You can’t always get what you want or deserve

only partly self-determined

keeping a reading journal to write to yourself about how the reading and your own thinking and purposes/plans are connecting and speaking to one another.

We might think of this as citation(1)=writer steers.

One of the most prominent ways that authority is signalled in an academic text is via citation.

the most complex object in the universe, the brain.

Now that more work is being done online, many people face global competition. Mark Ritson tells about his wife’s yoga instructor, Gary, who went online during a pandemic lock-down. He previously offered at-home personalized instruction, driving to his mostly rural clientele. When the lock-down was over he decided to only offer his services online and avoid all the time and expense of driving. But Mark’s wife now realized that she was no longer limited to Gary. “In the old, pre-Covid world of yoga my wife was limited to Gary or an elderly woman who creaked a lot and smelled of cheese. But with the opening of this new virtual yoga window, she now has a dizzying array of practitioners keen to work with her from all corners of the globe.” By moving his business online, Gary had unknowingly increased his competition to the entire world

The core problem here is that we really don’t know exactly how the brain learns information or skills. And for what we do know, we don’t have the ability to directly observe when it is happening in the brain. That would be painful and dangerous. So we have to rely on something external to the brain serving as evidence that learning happened.

quizzes, tests, exams, assignments – none of those can measure learning or skill mastery. Not directly at least.

exams or tests themselves are not essential

If you think that most of the students in your course would probably cheat

The main reason for all of this confusion about the research is that there is little consistency in the time frame, the definition of what counts as “cheating,” and how the frequency of cheating is measured.

there is the claim that McFarland makes that “a separate, peer-reviewed research paper published in May of 2020 in the Journal of the National College Testing Association also confirmed the link between online classes and dishonesty.” But that is not what the paper said at all. That paper looks at the differences between proctored and unproctored exams, and makes a lot of claims about how online learning has the potential for more dishonesty. But it does not confirm a link between dishonesty and online courses, because it was not looking for that.

In fact, the research is actually all over the place. You will see numbers anywhere between 2% and 95%. As one research paper puts it: “the precipitating factors of academic misconduct vary across the literature … The research of academic integrity is often unsystematic and the reports are confusing.”

they can get feedback until they know they are going to score what they want

How many of us sit around answering test questions (of any kind) all day long for our jobs? If you look to the areas of universal design for learning and authentic assessment, you can find better ways to assess learning. This involves thinking about ways to create real world assignments that match what students will see on the job or in life.

The potential to build community-curated knowledge networks remains largely untapped. There are reasons to be optimistic; the economic feasibility of paid communities, a renewed interest in curation, a slow move away from big social, and an improved understanding of platform incentives. All combined, this will lead to communities that are more sustainable, aligned, and intentional.

given the chat-based nature of these platforms, it’s easy to miss the best content

diagram

relation

The conversation around curation thus far has focused too much on reducing the amount of information

we should be able to reference it if we’re building a company in the design tools space

The architecture of digital platforms encourage us to consume information because it’s in front of us, not because it’s relevant

the goal is not to consume more information

“how do we collect, store, and contextualize the information we consume?”

we will pay people with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information

our brains are not  equipped to deal with this abundance. 

It stores fragments of the text you’re working on, based on the research you completed and fed into its archive.

expect your first draft to be imperfect. It will require work and polishing anyway, so it’s only reasonable to complete the first draft quickly: the sooner you finish, the sooner you’ll know what’s left to do

prepare research and the most of your writing before you compile your first draft

What do you think of the concept of the "Open Scholar"? If you are an academic, does this appeal to you? Would you dare publish your preliminary thinking, your drafts, your experiments, your data, your false starts and failures? If you are not an academic, does Open Scholarship sound like it would be a greater benefit for the advancement of knowledge or the improvement of teaching?

He or she is not impatient with amateurs.

ut it does of course clash with traditional ways of publishing knowledge

there is great value to others to see the methods used in pursuing knowledge, the various attempts in pursuing solutions (failures as much as successes), the data generated (especially beyond the subset of data used for drawing conclusions in the study at hand), and the various resources used to mount the investigation (whether that is lab equipment, social resources, bibliography, theory, or protocols). Again, there is great value in others being allowed to see this whole context of inquiry, not just the final outcome for the specific study at hand.

the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it--at any stage of its development.

Because consequential intellectual work takes place in myriad ways outside of traditional scholarly genres, that's why, and the digital realm is ready to capture, organize, value, and disseminate those other ways of generating knowledge.

There have been some exceptions along the way, but generally speaking, the traditional scholar truly doesn't care about reaching anyone except those peers whose judgment determines his or her reputation.

It's as unethical as it is unnecessary, but it will continue until institutions learn to be more publicly responsible with their intellectual resources, or until scholars reject the restrictive identity they are held to through the traditional reward system.

institutions of higher education are invested in keeping their scholars and those scholars' intellectual products limited and cloistered.

