add things in service of students. A recent example: For the last 10 years our PAC has fundraised to provide students with FoodSafe every 2nd year. So all our students learn life skills around preparing and serving food. This year our PAC is also providing our seniors with first aid training. The plan is that they will alternate years between FoodSafe and first aid so that every student who goes through Inquiry Hub will have these life skills when they leave the school. Carving out 8 hours of training time over 2 days involves our senior teachers reworking their schedule… in the service of giving our students a life skill.

I won’t pretend that everything we do is AI proof, and that there aren’t lessons and activities where students could avoid thinking using a tool that does the work for them. I also won’t pretend that every assignment and project is ‘in service’ of authentic learning for students. But I will say that we’ve worked hard to make the learning meaningful for students. We provide them with opportunities to work in our community towards common goals, and we provide them with opportunities to pursue projects meaningful to them, focusing on the process of learning… on the struggle, with a perspective that failure and struggle are a path to real learning, not a barrier.

I’ve said before,

“We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.”

This fits with what Alec said above,

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

The secret sauce is in providing the space and time for students to struggle out in the open, facing challenges or learning life skills that they will use. However, you don’t create these opportunities by continually adding things to a student’s plate. Adding more to their plates only invites them to find tools to do the work for them.

Thinking requires effort, and providing students with opportunities to demonstrate that effort in meaningful ways is, in my mind, the project of schools. Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.

Sleepy thoughts

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I’m frustrated with myself because last night I woke up twice with half developed ideas for Daily-Ink posts, then I woke up this morning not remembering them. A very long time ago I used to keep a pen and paper next to my bed to jot down ideas but I haven’t done that in years. I think it’s time to start again. Sure, I could use my phone, but I don’t want to shine a light in my face or my wife’s, and I don’t want to wake up more than is necessary.

These ideas, like dreams, tend to be very elusive in the morning. I can clearly remember having them, but they drift away. Fleeting thoughts that seemed once solid, but now sit translucent and unrecognizable. I remember waking up. I remember thinking that the idea was good enough to share, and in one of the two instances last night I even remember giving the post a title. And now that’s all I remember, the moment, not the concept… the thinking, not the thought.

I wonder how often this happens in a night? We formulate ideas, resolve issues, and solve problems only to have these insights slip away from our sleepy brains. How many times have we let cognitive brilliance drift away as we drift back to sleep? Or maybe our minds let these ideas go because they are not as insightful as we remember them in the morning. Maybe they escape us because they are not nearly as developed as we think we remember them to be in the morning?

I hope to learn soon just how valuable these ideas might be. I’ll set a pen and small notepad by my bedside and try to remember to jot these ideas down, while hopefully being able to get quickly back to sleep.

Rent free

There are a couple people who I don’t really like, who also happen to live rent free in my brain. It really bugs me that these two people can surface in my mind like an itchy scab. I want to forget them but they scratch at my brain and I think about them.

My last dream this morning was about one of them. I haven’t worked with him in over 15 years. I have no reason to think about him, but there he was in my dream, where he bumped onto me and asked for my phone number. I said ‘No’, but then instead of feeling like it was over I felt guilty. Then the rest of the dream was about him trying to contact me and me trying to avoid his contact. It was stupid and unrealistic, as dreams often are, and it ended up waking me up.

If you know me, I’m not someone that dislikes a lot of people. I can only my think of these two right now, beyond them I really don’t expend a lot of thought and energy into people I’m not a fan of. But for some reason these two people creep into my brain and bother me.

They both hold an inflated sense of self-importance. They both lack awareness of what others think. The one above has a habit of bringing things up that people don’t want to hear. He’ll often start a sentence with, “I hate to say it but…” then say something almost with delight. The other person is a true narcissist. I thought I knew what narcissism was, thought I understood it, then met this person and realized that everyone I ever thought was a narcissist previously were simply people with narcissistic tendencies. Neither of these people are people I consider nice, people that I’d want to be friends with.

Yet early this morning, there is this guy intruding in my dreams… living in my brain rent free.

Despite the fact that I owe them nothing, and in fact they have done harm to me and my state of mind, I end up thinking about them. It’s like a PTSD response in some way. Occasionally, (fortunately not too frequently), I’ll be thinking of something totally unrelated to them, and yet they pop into my brain.

I don’t wish them harm, I don’t want to think about them at all. There are so many wonderful people in my life that deserve far more of my attention. So it makes me wonder, why do these two deserve any of my thinking time? They don’t. They aren’t in my life now and they don’t ever need to be again.

And that’s where I end this thought… unresolved. No answers, no deep understanding. Just two people I’m not a fan of, who pop into my head and occasionally live there rent free.

Unspoken expectations

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”  ~Chris Williamson

We spend so much time living in the past. We beat ourselves up for what we did do, didn’t do, should have done. We build scenarios that never happened yet are fully imagined. And we play these scenarios in our mind as if they are real. Then we are helpless not to respond through thoughts and perseverations, again as if the scenarios were real.

Unspoken expectations build resentment, steal joy, and limit our presence in the present… Not because we are living in the past, but because we are living in the imagined outcomes of possibilities which never existed.

The past, real or imagined, limits our ability to truly be present now, unless we let go and focus on our presence in the present. Unless we leave our unspoken expectations behind.

We don’t need more inputs

I heard a quote on a podcast today and I really felt it: The podcast is Jimmy Carr on Chris Willamson’s Modern Wisdom:

“The answers you’re looking for is in the silence you’re avoiding. You need fewer inputs, not more.”

How often do we seek answers externally when what we should be doing is looking inward?