AI and Developing Human Intelligence

Future Learning and Educational Innovation

John Senior, Éva Gyarmathy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000449655
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

As the relationship between AI machines and humans develops, we ask what it will mean to be an intelligent learner in an emerging, socio-dynamic learningscape. The need for a new global view of intelligence and education is the core discussion of this future-focussed collection of ideas, questions, and activities for learners to explore.

This fascinating guide offers activities to understand what needs to be changed in our educations systems and our view of intelligence. As well as exploring AI, HI, the future of learning and caring for all learners, this book addresses fundamental questions such as:

• How do we educate ourselves for an increasingly uncertain future?
• What is the purpose of intelligence?
• How can a curriculum focussing on human curiosity and creativity be created?
• Who are we and what are we becoming?
• What will we invent now that AI exists?

AI and Developing Human Intelligence will interest you, inform you, and empower your understanding of "intelligence" and where we are going on the next part of our journey in understanding what it is to be human now and tomorrow.

1
DEFINING THE NEW LEARNING LANDSCAPE

A humble guide to the new world

DOI: 10.4324/9780429356346-2

Information and uncertainty – the struggles of education at level 2

The digital generation is us – all of us. Generations who previously would have been labelled as digital immigrants are more similar to those called digital natives than their earlier selves. Predigital fossils have not changed, though, of course. The old adage is true in this respect, too: “The stones remain.” And there will be many who will remain strangers to the digital present and future. We always need to remember that, for many, change is difficult to accommodate, and we must take this into account as the realisation of the future accelerates.

However, those who are alive to change and learning and not made of stone have spent so much active time in the age of info-communication that their neurological systems have adopted to the ways of this age. The human spirit, on the other hand, especially in a defensive mode, does not succumb so easily to novelty, and it will vigorously resist change and the uncertainty caused by change. Many people are still waiting for a new culture to pop into existence, which would finally bring some stability again.

This new culture is in the making. This is the good news. The bad news (but each can label “good” and “bad” as they see fit) is that the core essence of this new culture is change. As such, the most important component of our psychological survival gear is the acceptance of uncertainty. It will not be easy, but, coupled with our other values necessary for survival, we are facing a huge opportunity for development.

The general direction of historical development is clear, as are the new challenges of change, and answers to these challenges. They have already appeared in accordance with a series of levels familiar from several domains of human activity. Such challenges signal a change between these levels and inter-relationships and have invariably brought revolutionary changes in all eras and all arenas.

However, the stimuli bearing change have not yet reached the response threshold of the educational system. It has either been sedated with particularly strong tranquilisers, or the system itself is too unwieldy and requires a bigger scale of destruction in order for the mummies of education to be uncovered and put in a museum and for the pyramids to be filled with content adapted to change.

Information networks

Human information networks exist and have always existed, because the transfer of information belongs to and is enlivened through human social behaviour and has a defining impact on human development.

According to evolution scientist Robin Dunbar (2004), everything started with social grooming. On observing the social behaviour of primates, he concluded that this social cohesion activity is very demanding, and as a result, the brain is capable of handling only a limited number of social relationships. Based on the brain capacity of different species, he calculated the approximate size of their communities. In the case of humans, this number is around 150 people. Grooming such a great number of individuals would be, however, time-consuming, and so in the case of humans, the role of social grooming has been taken over by talking and gossip as a means of building social cohesion.

This helped considerably in our rise and our development.

The ancestor of the internet was a merely virtual (although we shall pass over what we mean and understand as to exactly what is real) network transferring information, and it worked well in smaller communities. Humans, however, strived to expand their communication in both space and time, and they experimented with different mediums. Smoke signals, cave drawings, then later recorded linguistic speech (pictographs, pictographic writing), phonological representations, and alphabetic writing were a big step forward in knowledge sharing.

Printing brought about a revolutionary change, and subsequently the spread of electronic communication tools and digital technologies meant that info-communication became extremely fast and rich, bringing with it a number of social and developmental changes. Even gossip did not remain what it used to be. It developed with the technologies of the 21st century, which shows that gossip does indeed fill an important role in humanity’s life.

Gossip plays a vital community-and culture-forming role, not to mention that people are also informed of important things through gossip. Gossip used to be the news. The appearance of printing brought on an enormous change, and publicly available information came into being. Gossip became the antithesis of this.

As printing became widespread, gossip as information took on a negative connotation, because in many respects what it conveys is unreliable and inessential, and it is often used for manipulative purposes. Today, now that we have technologically surpassed printing and the internet has opened up the way for information at a hitherto unseen level, information very much resembling gossip is beginning to increasingly appear on this pinnacle of information tools: information on the internet is often unreliable, inessential, and often serves manipulative purposes. Gossip has become globalised.

With the appearance of the internet, it seemed at the beginning that human knowledge would finally expand and would be unstoppable. However, as the internet became widespread, its content slipped out from under the control of the small class of “literates.” Information generated by the users mirrors these users, and so the greater the masses that use the internet, the more its content mirrors the intellectual content of humanity.

The internet is a storehouse of the information generated by humans, rather than of humanity’s knowledge. The first step in learning to use new tools is to learn how they work and how they can be used. The second step is to understand what it is that it creates and how it creates it. We have taken the first step, even if somewhat hesitatingly, but not the second one, and we should be cautious as to the next steps we take, as it is dangerous to proceed without understanding what it is we are proceeding to.

The internet bombards us with data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, but it would be good to know which is which.

