8 ms·

Growing up with AI

130 points by kawera 8y ago

billybolton 8y ago
"Growing up with AI" - is that a joke? People actually think that the "AI" we have now is intelligent?
organicmultiloc 8y ago
Most of these articles have the same narrative, summarized as: We have seen how dangerous and important technology is with elections, now it's more important than ever we educate everyone about AI. As if the two concepts follow or are related at all, it seems more like a extremely convenient way to pivot the conversation to this new area of hype in technology while not actually owning up to anything. How about we talk about anti-trust law, privacy, and busting up Facebook and Google instead?
- billybolton 8y ago
  I want something to new to come up and shatter Facebook, Google etc. We need more internet companies, and right now Facebook & Google reek with a vile stench. They lack creativity and innovation. They are the IBM of the current generation.
  - stochastic_monk 8y ago
    As far as fundamental research goes, they are both currently doing a lot of the very best machine learning research. What they are as companies is an entirely different matter, in which case I would not doubt your comparison. Take, for example, the decreasing quality in user experience in map apps over the last few years. Mining our data is apparently much more valuable than doing a simple job better.
    - baxtr 8y ago
      Apple maps got way better! Granted, coming from a difficult starting point...
      - stochastic_monk 8y ago
        It strikes me as not a coincidence that they are also the company in the big few which most highly values its users' privacy. Still not great, but it's something.
    - nsuser3 8y ago
      Openstreetmap can be very good when used with the right app. On Android I like OsmAnd, it has the best available UI imo.
dalore 8y ago
I would love a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion for my daughter.
GuiA 8y ago
One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance. This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s group and the work her graduate students have done over the years. But it would be nice to see effort put into removing the artificial separations between user/programmer, or learner/professional. An apprentice carpenter uses real hammers and table saws, an apprentice baker uses real flour and sugar and ovens, so why are apprentice programmers using the plastic playset/ez bake oven equivalent of Tensorflow? (and if the answer is just “because tensorflow is too hard for a 7 year old”, then how can we get somewhere where there is something as powerful, if not more so, than Tensorflow, while also being accessible to 7 year olds?)
- Retric 8y ago
  An apprentice carpenter often does not use 'real' power tools. Nail guns for example are significantly more expensive and dangerous than a hammer, but also more specialized.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Students routinely are given machines/equipment/tools that is massive overkill for the task they are being asked to do so that it can be assured that their effort is spent learning instead of fighting their way around the limitations of their tools/equipment.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 8y ago
      An apprentice is not really just students in that they are paid reasonably well. That pay is based on the idea their going to get a job done reasonably efficiently while not breaking stuff or getting someone hurt. Put another way, you generally don't give interns root access to production servers.
Jun8 8y ago
This is a great project but I can't help say it: I don't like Scratch (and similar block-based languages). They are limited, in some cases by design (e.g. opening files in Scratch) but usually by their very nature. I very much prefer the safety wheel way of learning to ride a bike: use the real thing with addons until you don't need them. Maybe I'm wrong, any thoughts from people who worked with kids? I can give anecdotal evidence from my son (had no problems with Python or CHIP-8) but that's a sample size of 1.
- blackbrokkoli 8y ago
  Well, my sample size is also one: myself. I wouldn't say that Scratch was my gateway to programming, but I played with it a lot in my early teens. In my opinion Scratch is very good, for the following reason: Programming is about achieving something by abusing the tools you have, right? (This is not all of programming, but I would say it's ~86% of it. You might call it technical sophistication). And for that, Scratch is wonderfull. The tools are colorful, easy to understand and while there are a lot, it's limited in size. You're learning the soft skills of programming with a lot more fun. What about the limitation? In scratch, you will explore the borders yourself and will have much easier time to understand why the solutions which exist in other languages are usefull ("Oh, finally I can automatically spawn a lot of the same object in") Limited, of course, to my own expierience...
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  It depends on the age of the kid and the sophistication of the teacher. So for a 6 year old with a basic computer or tablet with parents who don't code for a living (aka the VAST majority) Scratch is fantastic. No IDE to set-up, no installation, simple interface, tons of kid based examples, highly WYSIWYG, speed to first output etc... I think we techies forget how much patience it takes to just get an environment up and running.
- jpk 8y ago
  I've worked with kids from elementary to high school age. One of the obstacles for getting nearly any kid into coding is conditioning their response to things like syntax errors and the other obtuse-looking things compilers and interpreters like to spit out. For example, a kid can spend an hour adding a tree of dialogue to their text-based dungeon crawler, only to get a compilation error they've never seen before. They might have forgotten a curly brace somewhere and I'll help them find it, then they give it another go only to find out they forgot a semicolon or misspelled a variable name. That series of events can be pretty demoralizing, and it takes some coaching to get them through. The above is obviously a teachable moment to test early and often, but the point is kids often lose motivation in the face of errors they don't yet know how to interpret. On the other hand, kids get really interested when they can see the fruits of their labor come to life, which can happen without a lot of friction in Scratch. So to give students a taste for that success without the slog through syntax errors and stuff, things like Scratch are fantastic. Especially for younger kids where attention span and getting bored or disinterested come more easily. We quickly move on to real languages, though, and the concepts they picked up in Scratch are easily portable to Python or whatever else.
zawerf 8y ago
I am really jealous of what the more creative/motivated kids growing up today have access to. When I was a teenager not long ago, I was mostly motivated by cheating in games which got me learning basic scripting for keyboard/mouse macros which then led me to increasingly complicated stuff for botting. But there are so many more motivating factors for learning how to code today, and they have never been more accessible. For example if you want porn of your high school crush? You gotta train your own deepfake for that. You will start off as a script kiddie but when you grow up you can tell people you've been training neural networks since you were 12.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Jesus, I would have hoped they would achieve more noble pursuits instead of jumping straight into artificial child porn.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    I think that was meant to be a joke.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - soared 8y ago
    Kids are not into noble pursuits.. I learned html/css and webhosting stuff by making phishing sites of for my favorite video game.
    - matte_black 8y ago
      When I was younger I was into noble pursuits. I loved to study programming and would talk about ways I would want to help the world with my future skills. That's all gone now... At some point I started to get darker and more cynical, and began to see technology not as a way to improve the world, but rather as a way to take what is mine. It started as a few disappointments here and there, then into short bouts of anger, then expanding into a constant simmering rage. Don't know if I'll ever recover. What happened...
ThomPete 8y ago
One of the things I love about voice interfaces the most is how they allow for us to remove abstraction between what we want technology to do for us and how we get it to do it. The last major step we had for making technology more accessible and easy to use for more people was the touch screen which made it possible for anyone to understand what "click the button" or "drag the folder" means. My kids speak with Google Home all the time. They get more and more creative with what they ask it for. Furthermore, you can interact with it at naturally at a dinner table or in a meeting room without having to look down at a screen. It really just becomes a natural no-obstructive participant of the group of people which I think is going to be it's biggest Whatever weirdness my generation feel around speaking to tech it will be totally normalized by the coming generations.

