David McGavock's List: MindAmp

• Pay attention before you join in
• The disclosure of certain kinds of information may be obligatory in some communities and objectionable or shocking or out of place in others. So the first step I think in being a digital citizen is figuring out what kind of world you are engaging.
• If it seems to you that someone else is directing a negative communication your way, assume that the lack of social cues is causing you to misinterpret: ask friendly questions to find out what the other party intended.
• “assume good will.”
• jump in where you can add value.
• you look for something, anything, you can do, that can add a little bit of value.
• After you do one small thing, I bet you'll feel like doing something slightly larger,

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• Today, I want to call attention to a significant new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, written by two of my new colleagues at the University of Southern California -- Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown.
• John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas lay out a step by step argument for why learning is changing in the 21st century and what schools need to do to accommodate these new practices.
• My hope is that our schools will soon embrace the book's emphasis on knowing, making, and playing.
• The fear is easy to understand. What we are essentially doing when we move to student-directed learning is undermining our own relatively stable (though I would argue obsolete) notions of expertise and replacing them something new and different.
• One of the key arguments we are making is that the role of educators needs to shift away from being expert in a particular area of knowledge, to becoming expert in the ability to create and shape new learning environments.
• how do we identify the narrowing range of content which probably does fall into this category and which provides a common baseline for other kinds of learning?
• users are not so much creating content as they are constantly reshaping context.
• The very idea of remix is about the productions of new meanings by reframing or shifting the context in which something means.
• You challenge here what James Paul Gee has called the "content fetish," stressing that how we learn is more important than what we learn. How far are you willing to push this? Doesn't it matter whether children are learning the periodic table or the forms of alchemy practiced in the Harry Potter books? Or that they know Obama is Christian rather than Muslim?
• throughout the book, we stress that knowledge, now more than ever, is becoming a where rather than a what or how.
• The explicit is only one kind of content, which tells you what something means.
• The tacit has its own layer of meaning. It tells why something is important to you, how it relates to your life and social practices.

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• Sometimes it’s hard to tell if technology is something to love or to fear. Are computers making us smarter or dumbing us down? Are genetically modified foods a miracle or a menace?

   

  What’s really scary is how little control we have over it.
• Whatever we might think or feel, technology will progress and we need to decide for ourselves how we will interact with it. Yet before we can do that, we need to understand how it evolves into being.
• Technology, therefore, is somewhat dependent on precursors. What you start out with will help to determine what you end up with.

• What Does Technology Want?

   

  So is technology more worthy of our admiration or our fear?  Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, argues for both.  He describes a neverending chain of solutions to problems that create still newer problems.
• Perhaps what we fear most about technology is ourselves.  For better or worse, technology’s evolution and our own are inseparable.

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• It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.
• it's important to keep these new findings in perspective: they hint at how the Internet could be altering our memory habits, but they haven't demonstrated that this is any different from other forms of memory support.
• similar results might have been obtained if trivia statements had been written in notebooks or told to friends, as opposed to typed into a computer.

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• the science of neuroplasticity is changing the way we think about our brain’s learning potential.
• For example, new research has shown that failure to use and develop spatial memory strategies correlates to less use of the hippocampus, the part of our brain responsible for developmental learning and short-term memory formation. Incorporating spatial memory activated by music, art, and dance at an early age can grow our brains by using more of the hippocampus, resulting in stronger development of cognitive and social problem-solving skills.
• We know that if you give kids a little information about their own biology, you can change the game of how they might think about themselves and their problems and their own potential.
• What develops the hippocampus? Learning new things in time and space, specifically spatial memory. Furthermore, the hippocampus is the first region to be attacked by Alzheimer’s plaques. So we think attention should be given to growing the hippocampus for working memory in children’s development, but also to stave off Alzheimer’s later.
• We bring scientists who are working with stress reduction together with researchers who are dealing with mood modulation to dialogue about what they know.