The value of companies will diminish in the short-term, too, though they will continue to perform quite well over time.

Poverty would be greatly reduced and many more people would have a shot at the life they want.

Every citizen would therefore increasingly partake of the freedoms, powers, autonomies, and opportunities that come with economic self-determination.

American Equity Fund

Rising costs in government-funded industries would face real pressure as more people chose their own services in a competitive marketplace.

All citizens over 18 would get an annual distribution, in dollars and company shares, into their accounts. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or wanted—for better education, healthcare, housing, starting a company, whatever.

Similarly, we can imagine AI doctors that can diagnose health problems better than any human, and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn’t understand.

The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods

To the three great technological revolutions–the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational–we will add a fourth: the AI revolution

Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture)

The metadata will also contain the type of review, stating whether it is a referee report, author response, or community comment, etc. This allows accurate reporting on whether the peer review is happening within a traditional editorial process or elsewhere.

The overlay model presents a lean publishing approach that eliminates the need for most journal production processes like PDF formatting.

Overlay journals are peer-reviewed digital Open Access publications that host all of their articles on a preprint server rather than a journal website.

Crossref announced a new schema for registering preprint DOIs in 2016, it also helped pave the way for more widespread preprint acceptance. The schema makes it possible to register DOIs for preprints and link them to the DOIs of published articles, setting a precedent that preprints will remain permanently available and creating a more formal means for publishers to distinguish preprints from published articles.

But it has also magnified the potential for unvetted manuscripts, or worse, pseudo-science, to fuel the spread of misinformation.

The pandemic brought the most extreme surge in preprint posting to date, with a Nature analysis finding that “more than 30,000 of the COVID-19 articles published in 2020 were preprints — between 17% and 30%” of the total.

the sensitive nature and business value of such healthcare data also means its usage is highly regulated and not likely to be shared freely. Even if access were granted, it would still require considerable time, effort and expense to curate and maintain the kind of quality desired by fellow developers to train AI models

The insertion of an algorithm’s predictions into the patient-physician relationship also introduces a third party, turning the relationship into one between the patient and the health care system. It also means significant changes in terms of a patient’s expectation of confidentiality. “Once machine-learning-based decision support is integrated into clinical care, withholding information from electronic records will become increasingly difficult, since patients whose data aren’t recorded can’t benefit from machine-learning analyses,” the authors wrote.

The one thing people can do that machines can’t do is step aside from our ideas and evaluate them critically.

However, I would advise making time regularly, whatever that looks like for you, and putting it into your diary as a meeting with your writing.

I don’t think we find writing time – I think we have to make it.

Writing time is less about hours and minutes, I find, and more about space in my head

I don’t have time to do the things I need to do to make it possible for me to write. I don’t have time to read, and to make notes. I don’t have time to think about all I have read and make connections and have realisations and see a paper structure emerging from that thinking, scribbling and reading. I may have physical time, but my head is so full of all these other things that I find I need more than just an hour or two here and there to get into the right headspace and create writing time.

There was so much reading and thinking that went on during my PhD and early postdoc years and not many papers, but then there were a few years of several papers and a book. But this “productivity” was only possible because I took that time before (and also to a lesser extent during) all the writing and publishing to read, scribble, think with others and for myself.

We might be seen to not be doing anything. How many times have I spent a day reading and writing in my reading journal and thinking and then caught myself thinking that I have nothing to show for a day’s work?

We often think with others – “real” others like supervisors, co-researchers and critical friends and “imagined” others like the authors of the texts we are reading and working with.

It is an active process of engaging with an argument, with evidence, with methodology and findings, with underlying principles that shape what counts as valid knowledge and also credible ways of sharing that knowledge with other researchers and readers. It involves connecting what we are reading to the research or the practice work we are doing and either fitting the new knowledge into an existing frame of reference, or adjusting our frame of reference if it is challenged by this new knowledge.

We talk and talk about writing, but we spend far less time, comparatively, talking about reading and thinking

write in a slower, quieter way

There is no time. There are just tasks, one after another.

Thinking is part of everything we do. But, thinking is not as visible as writing and so we often underestimate how important it is and how much time we need to make for this vital labour.

‘How much time do we need to think, and how do we use this time effectively?’

Do we also need to actively make and protect time to read, and crucially, time to think?

the more I know about a topic, the longer integrating a note properly takes.

When we process all the stuff we’ve collected, we can allow ourselves to be picky.

Because the step of integration is accompanied by creating connections, you have to find suitable associations both in your note archive and in your head.

