Yes, AI could profoundly disrupt education. But maybe that’s not a bad thing | Rose Luckin | The Guardian

Yes, AI could profoundly disrupt education. But maybe that’s not a bad thing | Rose Luckin

"Education strikes at the heart of what makes us human. It drives the intellectual capacity and prosperity of nations. It has developed the minds that took us to the moon and eradicated previously incurable diseases. And the special status of education is why generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are likely to profoundly disrupt this sector. This isn’t a reflection of their intelligence, but of our failure to build education systems that nurture and value our unique human intelligence.

We are being duped into believing these AI tools are far more intelligent than they really are. A tool like ChatGPT has no understanding or knowledge. It merely collates bits of words together based on statistical probabilities to produce useful texts. It is an incredibly helpful assistant.

But it is not knowledgable, or wise. It has no concept of how any of the words it produces relate to the real world. The fact that it can pass so many forms of assessment merely reflects that those assessments were not designed to test knowledge and understanding but rather to test whether people had collected and memorised information.

AI could be a force for tremendous good within education. It could release teachers from administrative tasks, giving them more opportunities to spend time with students. However, we are woefully equipped to benefit from the AI that is flooding the market. It does not have to be like this. There is still time to prepare, but we must act quickly and wisely.

AI has been used in education for more than a decade. AI-powered systems, such as Carnegie Learning or Aleks, can analyse student responses to questions and adapt learning materials to meet their individual needs. AI tools such as TeachFXand Edthena can also enhance teacher training and support. To reap the benefits of these technologies, we must design effective ways to roll out AI across the education system, and regulate this properly.

Staying ahead of AI will mean radically rethinking what education is for, and what success means. Human intelligence is far more impressive than any AI system we see today. We possess a rich and diverse intelligence, much of which is unrecognised by our current education system.

We are capable of sophisticated, high-level thinking, yet the school curriculum, particularly in England, takes a rigid approach to learning, prioritising the memorising of facts, rather than creative thinking. Students are rewarded for rote learning rather than critical thought. Take the English syllabus, for instance, which requires students to learn quotations and the rules of grammar. This time-consuming work encourages students to marshal facts, rather than interpret texts or think critically about language.

Our education system should recognise the unique aspects of human intelligence. At school, this would mean a focus on teaching high-level thinking capabilities and designing a system to supercharge our intelligence. Literacy and numeracy remain fundamental, but now we must add AI literacy. Traditional subject areas, such as history, science and geography, should become the context through which critical thinking, increased creativity and knowledge mastery are taught. Rather than teaching students only how to collate and memorise information, we should prize their ability to interpret facts and weigh up the evidence to make an original argument.

Failure to change isn’t an option. Now these technologies are here, we need humans to excel at what AI cannot do, so any workplace automation complements and enriches our lives and our intelligence.

This should be an amazing opportunity to use AI to become much smarter, but we must ensure that AI serves us, not the other way round. This will mean confronting the profit-driven imperatives of big tech companies and the illusionist tricks played by Silicon Valley. It will also mean carefully considering what types of tasks we’re willing to offload to AI.

Some aspects of our intellectual activity may be dispensable, but many are not. While Silicon Valley conjures up its next magic trick, we must prepare ourselves to protect what we hold dear – for ourselves and for future generations.

• Rose Luckin is professor of learner-centred design at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London"

Yes, AI could profoundly disrupt education. But maybe that’s not a bad thing | Rose Luckin | The Guardian

Uncharted territory’: UN declares first week of July world’s hottest ever recorded

Extreme temperatures break records as scientists warn El Niño is set to get worse

A doctor checks a boy suffering from heat related ailments at the Lalitpur district hospital, in Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Saturday, 17 June 2023. Scientists have declared June 20203 as the hottest on record, and the first week of July the hottest week on record. Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP

“The beginning of July was the hottest week on record for the planet as a whole, according to the World Meteorological Organization. This year had already seen the hottest June on record, the UN body said, driven by climate change and the early stages of an El Niño weather pattern.

It is the latest in a series of records halfway through a year that has seen a drought in Spain and fierce heatwaves in China as well as the US.

“The world just had the hottest week on record, according to preliminary data,” the WMO said in a statement, adding that temperatures were breaking records on land and in the oceans, with “potentially devastating impacts on ecosystems and the environment”.

“We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024,” said Christopher Hewitt, WMO director of climate services.

“This is worrying news for the planet.”

Global sea surface temperatures were at record highs for the time of the year both in May and June, said Hewitt. “It is not only the surface temperature, but the whole ocean is becoming warmer and absorbing energy that will remain there for hundreds of years.”

A woman wearing an electric fan, putting a cooling pad on her forehead and carrying an umbrella visits the Forbidden City on a sweltering July day in Beijing. Photograph: Andy Wong/AP

“If the oceans are warming considerably, that has a knock-on effect on the atmosphere, on sea ice and ice worldwide,” said Michael Sparrow, chief of the world climate research programme at the WMO.