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• Savants can perform extraordinary cognitive feats much like trained experts, but unlike experts they usually cannot describe what makes them so talented, seemingly relying on intuition rather than conscious deliberation to quickly make choices.
• he consensus among many researchers is that intuitions are judgments made by unconscious processes in the brain.
• Studies have shown that inhibiting activity in certain areas of the brain can facilitate solving geometric puzzles.
• Allan Snyder has used transcranial direct current stimulation (DCS) to alter the activity both in the left and right hemispheres.
• DCS was applied for only ten minutes, specifically to decrease activity in the left hemisphere and increase activity in the right hemisphere, 40 percent of subjects were able to solve the puzzle.
• Tasks like solving the nine-dots puzzle are notoriously difficult because of our brains are structured in such a way as to limit creativity.
• The left hemisphere is thought to govern the role that right-brain activity may play in cognition. Inhibiting activity in the left hemisphere of the brain is thought to remove the predisposition to interpret random elements in meaningful ways, allowing for more creative solutions generated in the right brain to make it into consciousness.
• Savants thus may have a greater degree of conscious access to judgments of unconscious processes than non-savants.
• As we become more skilled at manipulating brain processes through psychoactive drugs or electronic devices, we may be able to invoke savant-like skills in neurotypical people. 

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• Kim Peek, who lent inspiration to the fictional character Raymond Babbitt—played by Dustin Hoffman—in the movie Rain Man, was a remarkable savant.
• He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye
• He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.
• Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did not have difficulties with social understanding and communication.
• The main cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections between his brain's two hemispheres. An MRI scan revealed an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer information between hemispheres. In some sense Kim was a natural born split-brain patient.
• Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, the first to study split brains in humans, found that several patients who had undergone a complete calloscotomy suffered from split-brain syndrome.
• the left hemisphere gives orders that reflect the person’s rational goal, whereas the right hemisphere issues conflicting demands that reveal hidden preferences.
• Despite his brilliant mind, his IQ was 87, significantly below normal. It was also difficult for him to follow directions of certain kinds.
• Kim Peek may have developed additional subcortical connections for information transfer.
• Peek's ability to retain large amounts of information may have had something to do with another condition he was afflicted with called macrocephaly. This brain abnormality consists in an excessively large head and a correspondingly huge brain.
• As a baby the real rain man was diagnosed with mental retardation and the physicians told his parents that he never would be able to read or talk.
• Despite the recommendation, Kim’s parents chose to raise him at home.

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• reminding us that the tools we have available to us, for the most part free (given internet access), are fantastic compared to what we had in the early 1990s -a search engine like Google was the stuff of dreams ‘back then.’ The technological progress is happening so fast that many people may not know how to make use of all these great tools that are becoming available.
• we are humans because we’re social learners
• He defines the Personal Learning Networks (PLN) as “Not just a network of sources to learn from, but  a network that learns together.”
• He  is currently working on a free handbook for peer learners that is in part a collaboration and in part a collection of single-author works, which you can access at peeragogy.org 

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• UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called "buzz."
• "Our study suggests that people are regularly attuned to how the things they're seeing will be useful and interesting, not just to themselves but to other people,"
• We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that.
• The study findings are published in the online edition of the journal Psychological Science, with print publication to follow later this summer.
• "Now we have mapped the brain regions associated with ideas that are likely to be contagious and are associated with being a good 'idea salesperson.' In the future, we would like to be able to use these brain maps to forecast what ideas are likely to be successful and who is likely to be effective at spreading them."
• the interns who were especially good at persuading the producers showed significantly more activation in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ, at the time they were first exposed to the pilot ideas they would later recommend.
• We found that increased activity in the TPJ was associated with an increased ability to convince others to get on board with their favorite ideas.
• Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important."
• The TPJ, located on the outer surface of the brain, is part of what is known as the brain's "mentalizing network," which is involved in thinking about what other people think and feel.

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• When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
• IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
• The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
• what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
• Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
• They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
• nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
• They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
• We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.

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• For the first time ever, a paralyzed man can move his fingers and hand with his own thoughts thanks to an innovative partnership between The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Battelle.
• “It’s much like a heart bypass, but instead of bypassing blood, we’re actually bypassing electrical signals,” said Chad Bouton, research leader at Battelle. “We’re taking those signals from the brain, going around the injury, and actually going directly to the muscles.”

