Over a month since my last post. Wow.

Anyway, last week was full of Artificial Intelligence events. On Wednesday, I attended a talk by Ray Kurzweil, hosted by Trinity High School - a posh private school on the Upper West Side, The Academy for Teachers, and Teach for America. Thursday was a StuyCS event which was really about early stage startups but much of the discussion revolved around AI and Friday was a meeting of CUNY CS educators where the topic of the day was, of course, AI - I was there to pitch, well, Pitchfest.

All three were great but I wanted to write about the Kurzweil talk.

The talk was supposed to be about AI and the future of education but he really didn't share any deep thoughts on the subject. He did, however bring up some topics that made me think about a number of issues.

A big part of the talk involved Kurzweil talking about what he described as our biological brain and our other, external brain - that being what we have access to via our phones or other computing devices. The example he gave multiple times was that we might be thinking of an actor and forgot who they were but we can easily use our phone to look them up which, in a way, increases our intelligence over us, say 30 years ago.

Kurzweil predicts that by some time next decade we'll have achieved Artificial General Intelligence and in fact our biological brain will be directly connected to our "external brain." Then, if we're asked about that actor we'll just be able to give the answer instantly. We won't even know if the answer came from the biological brain or the other one.

It will have made us smarter.

Or did it?

This was the big question I was left with.

I was catching up with an old high school buddy and was relaying this to him and he hit the nail on the head. He said "or at least we'll have more knowledge."

Does knowing more stuff actually make us smarter?

It's an interesting question.

Years ago, a few of us at Stuy were talking about two particular students. Both very smart by any reasonable measure and in fact both were individual standouts. There was a big difference between them though. One student knew a lot - had a lot of information. Had a great memory, read tons of books, could produce formula after formula on demand and so forth. The other didn't have nearly as much information at the ready but was stronger at figuring things out. The first student would just know the theorem, the second would derive it.

Who was "smarter?"

We mostly felt the one who was the stronger problem solver was "smarter" than the one with more knowledge.

So how does it play out with AI?

Will all that knowledge make us smarter?

We'll "know" all the formulas but will we know when to use them? Will knowing all the chords make me a better composer? Knowledge of color theory a better artist?

It also raises the question of how the information will exist and be "communicated" to our brain. Right now most of the information we interface with is textual - word based descriptions. Will textual knowledge translate to non textual concepts?

How does this play against things like Synesthesia where some people might "see" music as colors or "smell" scents for shapes.

I don't have any answers here but these are questions that go well beyond the already interesting and challenging questions of students using LLMs.

Of course, those LLM questions came up during the second part of the talk. That was something of a reverse panel where three guests - one, a representative from Math for America, one from the Academy for Teachers, and one form Trinity asked Kurzweil questions.

Another question that came up during that panel part made me chuckle. It was raised by the Trinity representative - I think she was head of school. She went on about he strong belief in equity and diversity and ended with concerns about AI - could it be an equalizer.

I chuckled because the person who was asking the question hold a position that in spite of statements to the contrary is very much about maintaining separation between the "elite" and everyone else. I mean, a high school that has an annual tuition of over $60,000 isn't really working for the common man. The person she was asking, Ray Kurzweil, on the other hand was a product of New York City public schools. Martin Van Buren high school specifically.

Chuckles aside, it's an important question and I didn't agree with the answer. Kurzweil addressed the audience noting that they all had phones and that having a phone was not a big deal financially. As I looked around, I noted that the audience was mostly white, mostly well dressed, and apparently largely affluent.

Sadly, the digital divide is still real and I don't see things getting better with AI.

In any event, I really enjoyed the evening and it did leave me thinking about things.

I know that we're all thinking about AI as educators. I wonder if others are also thinking about the types of issues I was left thinking about after Kurzweil's talk.