Bonus Blog: Is AI Harmful to Students?

Readers of my blog may be interested in this recent event from Valparaiso University’s Christ College, where students debated the proposition “on balance, the rise of Artificial Intelligence harms students more than it helps them.” (So the “pro” team was arguing against students using AI, and the “con” team was arguing that it’s OK). If you work in education, or are just an interested observer, you might be intrigued by what these bright students thought were the most compelling reasons for and against their own use of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I should note that both sides were explicitly instructed not to bring up the issue of reliability or AI-generated “hallucinations,” because it was felt that this would distract from the main question. That’s probably fair, as hallucinations have gotten a lot of press yet are also decreasing in frequency and severity with each new iteration of the technology. My daughter Ruth was one of the speakers for the “pro” side, but I won’t spoil this by telling you who won! https://www.youtube.com/live/iZ0FKG_O4LU?si=TZFmf1lnpubwh_Im

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What You Believe about Beliefs is Probably Wrong

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines a "belief" as "the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. ... Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a 'propositional attitude,' [where] propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express. For example ... 'snow is white.'" Beliefs, then, (a) are expressed in language, (b) refer to some specific contents such as "snow," and (c) express some truth about those contents. The truth need not be an empirical statement about the world -- propositions such as "x is the square root of x-squared" are also beliefs under this definition even when there is no empirical referent for "x." Beliefs can be about a single thing, or about the relationships between things, in which case they might or might not be expressed as formal rules: e.g., "every bird has wings." Language, representation...

In Pursuit of Digital Badges

What's the appeal of digital badges? I used to think that only a crazy person would be motivated to exercise just to move some electrons around on their smartphone screen. My phone would notify me that a new challenge was available each month, and I would routinely ignore it. I felt no pain or consternation about this -- in fact, I never gave it a second thought, or never notice the challenge at all. But for the past few months it seems that I'm among those who increase their activity level just because their iPhone tells them to (my latest badges shown above). Why does this seemingly stupid behavior-change strategy work, and why did it start working for me when it didn't help me before? First, it's important to know that rewards do motivate behavior. In a previous post on behaviorism I provided some background on how this works by training the Intuitive Mind. Two Minds Theory posits that the final stage before a behavior is produced by the Intuitive Mind (after proc...

Some Things That AI Probably Shouldn't Do

I'm on record endorsing the use of AI by students to improve the quality of their writing and their thinking, but also expressing concern about the potential for autonomous AI to end civilization! So what's the deal here? Am I for AI or against it? As in many areas of life, the answer is "it depends ...". In this blog post, I will look at some things that AI probably should not be doing for us, which might help to delineate the areas in which it can be more beneficial. Let's start with ethics. Although some techno-futurists have argued that AI will eventually be better at knowing what's good for us than we are ourselves, a recent report showed that a "robo-ethicist" using large language models (LLM) showed notable flaws in its reasoning. LLMs' ethics were consistently more influenced by utilitarian thinking (do what causes the least harm or the most benefit in this specific situation) than by reasoning from first principles (Kant's id...

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