Skip to main content

Boxed Education

I may be out of touch with the times but the notion of a K-12 AI camp feels deeply disturbing and disappointing to me. I can't think of one redeeming quality of such education for the under 16 age-group. To create any artificial intelligence of value, the person creating it must have a fully formed emotional awareness and understanding of the world they will be operating this AI in. Kids that young have a lot of growing left to do in that area. A notional understanding of what AI is and the discussing the ethical concerns around it are very beneficial. Just blithely applying the key-phrase social-impact is not a way to circumvent the real problem here. 

Why does an kindergartner need to implement AI Out of the Box? What possible use or good that be to the child or anyone else? What happened to the idea of focusing on fundamental things like reading, writing and numeric literacy and then going on to logic, reason and philosophy? Those are the skills every kid needs to make sense of what is going on in the world and consider what they could do to change things they don't like. Awareness of tooling like AI is good to have so when the time comes they will know what tool is fit for purpose - their purpose. Not some ill-conceived curriculum that puts AI in a box. 

This is exactly the kind of misguided education that is driving academic achievement of American kids down compared to those in other countries. STEM and now AI is not stuff you are pre-process like a frozen dinner and and consume like so many episodes of a reality show. There are basic concepts to learn and build on over a period of time to gain facility with the disciplines that fall under those acronyms. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more