Writing Slowly

Do you like links? Here’s what I’ve come across on the Web lately: provocative words about learning, teaching, AI, and the timely value of history.

💬 “What A.I. can’t do is feel the shape of silence after someone says something so honest we forget we’re here to learn. What it can’t do is pause mid-sentence because it remembered the smell of its father’s old chair. What it can’t do is sit in a room full of people who are trying—and failing—to make sense of something that maybe can’t be made sense of. That’s the job of teaching.” — Sean Cho A. on teaching college during the rise of AI The Rumpus.

💬 “When human inquiry and creativity are offloaded to anthropomorphic AI bots, there is a risk of devaluing critical thinking while promoting cognitive offloading. If we turn the intellectual development of the next generation over to opaque, probabilistic engines trained on a slurry of scraped content, with little transparency and even less accountability, we are not enhancing education; we are commodifying it, corporatizing it, and replacing pedagogy with productivity.” —  Courtney C. Radsch, We should all be Luddites • Brookings.

💬 “While the school says its students test in the top 1% on standardized assessments, AI models have been met with skepticism by educators who say they’re unproven.” — The $40,000 a year school where AI shapes every lesson, without teachers. CBS News. Wikipedia: Alpha School. I’ll revisit this in a few years to see just how hard it crashed (or not).

💬 “As our lives become more enmeshed with technological devices, services, and processes, I think that awareness is something which we the technology-wielding should strive for if we want to build a properly humane and empathic world.” — Matthew Lyon, The Fourth Quadrant of Knowledge • lyonheart.

💬 “Knowledge of history and awareness of history can allow us to see patterns, make connections, and identify incipient problems. It can give us a language and a set of references which allows us to step back, broaden our view, and see things and sometimes warn ourselves and others when necessary.” — Timothy Snyder on Stalin and Stephen Miller.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri. The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.. And for all the crunchy, fresh Writing Slowly goodness you can sign up to the weekly digest. It’s exactly like a bunch of radishes, but made out of email.