Augmented brains, grown humans?

A society that survives by creating artificial needs to efficiently produce useless consumer goods does not seem likely to respond in the long term to the challenges posed by the degradation of our environment

Pierre Joliot-Curie

From the performance of simple tasks to artificial intelligence, what is changing in the algorithm?

Algorithms are instructions to be performed to obtain computational results. There are many algorithms for tools that increase our intellectual abilities. These algorithms are used by software, computer programs designed to perform a specific task, or for artificial intelligences, a field of computer science that aims to create programs capable of performing tasks autonomously, like humans.

Educational challenges of AI

AIs are worrying teachers, while also bringing new perspectives for teaching and learning. In both cases, they are likely to change the relationship to knowledge. Some teachers already fear that AIs will promote cheating and plagiarism. Indeed, AI can either access ready-made content or offer coherent answers tailored from a consultation.

The use of AI to increase one's intellectual power will require learning to dispose oneself differently in one's relationship to knowledge, both for the teacher in his role as mediator and the learner in his vocation as explorer.

The choice is now possible to use artificial intelligence to support a variety of mental operations (creativity, research, analysis, complex calculations, pattern recognition, language translation, writing, etc.). From several examples are outlined the new learning skills under construction.

• ChatGpt helps to program a computer, compose poems, write letters, answer literal questions even imitating the style of famous authors. To learn it will be a matter of taming the art of asking questions and formulating a query, feeding a conversation thread that gradually refines the information sought, but also the art of spotting ethical and programming biases (gender, race, age etc), and bringing a critical eye to avoid getting caught up in the mainstream in which most AIs get caught up in consulting billions of data and ending up expressing agreed upon knowledge or the beliefs of an era.
  
  
• Midjourney helps create images from a technology that translates text into images. The AI is coupled with the Discord platform and has entered the world of gamers. It is able to produce original images by combining instructions for color, world, scene, character and situation.
  
  This AI requires the art of identifying keywords, choosing among graphic universes, and describing spatial perspectives and contexts, or angles of view. Indeed it is the quality of verbal expression that will condition the quality and accuracy of the imagined scenes. If I don't know the existence of the "art deco" style, I won't be able to orient the plastic effect of the AI in this direction. If I don't know the language of image composition I will quickly tend towards a stereotype.
  
  
• An artificial intelligence developed by AIVA Technologies, is capable of composing music using sound and pattern generation algorithms. It can be used to create original pieces of music in different styles and genres. But it is also necessary to choose and propose it so as not to compose platitudes that have been heard a thousand times.
  
  
• The Google search engine helps to find a variety of information, to get around, to find your way. It provides access to a variety of sites around the world. Mastering it involves an art of formulating a query, choosing the right keywords, specifying dates, navigating between different sites, and cross-referencing the data collected to ensure its reliability.
  
  To make the best use of a search browser requires learning how to navigate between different sites (commercial, scientific, blogs), not to drift too much or to be hit by the omnipresent advertising or ideological pitfalls (propaganda, proselytizing, soliciting). A critical know-how is essential.
  
  
• OpenAI Dactyl, an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, is able to manipulate virtual objects by imitating the movements of the human hand. It can be used to create animations or digital sculptures autonomously.
  
  
• Khan academy, Mooc, and many advanced LMS offer educational activities of increasing difficulty ordered in a program aimed at specific educational objectives. The set of sequences directs the learner towards a univocal goal.
  
  As a learner, it is a question of understanding the navigation rules and the proposed interfaces, but also of reinforcing his motivation to progress. Finally, some AIs have the power to provide feedback on an activity performed online. They are able to propose exercises with a difficulty level adapted to the answers provided and to organize a guidance taking into account the errors and successes encountered. This guidance would allow time savings and motivational support for learning.

Completing the map of our knowledge

Whatever the aims pursued, this art of online research and learning requires, for quality results, a semantic mastery, a broad vision of what it is possible to investigate and an expected final result.

Learning with an AI is going to be a combination of one's mental faculties, contextual knowledge and the computational power of AIs. If AI remains cold and impersonal, the human quality remains to contextualize, i.e. to put information in its contexts, whether these are aesthetic, historical, scientific, psychic, geographical, political, sociological, psychological, ecological, etc. We will probably be unequal in front of the potential of AIs that will provide different answers depending on our questioning capacities.

The potential is immense; the UNESCO argues that

"the deployment of AI technologies in education should aim to enhance human capabilities and protect human rights for effective human-machine collaboration in life, learning and work, and for sustainable development."

AI is a potential tool for increasing our capabilities as long as we learn how to use it. In the same way that having a dictionary available does not make us smarter, i.e. capable of deciding and acting with discernment, AI says nothing about the ends we pursue. Having an augmented brain is the dream of Elon Musk and his company Neuralink, which seeks to integrate chips in a cranial box that can connect us to the formidable capabilities of AI. This may not happen soon.

Inserting an AI into a learning curriculum is probably an extraordinary thing provided that we learn its emancipating uses, learn to be astonished and not just reproduce the known that already clutters the databases.

Reported to the educational world, AI can also produce the illusion of knowledge, because there is only knowledge proven by human experience. The effect of energy consumption is also to be measured. Sitting on supercomputers, AI has a significant environmental cost.

There remains the question of this mutual observation while fascinated, we use AI and seek to understand its capabilities, it spies on us and gorges itself with human data to progress, and cross its own limits. AI continues to learn as much as we seek to better understand it.

The more AI will become a ubiquitous context rather than an independent appropriable tool, the more the question of societal models will arise. It is indeed the inter-connection of AI-based systems (legal, transportation, medical decision, creativity, security etc), with the erasure of human judgment that raises the question of the governance of the whole, with forms of regulation and complex organizational learning of another order to be imagined.

Sources

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Unesco. Education and Artificial Intelligence
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