130 points by kawera 8y ago

"Growing up with AI" - is that a joke? People actually think that the "AI" we have now is intelligent?

Most of these articles have the same narrative, summarized as: We have seen how dangerous and important technology is with elections, now it's more important than ever we educate everyone about AI. As if the two concepts follow or are related at all, it seems more like a extremely convenient way to pivot the conversation to this new area of hype in technology while not actually owning up to anything. How about we talk about anti-trust law, privacy, and busting up Facebook and Google instead?

billybolton 8y ago
I want something to new to come up and shatter Facebook, Google etc. We need more internet companies, and right now Facebook & Google reek with a vile stench. They lack creativity and innovation. They are the IBM of the current generation.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  As far as fundamental research goes, they are both currently doing a lot of the very best machine learning research. What they are as companies is an entirely different matter, in which case I would not doubt your comparison. Take, for example, the decreasing quality in user experience in map apps over the last few years. Mining our data is apparently much more valuable than doing a simple job better.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    Apple maps got way better! Granted, coming from a difficult starting point...
    - stochastic_monk 8y ago
      It strikes me as not a coincidence that they are also the company in the big few which most highly values its users' privacy. Still not great, but it's something.
  - nsuser3 8y ago
    Openstreetmap can be very good when used with the right app. On Android I like OsmAnd, it has the best available UI imo.

dalore 8y ago

I would love a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion for my daughter.

GuiA 8y ago

One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no engineer would ever use them to build something of significance. This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s group and the work her graduate students have done over the years. But it would be nice to see effort put into removing the artificial separations between user/programmer, or learner/professional. An apprentice carpenter uses real hammers and table saws, an apprentice baker uses real flour and sugar and ovens, so why are apprentice programmers using the plastic playset/ez bake oven equivalent of Tensorflow? (and if the answer is just “because tensorflow is too hard for a 7 year old”, then how can we get somewhere where there is something as powerful, if not more so, than Tensorflow, while also being accessible to 7 year olds?)