But Sparrow said El Niño’s effects would probably be felt more acutely later in the year. “El Niño hasn’t really got going yet,” he said.

Europe’s climate monitoring service Copernicus told the AFP news agency that its data also showed last week was likely to be the hottest since records began in 1940.

Copernicus said that its data suggested Thursday was likely to have seen the highest global average temperature, after several record-breaking days earlier in the week.

‘Out of control’

Along the US-Mexico border, federal agents reported that extreme temperatures over the weekend contributed to 10 people dying and another 45 people being rescued.

The south-western US is bracing for another week of blistering temperatures, with forecasters on Monday extending an excessive heat warning through the weekend for Arizona’s most populated area, and alerting residents in parts of Nevada and New Mexico to stay indoors.

People cool themselves in the waters of the Rio Grande after crossing to the US from Mexico.Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

The metro Phoenix area was on track to tie or to break a record set in the summer of 1974 for the most consecutive days with the high temperature at or above 110F (43C).

Last week the Canadian ministry of natural resources said the number of wildfires in the country – more than 670 on Friday – was “off the charts” with a long and difficult summer ahead.

Smoke from the fires so far this season has polluted the air in Canada and neighbouring US, affecting more than 100 million people.

In the US, Texas was experiencing a prolonged “heat dome” in which warm air is trapped in the atmosphere like a convection oven, while in Europe, Spain was bracing for its second heatwave in a matter of weeks.

In southern Iraq, the fabled marshland was having its worst heatwave in the past 40 years, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said on Monday, warning of a “devastating impact” on the ecosystem as well as farmers and fisheries.

A man shows the skeleton of a fish at a dry marsh in Chibayish, Iraq’s southern Dhi Qar province, on 5 July 2023. Photograph: Asaad Niazi/AFP/Getty Images

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has said “the situation we are witnessing now is the demonstration that climate change is out of control”.

Heat-related deaths

Higher than normal temperatures also cause health problems ranging from heatstroke and dehydration to cardiovascular stress.

Research published on Monday found that more than 61,000 people died due to the heat during Europe’s record-breaking summer of 2022.

The majority of deaths were of people over the age of 80 and about 63% of those who died due to the heat were women, according to the research published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Experts say heat exhaustion and heatstroke are likely to become more common as the impacts of climate change grow more and more extreme.

Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness and happens when the body loses its ability to sweat.

A firefighter lifts a migrant woman suffering from heat exhaustion on to a stretcher in the border community of Eagle Pass, Texas. Photograph: Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters

Jon Femling, an emergency medicine physician and scientist at the University of New Mexico, said the body tried to compensate by pumping blood to the skin as a way to cool off. The more a person breathed, the more they lost fluids, becoming increasingly dehydrated.

“So one of the first things that happens is, your muscles start to feel tired as your body starts to shunt away,” he said. “And then you can start to have organ damage where your kidneys don’t work, your spleen, your liver.”

The stress on the body may result in the brain not getting enough blood, he said. With heat exhaustion, the body could also become cold and clammy. Older people, children and those with health conditions could face greater risks when the temperatures were high.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Doughty's social media injunction undoes election disinformation efforts - The Washington Post

Social media injunction unravels plans to protect 2024 elections

"Civil rights groups warn limits on government contacts could be a boon for election lies ahead of ‘the biggest election year the internet age has seen’

Cat Zakrzewski

Crowd with Trump 2024 flags at the “Protect Our Elections Rally” at the Arizona Federal Theater in Phoenix. (Cassidy Araiza for The Washington Post

A July 4 injunction that places extraordinary limits on the government’s communications with tech companies undermines initiatives to harden social media companies against election interference, civil rights groups, academics and tech industry insiders say.

After companies and the federal government spent years expanding efforts to combat online falsehoods in the wake of Russian interference on the platforms during the 2016 election, the ruling is just the latest sign of the pendulum swinging in the other direction. Tech companies are gutting their content moderation staffs, researchers are pulling back from studying disinformation and key government communications with Silicon Valley are on pause amid unprecedented political scrutiny.

With voting in the 2024 primaries just months away, tech companies also are facing new election threats as leaps in artificial intelligence give bad actors new tools to create fake videos, photos and ads.

Amid that rapidly changing social media landscape, civil rights groups say U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty’s order will be a boon for election lies.

“As the U.S. gears up for the biggest election year the internet age has seen, we should be finding methods to better coordinate between governments and social media companies to increase the integrity of election news and information,” said Nora Benavidez, a senior counsel at Free Press, a digital civil rights group.

Judge blocks U.S. officials from tech contacts in First Amendment case

Doughty’s order marks a watershed development in the years-long, partisan battleover the rules for what people can say on social media. As Democrats warn tech companies aren’t doing enough to check the proliferation of falsehoods on their platforms, Republicans continue to say the companies unfairly pick on them because of their political views, criticizing the companies for developing misinformation policies and deploying fact-checkers and contractors to enforce them.

