#of-ai

Ah, thanks! I forgot that I needed to go to “browse all channels”

How about a "by-ai" channel? For contributions by AI systems written by community members. Could be fun.

Our department is having a retreat to seriously consider what we should be teaching and how. I’m the Chair of the department and trying to figure out how to orient the conversation. In this video, (youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70), Derek makes the case that what we need to do is get students to put the time in to do the slow thinking that would give them the fast-thinking skills to build their capacity. I would love to hear the thoughts from this community.

I have pulled together some resources to inform our discussion in the department. Some of you may be interested: docs.google.com/document/d/1T3S3mNfL-xvViZAvnSvyejqToowwsuVjWlvUSUhwRQ0 If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them

I started this in corecursive.slack.com which might be interesting for those in this space. (I heard about this space from an interview on CoRecursive.)

Which age group?

For teaching CS to middle-schoolers (12-16 yr olds), I believe that best tool is Berkeley's Snap!. Unlike MIT Scratch, it has all the right CS primitives (first order lists, functions, vectors etc) and therefore encourages computational thinking, but unlike the "industrial" programming languages - like Python, it does not have a high cliff for beginners before they can be productive.

Here is a library that adds AI building blocks to Snap language.

"Teaching CS" already looks like a much too narrow framing to me. It's of course what a CS department must think about short-term, but what really needs a big revision is "teaching about computing, including AI, to the next generation of citizens", with a special focus on future intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and political leaders.

Sorry, university undergrad. I certainly agree there is a general education aspect, but we have 2000 undergrads who are looking for a “Computer Science” education. The question is, what should that look like in the face of LLMs, cursor.io etc.

At one point in the video, a question is asked "if they don't craft those sentences what happens to their brains?". My answer: they get to think about things they can't think about now, because they are currently consumed by thinking about noise issues (at least, those who are inspired to think about specific problems - I don't think that the ratio of inspired-to-think:biological-robots will change). IMO, coding and writing-editing essays/videos is noise, something that stands in the way of thinking about more interesting issues. The currently popular trend is to emphasize linear thinking and specialization, I feel that generalization is more fruitful. ChatGPT is trained on linear thinking, specialization, synchronous programming, which isn't sufficiently broad IMO. ChatGPT can dutifully work on the noise, while humans are freed to think more broadly. IIUC, Kasparov was the first human to be put out of a job by AI. One of the things he does now is to run tournaments involving a new chess discipline, known as "Advanced Chess," aiming at bringing together human skills and machine intelligence.

I stumbled upon this video, which, I think is relevant to this question. The basic thesis is: don't /use/ AI, work /with/ AI (collaborate instead of ask/command).

I am not sure I even understand this metaphor, as I don't keep tabs open on my browser over long periods.

But "mental browser" sounds wrong in many ways.

I think I know what you mean Konrad Hinsen. Maybe “mental browser” here is actually “mental plate”, and overstimulation is piling so much food onto it that it starts bending.

I keep ~2000 tabs open at a time and Firefox has no issues (other than starting back up after a reboot)

Arguably though, this is as human a metaphor as any tool-based one. 'She had the wind in her sails', 'They popped a gasket', 'He pushed their buttons' etc

Yes, but I think more interested in that blending of self with something else (in this case, browser, but you also mentioned the parts of a boat and a car). I don’t know what to call that, and so I’d be curious to learn what that means.