  • Like bypass
• Ian’s brain signals bypass his injured spinal cord and move his hand, hence the name Neurobridge.
• During a three-hour surgery on April 22, Rezai implanted a chip smaller than a pea onto the motor cortex of Burkhart’s brain. The tiny chip interprets brain signals and sends them to a computer, which recodes and sends them to the high-definition electrode stimulation sleeve that stimulates the proper muscles to execute his desired movements. Within a tenth of a second, Burkhart’s thoughts are translated into action.
• Battelle also developed a non-invasive neurostimulation technology in the form of a wearable sleeve that allows for precise activation of small muscle segments in the arm to enable individual finger movement, along with software that forms a ‘virtual spinal cord’ to allow for coordination of dynamic hand and wrist movements.
• As part of the study, Burkhart worked for months using the electrode sleeve to stimulate his forearm to rebuild his atrophied muscles so they would be more responsive to the electric stimulation.

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• What is it that gives you energy these days? And what at work gives you energy?
• I love to draw with people to solve problems, gain insights about vision or just have some fun!Adding color and movement to the page via the bodily movement of drawing gives me energy.

• what I'm proposing is that if AI was a real thing, then it probably would be less of a threat to us than it is as a fake thing.
• it adds a layer of religious thinking to what otherwise should be a technical field.
• we can talk about pattern classification.
• But when you add to it this religious narrative that's a version of the Frankenstein myth, where you say well, but these things are all leading to a creation of life, and this life will be superior to us and will be dangerous
• I'm going to go through a couple of layers of how the mythology does harm.
• all this overpromising that AIs will be about to do this or that. It might be to become fully autonomous driving vehicles instead of only partially autonomous, or it might be being able to fully have a conversation as opposed to only having a useful part of a conversation to help you interface with the device.
• If a program tells you, well, this is how things are, this is who you are, this is what you like, or this is what you should do, we have a tendency to accept that.
• our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on
• people often accept that
• this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.
• other cases where the recommendation engine is not serving that function, because there is a lot of choice, and yet there's still no evidence that the recommendations are particularly good.
• there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.
• if the preponderance of those people have grown up in the system and are responding to whatever choices it gave them, there's not enough new data coming into it for even the most ideal or intelligent recommendation engine to do anything meaningful.
• it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened
• What's not clear is where the boundary is.
• If you ask: is a recommendation engine like Amazon more manipulative, or more of a legitimate measurement device? There's no way to know.
• we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.
• If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore
• not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense.
• because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth.
• Cortana or a Siri
• This pattern—of AI only working when there's what we call big data, but then using big data in order to not pay large numbers of people who are contributing—is a rising trend in our civilization, which is totally non-sustainable

  • Key relationship between automation of tasks, downsides, and expectation for AI
• If you talk about AI as a set of techniques, as a field of study in mathematics or engineering, it brings benefits. If we talk about AI as a mythology of creating a post-human species, it creates a series of problems that I've just gone over, which include acceptance of bad user interfaces, where you can't tell if you're being manipulated or not, and everything is ambiguous.
• It creates incompetence, because you don't know whether recommendations are coming from anything real or just self-fulfilling prophecies from a manipulative system that spun off on its own, and economic negativity, because you're gradually pulling formal economic benefits away from the people who supply the data that makes the scheme work.
• Having said all that, let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything.
• let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
• I'm going to give you two scenarios.
• some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly
• another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people.
• the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality
• not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI
• The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate.
• What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative.
• This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it.

  • Another key - focus on the actuator, not the agent that exploits it.
• There's a whole other problem area that has to do with neuroscience, where if we pretend we understand things before we do, we do damage to science,
• You have to be able to accept what your ignorances are in order to do good science. To reject your own ignorance just casts you into a silly state where you're a lesser scientist.
• To my mind, the mythology around AI is a re-creation of some of the traditional ideas about religion, but applied to the technical world.
• The notion of this particular threshold—which is sometimes called the singularity, or super-intelligence, or all sorts of different terms in different periods—is similar to divinity.
• In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.

  • Technical priesthood.
• If AI means this mythology of this new creature we're creating, then it's just a stupid mess that's confusing everybody, and harming the future of the economy. If what we're talking about is a set of algorithms and actuators that we can improve and apply in useful ways, then I'm very interested, and I'm very much a participant in the community that's improving those things.
• A lot of people in the religious world are just great, and I respect and like them. That goes hand-in-hand with my feeling that some of the mythology in big religion still leads us into trouble that we impose on ourselves and don't need.

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