Republicans have used their control of the House of Representatives to advance such allegations, and conservative activists have targeted academics studying online disinformation with lawsuits and open records requests. Their efforts have been aided by Elon Musk, who has used his ownership of Twitter to release a slew of internal communications about content moderation decisions that he dubbed “The Twitter Files.”

“We have watched as conservatives have weaponized this kind of false idea of conservative bias throughout Silicon Valley,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights organization Color of Change. “And so it’s no surprise that they’ve used their soft power within corporate America to make companies afraid to actually live up to their responsibility and to be accountable.”

New video undercuts claim Twitter censored pro-Trump views before Jan. 6

Meta, Google and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Justice Department has sought a stay of the injunction because of the risks. In an appeal filed Thursday night, DOJ lawyers warned that the judge’s order could prevent the government from “working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Already there are signs of how the judge’s order and other conservative moves are chilling efforts to combat election interference. A day after the ruling, the State Department canceled its regular meeting with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, whose contacts with social media companies are also limited under Doughty’s order, has played a major role in getting accurate voting information out. A private nonprofit with some government funding, the Center for Internet Security, which is mentioned in Doughty’s order, has connected local election officials with the social media companies when the local officials spot falsehoods about election mechanics. CIS is not specifically barred from contacting social media companies, but people who have worked with both organizations expect a chill in coordination.

“For several years now, CISA’s productive working relationship with election officials and social media platforms has been an essential part of tamping down false rumors that can impact the public’s participation in election processes,” said Eddie Perez, a former Twitter director of product management who led a team on civic integrity and similar issues. “This sweeping injunction has the potential to ‘green light’ bad actors’ efforts to undermine confidence and suppress the vote.”

Doughty included some exceptions that appeared to acknowledge that restricting the government’s communications with the tech industry could exacerbate national security threats. His injunction permits communications between the government and the companies to discuss illegal voter suppression or foreign interference in elections. But it’s not always immediately clear if disinformation on a site is originating from a foreign actor, and it could result in the government being extra cautious and only sharing threats with the tech industry when they’re positive they originate from people abroad, said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director at Meta.

“Does that put us back to where we were in 2016?” Harbath said.

Read the judge's order about the Biden administration's communications with social media companies

The scrutiny from conservatives is also affecting how tech companies are talking with one another about potential disinformation threats, according to a former tech industry employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment and concern about discussing confidential interactions between companies. Following the revelations of disinformation during the 2016 election, officials from Twitter, Facebook, Google and other social media companies began regular contacts to discuss election threats. Details of those communications have become public, opening up tech employees to harassment.

Now people are “wary of having those conversations,” the person said.

Academic researchers were reeling from the injunction and still sorting out how to respond to it. The order placed new restrictions on communications between key U.S. government agencies and academic institutions studying online disinformation, including the Election Integrity Partnership, an initiative led by Stanford University and University of Washington that in past elections tracked election disinformation.

“There’s no version of us being able to do our job, or other versions of the field of trust and safety, without being able to communicate with all stakeholders, including government and including industry,” said a leading researcher on extremism and foreign influence who asked not to be named due to the ongoing litigation.

These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers.

The order comes as a series of conservative lawsuits and records requests are already vexing academics doing social media work. Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, said it’s difficult to quantify the impact of the litigation and investigations on social media researchers, but that it is undoubtedly “making people think twice before working on these issues.”

“The First Amendment is supposed to protect against exactly this problem — that people will just shut up because they’re worried about bad consequences or think it’s just not worth the hassle,” she said. “It’s being flipped on its head here and being used to chill people from doing important and legitimate academic work.”

Tech companies have also cut back on content moderation initiatives in recent months. Under Musk, Twitter unwound programs intended to limit the spread of misinformation and fired many employees working on content moderation. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has also laid off significant swaths of its workforce, including employees who worked on trust and safety.

How Mark Zuckerberg broke Meta’s workforce

The order’s focus on the government also distracts from badly needed attention on how the companies are acting on their own, advocates say.

“While we’re covering the issue of how the government can or cannot engage with Big Tech, we’re not talking about Big Tech failing to do its job of moderating lies,” Benavidez said.

Meanwhile, companies are releasing new products that could be abused to spread disinformation. The day after the ruling, Meta launched its Twitter competitor, Threads, which attracted more than 70 million sign-ups in 48 hours. The launch underscores how quickly the social media landscape can change and why it’s so necessary for the government to be able to talk to the companies, said Leah Litman, a professor at University of Michigan Law School.

The ruling “is just going to compound the inability to adapt to new challenges that are coming,” Litman said."

Doughty's social media injunction undoes election disinformation efforts - The Washington Post

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