🎧 Artificial intelligence, ethics and education
AI holds enormous potential for transforming the way we teach, says education technology expert Simon Buckingham Shum, but first we need to define what kind of education system we want.
Also, the head of the UK’s new Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation warns democratic governments that they urgently need an ethics and governance framework for emerging technologies.
And Cognizant’s Bret Greenstein on when it would be unethical not to use AI.
Guests
Roger Taylor – Chair of the UK Government’s Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation
Simon Buckingham Shum – Professor of Learning Informatics, University of Technology Sydney, leader of the Connected Intelligence Centre; co-founder and former Vice-President of the Society for Learning Analytics Research
Bret Greenstein – Senior Vice President and Global head of AI and Analytics, Cognizant
In this episode of RN Future Tense, Antony Funnell leads an exploration of artificial intelligence, educational technology and ethics. Simon Buckingham Shum discusses the current landscape and points out that we need to define the education we want, while Roger Taylor raises the concern that if we do not find a position that fits with our state that we will instead become dictated by either America’s market based solutions or China’s focus on the state. This is a topic that has been discussed on a number of fronts, including by Erica Southgate. This also reminds me of Naomi Barnes’ 20 Thoughts on Automated Schooling.
Continuing the conversation about forgetting and ethics, Antony Funnell speaks with Kate Eichhorn and Kate Mannell about digital forgetting.
Eichhorn, the author of The End of Forgetting, discusses the long and complicated history that children have and challenges associated with identity. She explains that our ability to control what is forgotten has been diminished in the age of social media. Although new solutions may allow us to connect, this also creates its own problems and consequences, such as the calcification of polarised politics. Eichhorn would like to say things are going to change, but she argues that there is little incentive for big tech. Although young people are becoming more cynical, there maybe resistance, but little hope for a return to an equitable utopian web.
Kate Mannell explores the idea of forcing a sense of ethics through the form of a hypocratic oath. Some of the problems with this is that there are many versions of the oath, it does not resolve the systemic problems and it is hard to have an oath of no harm when it is not even clear what harms are actually at play. In the end, it risks being a soft form of self regulation.
I found Eichhorn’s comments about resistance interesting when thinking about my engagement with the IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own. I guess sometimes all we have is hope. While Mannell’s point about no harm when it is not even clear what harm is at play reminds me about Zeynep Tufekci’s discussion of shadow profiles, complications of inherited datasets and the challenges of the next machine age. In regards to education, the issue is in regards to artificial intelligence and facial recognition.
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