I pull out the notes and create clusters before I add anything to my digital note archive

The idea is that by the time I finish reading a book, I've already done the majority of my thinking, reflecting, writing, and synthesising on it. And created a readable summary n+1 other people might find helpful.I also like that the system allows me to take my sweet time with a book. I can read it deeply, think about it properly, and let my notes on it mature without ending up with a huge backlog of them.

Whenever I find an article, academic paper, podcast, or video I want to save, I'm able to hit a specific hotkey that snaps up the page title and URL, then formats it into Roam-friendly markdown link.

“What if the algorithm is designed around the goal of saving money? What if different treatment decisions about patients are made depending on insurance status or their ability to pay?”

n discussing designer intent, which is one source of bias, the authors pointed to private-sector examples of algorithms meant to ensure specific outcomes, such as Volkswagen’s algorithm that allowed vehicles to pass emissions tests by reducing their nitrogen oxide emissions during the tests. 

Machine-learning-based clinical guidance may introduce a third-party “actor” into the physician-patient relationship, challenging the dynamics of responsibility in the relationship and the expectation of confidentiality.

Also, algorithms might be designed to skew results, depending on who’s developing them and on the motives of the programmers, companies or health care systems deploying them.

Data used to create algorithms can contain bias that is reflected in the algorithms and in the clinical recommendations they generate.

war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

In essence, the call is to dumb down mathematics so even the worst performers can earn a pass, because that will resolve the perceived problem that minorities struggle with mathematics.

So how do we build technology with the right politics?

otherwise, we're going to zigzag and not really solve the wicked problem

We have not yet started thinking about how will humans react to those machines?

They wouldn't say those things if they knew some machine was watching them.

How do we guarantee its security over long periods of time

We're just so fascinated by our own small things that we haven't started thinking about the possibility that we're going to fall and hurt ourselves or hurt someone else

Issues of student privacy. Do I have the right of looking at your introduction and someone else's introduction and connecting you? That might work out, that might not work out.

If you think of Facebook … I work with Facebook one-on-one, Facebook is in front of me and on the screen, I'm working on it. But truly, I use it to connect with other people. I don't care about Facebook, but I care about my family and friends and contacts. That's what I'm interested in.

where AI is not helping individual humans as much as AI is helping human-human interaction

is the most accessible and widespread

If you build a model, it automatically sets up the simulation for you. So you don't have to know any programming or mathematical equations. And then you can look at the results of this simulation.

guarantee that quality

solutions to these problems?

If you look at almost all of the work coming [out] on so-called cognitive tutors, or intelligent tutors, you put a child in front of a machine and you expect your child to learn.

how does technology help with social learning also?

There is another tension. What makes education really wicked and then connects with the two points you are making about policy and technology is that, on one side, when learning occurs, it occurs one-to-one. So, there is a teacher, there is a student. On the other side, learning is a fundamentally social process.

So education is a wicked problem because you and I can think of multiple goals which are in conflict with each other. We want education to be accessible. We want it to be affordable by everyone. We want it to be achievable, by which I mean, if I register for a class, I should be able to achieve the goals that I want to achieve. Even if it's accessible and affordable, but I can't achieve it, it's not of much use to me. At the same time, we want learning to be very efficient. I should be able to learn what I need very quickly. And it should be very effective in the sense I can make use of it. The difficulty is we know how to make it very efficient, very effective. All we have to do is to do it individually—one-to-one tutoring—and we know that works very well. But that breaks the point about accessibility [and] affordability, because we cannot have one teacher for every student for every subject in the world. It's just not going to happen. So those two sets of goals are in conflict. Accessibility [and] affordability is in conflict with efficiency and effectiveness. That's what makes it wicked.

It's the engineering of learning. And the idea is really quite revolutionary, in a way, in the sense that we have always tried to model how people learn—we already tried to build technologies that can help people learn—but we have never viewed learning, until recently, as something that you could completely engineer.

every student and researcher should have access to artificially intelligent assistants that not only help them study facts and figures, but also collaborate more closely with other humans.

And this would all happen while doing fewer hours of work than I had been doing before.

although I traveled constantly, I rarely took “vacations” per se. It was more like, “hey, that beach looks like a really beautiful place to check my email for the next two hours.”

solving problems is like food for your mind. It makes your mind happy

Micromanaging the hell out of your employees won’t only not make them more productive, they’ll come to hate you and be even less motivated to produce results for you in the future.

I banged out a new draft of the book in two months flat.

In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses

Experts who study the phenomenon say it's due, at least in part, to the widening role of technology.

A version of this shift is present in just about any other industry you can name. “As more automation came in, there was more demand on these workers to display social skills. What you now needed was someone who could talk to a customer, who could articulate the problem and problem-solve,” says Raman. But rather than look for candidates with those specific qualifications, “many companies took the easy route of using the four-year college degree as a proxy: ‘I know if they have a degree, they’ll be able to use an iPad. They’ll be able to use Excel’.”

