Teachers and AI. Is resistance futile?
Just like automatic braking, do we hand off our controls to the latest shiny new technology? Are we working for the AI, in the hope that it will work for us?
As a teacher, I try to stay plugged into what the industry expects of us in education. I’ve heard it all too often — the complaint that “Schools don’t teach these anymore.” Or that what’s being taught in schools is outdated. It’s a demand and supply problem. How do we bridge that? Should we chase after every new trend that shows up?
In my podcast series (Radio 201) on emerging tech, and here on Medium, I have been talking to a lot of industry folk. Even they seem to be grappling with what’s coming at us as a society. Dave Conelias, founder of MilestoneC is one of them. He’s someone who speaks his mind about the good, the bad, and the overhyped. I interviewed him a few days after Google announced it would release its own AI, Bard. (I’ve been testing Bard.) This was soon after the deluge of ChatGPT which saturated the news cycle like that ‘atmospheric river’ which dunked southern California. I wanted to know what aspect of this ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer’ (the GPT part of the ChatGPT) was showing up on his radar. For the record I think Generative Pretrained Transfer is the dorkiest term inflicted on us since… HyperText Transfer Protocol — HTTP.
