Block 1 – week 1
This week I have been challenged in my thinking of digital culture and I’ve been genuinely scared by AI.
The challenges have been two-fold, challenging my perceptions and memory and in making me reconsider technology for teaching. Making me relive my eighties childhood by remembering the counter-culture around the early web, the excitement of a new group of people challenging the status quo in a whole new way, a group of people who had a superpower, the superpower of being able to control computers.
In all my time working with technology for teaching and learning I have never thought back to those early perceptions of computers or the belief that they would somehow “bring down” the government. I have merely accepted the technology we have as a tool to assist. Now I’m considering the counter culture and the rocking of the status quo again and thinking of MOOCs and the media hype that launched them into public consciousness, the promise that they were the technology that would “bring down” traditional education.
And then there was a genuine shake-up, google translate’s AI taught itself something that it hadn’t been programmed to do which massively improved its translations, but… was this the first step of an AI becoming sentient? Is twitterbot going to steal our jobs?
What was good about our twitter feed where the interactions of classmates sharing the google news articles with me and joining in my fear of Skynet’s birth.