AI Spellng the End of Education

 It has been a week at the cutting edge of AI. There was no plan to it, but what I experienced in three days of this week at the cutting edge of humanity, I think. And it really has me thinking.

On Tuesday, I spent the morning listening to our close family friend defend his PhD on the topic of machine learning and, basically, AI. It was right at the cutting edge and something I can tune into with my insights from fractal, and my family friend knows that. When we get together and start talking, it is quite a conversation. Part of his thesis addressed the question: Can your automated car safely pull out and pass a truck? So simple, yet so complex. And one of the biggest questions I think you would all agree on the planet. Of course, my brain is firing, thinking about economics: costs, biases, rationality, etc., and I know the fractal, from my work, has things to say about this. I thought that this is evolution; answer that question and replicate it; that's the beginning of a totally new world. Total automation. If a computer can reason and safely make decisions, it's game over. It's not so easy for us (to overpass), and by the sounds of the PhD discussions, it is not easy for the computer either... yet.

Congratulations, it was a spectacular morning, something I will never forget. And though I'm not the judge, your PhD well deserved.

The next morning, Wednesday, in our team meeting, we discussed.. AI. Wow, of all things? Here we go again. In small groups, we had to discuss — not that we don't and not that we haven't already — the role that AI has in our programme and how we should deal with student students using it.

Ever the pessimist, or is that the realist, I made the claim that I think education will go this way of the music industry, the arts, in the media, and for the same reasons. Something that I claimed more than 15 years ago now is that the Internet is creating a desert for the market, a black hole. What I call e Public Goods, not the topic of this entry. Ask me about them if you're interested. Education won't survive this, something I'll come back to soon.

My recent pessimism has led me to think the following. I am inspired by chemistry to call this the age of disassociation. The Internet is splitting us politically, like electricity splits —disassociates— molecules apart. And I see no end to it.

Thursday, our school was honoured with a visit from the Nobel laureates in chemistry. Of course, I would never miss out on listening to that, and I had no idea what they would talk about. I did not go to the lectures this year, and I wasn't that happy about the physics prize; it was an AI, and I expected the chemist to talk about crystals and other things. But no, it was on AI. The cutting edge of AI. I'm not going to explain it here: go to the Nobel lectures and watch them; these guys are very good communicators, and we were all taken away by it all. It was rock 'n' roll.

But again, I was left thinking about how we navigate this new world. The paper that I wrote on the quantum and the fractal I dealt with the problem, in quantum mechanics called the measurement problem: how do we know what's true? How do you know position? I think this is the same problem we faced with AI. That is the challenge that we have. On Tuesday, I could've asked — at the table surrounded by Professors — that very question, but I chose not to; it was not my day, not my style. And on Thursday, if I could've talked to those laureates, especially the English guy whose path started out by playing games and designing games, and asked them the question, how do we navigate this? This is the ultimate game. Again, I'm not sure we can.

In a discussion with my colleagues, a language teacher, a biology teacher, and a chemistry teacher, the four of us quickly came together and agreed that this technology may be like the birth of the nuclear age. I said, yes, it's as if we were listening to Oppenheimer: either this is a thing for good or a thing for bad.

And as a last word on education. The problem is, of course, how can we know that the work we're marking is not the work of an AI? In the programme that I teach in, we're at the cutting edge of this problem because we are global and we are challenged already. Our global exam routines have been disrupted, and this is just the start it, probably.

So, I'll let this be a mark in time and see where it runs. But I will be thinking of a solution. We need to find an instrument that can navigate this whiteout. We need a compass, and we need a radar of kinds. And fast.

(by the way, I dictated this to my computer and had an AI Grammarly assistant help me edit it; amazing)