Technolandy

Day 7 (of SOL 2025) Summer of Learning… Dear Dr Kennedy @chrkennedy AI

In his annual year end blog, Chris had some good questions… here is question 

7. Can AI make education more human—or will it just keep writing emails  that are more diplomatic than we’d ever be?

1. So good at providing prompts… and edits… in a more timely manner than humans are currently doing. The feedback is more descriptive with every update and more personalized the more we work. With and get to know each other (philosophical quesries will be guided by Marcus Blair down the information highway in a couple more exits…

AI in the news: https://apple.news/AixXZDYUlTV-AagUKoXbRLQ

I’m going to take a part from Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy and how Douglas Adams compared civilizations to food…  as I’ve done in the past thinking about socioeconomic… https://technolandy.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/day-160-of-184-the-school-at-the-end-of-the-universe/)

So I’m gonna adapt it to AI:

“The history of every major galactic civilisation tends to pass through three distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question How can we eat?, the second by the question Why do we eat?, and the third but the question Where shall we have lunch?” – Douglas Adams

• Survival (How):
  This initial phase focuses on the fundamental necessities of life. Civilizations in this stage are concerned with basic survival, answering questions like “How can we get food?” or “How do we protect ourselves?”
  
  or – how can we ban it? Or how can it be used to cheat? – Caen it be a more elaborate google tool…? Basic queries at a surface level – is it a tool? Is our worry the same the mathers had when calculators replaced slide rules and made graphing questions become much more complex in public schools? Is language more connected to math than some of us wish them to be?
  
• Inquiry (Why):
  Once survival is relatively secure, civilizations move to the inquiry phase. This involves questioning the purpose of existence, seeking answers to questions like “Why are we here?” or “What is the meaning of life?”
  
  or – what can it do to collaborate? Can it help me understand content more in depth, or how to make my writing (or reading…) more concise and then check me to see if I did understand it (to an acceptable normed perspective) – is it conscious if we think using its information and help us with plagiarism research?
  
• Sophistication (Where):
  The final phase, sophistication, is characterized by a focus on the finer things in life and the exploration of complex, often trivial, matters. In Hitchhiker’s, this is humorously represented by the question, “Where shall we have lunch?”
  
  or – where is this partnership going to push education… maybe we don’t need to rush and can put joy back into the goal – work on some hard things that take rigor and practice and accelerate deep learning in areas of passion. Understanding that most jobs we would like to prepare students for are going to be done more out of passion than necessity… the Star Trek/Orville socialist view of the future may actually be coming more likely as ‘needs’ can be done with robots and AI and humans can finally follow up on what was promised to my English teacher ~ who was trained in physical education (he’s published multiple books that were no,instead for awards, so he’s legit) because in the 1960s the hope was that by the 80s so much work would be automated and ‘recreational skills’ will be essential. Maybe, like BCs year 2000 education program (and my early explorations of portfolios)we needed the more global tech environment of now. “Where shall we do our learning” might be a very important ponder in the next few years…
  

AI is giving us the “why” we need to rethink this experiment called schooling as more than just a thought exercise… and the ‘why’ question asked about all learning needs to have time given to dive in and discuss answers – dive into the curiosity of kindergarteners and explore, rather than provide a short ‘because…’ answer.