Retric 8y ago
An apprentice carpenter often does not use 'real' power tools. Nail guns for example are significantly more expensive and dangerous than a hammer, but also more specialized.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Students routinely are given machines/equipment/tools that is massive overkill for the task they are being asked to do so that it can be assured that their effort is spent learning instead of fighting their way around the limitations of their tools/equipment.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 8y ago
    An apprentice is not really just students in that they are paid reasonably well. That pay is based on the idea their going to get a job done reasonably efficiently while not breaking stuff or getting someone hurt. Put another way, you generally don't give interns root access to production servers.

Jun8 8y ago

This is a great project but I can't help say it: I don't like Scratch (and similar block-based languages). They are limited, in some cases by design (e.g. opening files in Scratch) but usually by their very nature. I very much prefer the safety wheel way of learning to ride a bike: use the real thing with addons until you don't need them. Maybe I'm wrong, any thoughts from people who worked with kids? I can give anecdotal evidence from my son (had no problems with Python or CHIP-8) but that's a sample size of 1.

blackbrokkoli 8y ago
Well, my sample size is also one: myself. I wouldn't say that Scratch was my gateway to programming, but I played with it a lot in my early teens. In my opinion Scratch is very good, for the following reason: Programming is about achieving something by abusing the tools you have, right? (This is not all of programming, but I would say it's ~86% of it. You might call it technical sophistication). And for that, Scratch is wonderfull. The tools are colorful, easy to understand and while there are a lot, it's limited in size. You're learning the soft skills of programming with a lot more fun. What about the limitation? In scratch, you will explore the borders yourself and will have much easier time to understand why the solutions which exist in other languages are usefull ("Oh, finally I can automatically spawn a lot of the same object in") Limited, of course, to my own expierience...
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
It depends on the age of the kid and the sophistication of the teacher. So for a 6 year old with a basic computer or tablet with parents who don't code for a living (aka the VAST majority) Scratch is fantastic. No IDE to set-up, no installation, simple interface, tons of kid based examples, highly WYSIWYG, speed to first output etc... I think we techies forget how much patience it takes to just get an environment up and running.
jpk 8y ago
I've worked with kids from elementary to high school age. One of the obstacles for getting nearly any kid into coding is conditioning their response to things like syntax errors and the other obtuse-looking things compilers and interpreters like to spit out. For example, a kid can spend an hour adding a tree of dialogue to their text-based dungeon crawler, only to get a compilation error they've never seen before. They might have forgotten a curly brace somewhere and I'll help them find it, then they give it another go only to find out they forgot a semicolon or misspelled a variable name. That series of events can be pretty demoralizing, and it takes some coaching to get them through. The above is obviously a teachable moment to test early and often, but the point is kids often lose motivation in the face of errors they don't yet know how to interpret. On the other hand, kids get really interested when they can see the fruits of their labor come to life, which can happen without a lot of friction in Scratch. So to give students a taste for that success without the slog through syntax errors and stuff, things like Scratch are fantastic. Especially for younger kids where attention span and getting bored or disinterested come more easily. We quickly move on to real languages, though, and the concepts they picked up in Scratch are easily portable to Python or whatever else.

zawerf 8y ago

I am really jealous of what the more creative/motivated kids growing up today have access to. When I was a teenager not long ago, I was mostly motivated by cheating in games which got me learning basic scripting for keyboard/mouse macros which then led me to increasingly complicated stuff for botting. But there are so many more motivating factors for learning how to code today, and they have never been more accessible. For example if you want porn of your high school crush? You gotta train your own deepfake for that. You will start off as a script kiddie but when you grow up you can tell people you've been training neural networks since you were 12.

matte_black 8y ago
Jesus, I would have hoped they would achieve more noble pursuits instead of jumping straight into artificial child porn.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I think that was meant to be a joke.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- soared 8y ago
  Kids are not into noble pursuits.. I learned html/css and webhosting stuff by making phishing sites of for my favorite video game.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    When I was younger I was into noble pursuits. I loved to study programming and would talk about ways I would want to help the world with my future skills. That's all gone now... At some point I started to get darker and more cynical, and began to see technology not as a way to improve the world, but rather as a way to take what is mine. It started as a few disappointments here and there, then into short bouts of anger, then expanding into a constant simmering rage. Don't know if I'll ever recover. What happened...

ThomPete 8y ago

One of the things I love about voice interfaces the most is how they allow for us to remove abstraction between what we want technology to do for us and how we get it to do it. The last major step we had for making technology more accessible and easy to use for more people was the touch screen which made it possible for anyone to understand what "click the button" or "drag the folder" means. My kids speak with Google Home all the time. They get more and more creative with what they ask it for. Furthermore, you can interact with it at naturally at a dinner table or in a meeting room without having to look down at a screen. It really just becomes a natural no-obstructive participant of the group of people which I think is going to be it's biggest Whatever weirdness my generation feel around speaking to tech it will be totally normalized by the coming generations.