The road from information to knowledge and, hopefully, beyond

The words data, information, understanding, and knowledge are often used synonymously, even though there are vital differences between them. Russell Ackoff (1989) analysed very precisely the various elements in communication. Since then, many have been trying to develop his system, but the following captures its essence:

• Data: a description of the world in symbols; facts
• Information: processed, transferred data, knowledge, or opinion; answers “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” questions
• Knowledge: processed, applied data and information; a model of the world; answers “how” questions
• Understanding: involves further processing; answers “why” questions
• Wisdom: evaluation of the processed material

A piece of data is about unprocessed facts. It may be mistaken, but it is never false (though it can be falsely conveyed). At that point, however, it is information and not a piece of data obtained through direct experience.

Information already represents interpretation and opinion, and of course, like data, can also be mistaken, but processing allows for conscious or unconscious deception as well.

Knowledge arises from the processing of information. Following appropriate processing, useful knowledge comes into existence. Knowledge presents a limit to the ability of answering questions. If processing remains at the level of memorisation, a more generalised application of knowledge is not possible.

Understanding is the cognitive and analytical processing of knowledge. The difference between knowledge and understanding is the same as the difference between memorisation and learning. This is a conceptual difference that the word learn actually fails to highlight sufficiently. If someone has learned something, then they are able to apply that piece of knowledge, while if they merely memorised it, then they will not be able to apply it due to lack of processing, because processing is what leads to understanding and therethrough to solutions beyond mere factual knowledge.

Computers are able to process data and create information for us. Significantly, artificial intelligence can no longer only memorise things; it is also able to learn things. This way, a machine may be able to learn more efficiently than a student who is compelled by education to stick to factual knowledge.

Wisdom is the highest level of processing and synthesis, a level at which the mind creates new connections based on knowledge and based on the evaluation and deliberation of the understanding of this knowledge. This is a creative level, a level at which elements of earlier categories are evaluated along moral and human values, as well, whereby a higher-level understanding can emerge.

The first four categories relate to the past and are concerned with what has been and what can be known or understood from what has been. The fifth category, wisdom, looks at the future, and in fact creates ideas that constitute the future. However, this level is out of reach without a command of the previous levels of processing.

Many are of the opinion that artificial intelligence is incapable of reaching this level because of its lack of conscious experience. However, if artificial intelligence develops at an exponential rate as reckoned by Ray Kurzweil (2005) and many others, then it could reach the capacity of the human brain within a few decades, and since it is able to learn, it will also acquire experience. The question is at which point we can regard this as a conscious experience.

Artificial intelligence has already crossed some boundary lines that we set with a human brain socialised in the past. One such line is creativity. Machines have been able for some time to write Bach chorales, and anyone today can create artistic pictures with basic mobile applications. Artificial intelligence can also write movie scripts and beat not only the best chess players but also Go masters, even though this game requires a lot of intuition. Artificial intelligence is also capable of producing formulas in organic chemistry.

Technology and the propagation of information both develop exponentially – that is, their development accelerates. Information floods us, and we have to learn to process it very soon. To achieve this, it can help if we understand the general tendencies of development processes, and if learning/teaching progresses to the levels currently dictating cultural and social changes.

The ladder of development

There are several segments of our collective and individual lives whose development catalyses significant changes in human history. Such segments include technology, information dissemination, and education. Technology has primarily affected the development of humanity at the level of ecology, while dissemination of information did so at a mental level.

The role of education is to impart the most important abilities and knowledge in a given culture, and education fulfils its function when it meets the technological and information dissemination challenges of the relevant culture. We need to respond not to the tools provided by our culture but to the problems posed by our culture.

Revolutionary changes involve fundamental level shifts which entail significant changes in the socio-cultural environment, and such turning points are as a result not hard to identify.

The instrument of the information explosion at the end of the 20th century was the internet. It developed within a very short time span and very clearly right in front of our eyes, and it has been progressing from Web 1.0 towards Web 4.0.

Each developmental stage of the internet has brought massive changes in human communication, which in itself makes the internet an important object of study. Here, however, the focus of our study is not merely the effect of the development of the internet. Instead, this quickly developing tool will be used to illustrate the stages of development through the different versions of the internet, adopting even the version designations 1.0–4.0.

The short history of the internet through its stages is as follows:

• Web 0.0: 1969 – ARPANET and other internal information networks are its precursors.
• Web 1.0: 1991 – The World Wide Web becomes a public network of information; information becomes publicly accessible.
• Web 2.0: 2003 – Social network; interactive; human links become widespread and common; users generate data.
• Web 3.0: 2006 – Intelligent network; it adapts data coming from the users to user needs; content becomes personalised.
• Web 4.0: 2012 – Artificial intelligence becomes part of the network; a collaboration of machines and humans; a comprehensive organising force arises.

The different steps in the development of the internet are thus as follows:

1. Precursor, initiative
2. Appears and becomes accessible
3. Spreads and becomes widespread and mainstream
4. Becomes differentiated and personalised
5. Reaches the level of synthesis and becomes comprehensive

This trend fits all other forms of development as well, irrespective of how big a time interval the development takes up. The stages we observe through the transition stages of the internet – an important and quickly developing tool – apply equally to technology, information transfer, and education.

The cases of industrial revolutions, revolutions of the media, and the evolution of education would be entirely parallel, although in the latter case, we can hardly talk abo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: artificial intelligence: the mirror we can climb through
• 1 Defining the new learning landscape: a humble guide to the new world
• 2 A brief history of intelligence – artificial and otherwise
• 3 Fluid intelligence, other satellites, and consciousness
• 4 The changing nature of employment and future learning behaviours
• 5 Included, excluded, extraordinary, efficacious: transitional and open curriculums
• 6 Accepting change: a brief history of the future
• 7 The mental health of machines
• 8 What needs to be done: the creative being and being creative
• Afterword: homesick for the old times – yearning for the future
• Glossary
• Index