CathyAnderson on Education, Technology and Open Education

When I set out writing this blog it was not my intent that I ponder on what the singularity is, how great Google is or any of the other initiaitives occuring in technology that are impacting our lives, this is just sort of happening.  I am not an expert in any of these areas, this blog is just a reflection on how I feel about these things, how I think they could be connected and what the future may hold.  Given that, I think the future is now, in some aspects the singularity may be happening somewhere right now only it’s so small and so isolated that we are not seeing it on a global scale.  Google does have  vast stores of information and knowledge and will continue to grow…this is one genie we can’t put back in the bottle folks ..and trying to keep up is next to nearly impossible.

Take Google street view for example..oh you aren’t familair with that one?  Well “google” it then and see what it’s all about.   Here is how Google describes it: when you’ve zoomed all the way in you find yourself virtually standing on the street….and indeed you do and all of sudden real life is now blended with virtual life.   The most concise way to describe this is to say Google is giving you ‘street level imagery” of an address you input, your journey and your destination. Thee are some entertaining videos on how this is done on this Google site. If you want to know if Google is visiting your neighborhood you can find out by visiting this site.

In the last blog I wrote about Google gathering all the knowledge of the world ..you may scoff, but is that so far fetched?  And all that knowledge is going into an array of interconnected computers or servers…and ala “Twilight Zone” for your consideration .. that knowledge maybe somewhat loosely joined now but what will the future hold when it’s interconnected, when it double loops, and when it thinks.

We look at what we do individually on the web without thinking about how that ripples out and intertwines with what others are doing on the web…I have recently uploaded almost 20,000 non duplicated pictures and other artifacts to Flickr.  Some of these are digital photos that I have taken, others are scans of amateur photography I have collected over the years, and scans of paper ephemera.  Ultimately though within that collection of images are the patterns of human existence, nature, and artistic creations of life on this earth that can be processed and interpreted via artificial intelligence.    Have you ever uploaded photos to Google photo albums, have you noticed how picasa seeks out faces of people and tags them?

Ok so what do I know about artificial intelligence…well what do any of us know about this obscure concept that is seemingly a very science fiction like term.   You can find an article on artificial intelligence here on Wikipedia.  However what I find is not exaclty what I think the future will be like…”is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. Textbooks define the field as “the study and design of intelligent agents,”^[1] where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.^[2] John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956,^[3] defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”^[4]“   Why is “intelligence’ artificial if it is that of machines?  And what is intelligence anyway?   And in the spirit of not taking Wikipedia as first source here are more definitions of artificial intelligence:

A May 23, 2009 article in The New York Times by Joh Markhoff describes Artificial Intellgence this way…”Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today.”

The basic artificial intelligence website presents the following:  “It is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. It is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.
and addresses this question;

Q. Yes, but what is intelligence?

A. Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world. Varying kinds and degrees of intelligence occur in people, many animals and some machines.
Well back ts artificial intelligence site ..’Kurzweil finesses the issue of runaway AI by proposing a pathway where machine intelligence is patterned after human brains, so that they would have our morals and values built in…”  Hall also speculates that the possibility of computer based intelligent machine being better equipped to make better decisions than humans is near.

I have long been a fan of Kevin Kelly, I have included his blog as a resources here…it is interesting. He gives an excellent explanation of the Singularity here at this site. So you have to read Kurzweil and Kelly..and then speculate..what if the singularity is here already in some respects?  What if artificial intelligence already exists?  It is just disaggregated?

As an educator am I going to wake up some morning and find that teaching and learning in the way we do it now has been disrupted  in such a way that I as learner flip on my machine and find that what I “need to know’ has been provided to me based upon information I have provided in my profile which includes information on my career/job, my education and my experience?  My learning happens daily, inobtrusiviely, is individualized and the resources are ubiquitous.  Or is this happening already in such a manner that I am not really aware, that it is information I requested via Google Alerts, my social networks, and Google Reader?

Resources for further review:  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Artificial Intelligence Depot , Science Daily; Artificial Intelligence News, Kevin Kelly’s website,Ray Kurzweil’s Artificial Intelligence Website

Related posts:

1. Random thoughts on the book by Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near… This is a post on the book by Ray Kurzweil,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.