If the exam is designed in a way that accounts for collegial discourse and use of resources that problem is solved

if a student has nowhere in their university assessment a chance to recognise their work as socially useful, and to see others recognise it as such, then this is a very diminished educational experience

I extend the notion of student involvement to think in terms of the whole student: to think philosophically about the relationship between assessment and students’ self-realisation. The issue thus becomes, the extent to which assessment is involved in our students: how it contributes, or not, to their wellbeing, personal and intellectual growth and their development as constructive members of society.

students must understand an assessment system if they are expected to flourish within it

considering the possibility that a different assessment method may have enabled a better engagement with knowledge.

many universities have pursued technocratic solutions that reproduce the trusted orthodoxy of the time-limited, unseen exam as closely as possible.

but fundamental principles not rethought.

The assessment challenges induced by Covid-19 opened many possibilities to fundamentally rethink why and how we assess, but I see little evidence of this actually happening.

we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place

first considered how we could write a piece for the public later

the first step in improving academic writing is to learn to reduce the jargon academics use and express concepts clearly

Greater reach leads to far greater exposure. This can take the form of comments from academics around the world, invitations to collaborate, and TV and radio interviews.

Academics need to start playing a more prominent role in society instead of largely remaining observers who write about the world from within ivory towers and publish their findings in journals hidden behind expensive digital paywalls.

This can help develop creative non-fiction writing skills.

Academics have no choice but to go along with this system. Their careers and promotions depend almost entirely on their journal publication record, so why even consider engaging with the general public?

Universities also don’t do a great deal to encourage academics to step beyond lecture halls and laboratories. There are globally very few institutions that offer incentives to their academics to write in the popular media, appear on TV or radio, or share their research findings and opinions with the public via these platforms.

Some academics insist that it’s not their job to write for the general public. They suggest that doing so would mean they’re “abandoning their mission as intellectuals”. They don’t want to feel like they’re “dumbing down” complex thinking and arguments.

many potentially world altering ideas are not getting into the public domain

an average journal article is “read completely by no more than ten people”. They write: Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities – 82% of articles published in humanities [journals] are not even cited once.

Research and creative thinking can change the world. This means that academics have enormous power. But, as academics Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr have warned, the overwhelming majority are not shaping today’s public debates.

forced

By forcing students to write ‘publicly’, their writing rapidly improves

there is no waste – what starts as a blog, ends as an academic output

By building blogging, Twitter, flickr, and shared libraries in Zotero, in to our research programmes – into the way we work anyway – we both get more research done, and build a community of engaged readers for the work itself.

when journal articles proliferate beyond number because they serve the needs of big publishing, rather than academic dialogue – we need to think harder about how we do the job of the humanities

Don't bend yourself to fit the world.

Don't bend yourself to fit the world.

most students did not report study strategies that correlated with their VARK assessment, and that student performance in anatomy was not correlated with their score in any VARK categories. Rather, some specific study strategies (irrespective of VARK results), such as use of the virtual microscope, were found to be positively correlated with final class grade. However, the alignment of these study strategies with VARK results had no correlation with anatomy course outcomes. Thus, this research provides further evidence that the conventional wisdom about learning styles should be rejected by educators and students alike.

If we write blogs, we are told, we can communicate our research more effectively. Blogs enhance impact, they are a medium for public engagement. The advocacy goes on… Blogs (and other social media) can point readers to our (real) academic publications, particularly if they are held on open repositories. Blogging it seems is a kind of essential add-on to the usual academic writing and academic publication that we do.

Blogging helps you to get to the point The blog post is a small text, not an extended essay.  It’s simply not possible to introduce lots and lots of different ideas and make multiple points in a post of a thousand words or less.

Of course, some people do argue – and I’m in this camp – that blogging is in and of itself academic writing and academic publication. It’s not an add-on. It’s now part and parcel of the academic writing landscape.  As such, it is of no less value than any other form of writing. Even though audit regimes do not count blogs – yet – this does not lessen its value. And therefore those of us who engage in bloggery need to stop justifying it as a necessary accompaniment to the Real Work  of Serious Academic Writing. Blogs are their own worthwhile thing.

How do you find time to write? I’ve become fascinated by this question in recent months. Implicit within it is an understanding of ‘writing’ which I’m coming to see as deeply problematic. It treats the creative activity of writing as a matter of temporal budgeting. But how much time does writing take? It obviously depends on what we mean by ‘writing’

perhaps it’s getting into the routine of responding to ideas in this way as and when you encounter them.

By writing regularly, and for shorter periods (2-3 hours a day),

One study suggests that academics who write daily and set goals with someone weekly write nearly ten times as many pages as those without regular writing habits.

An important part of being an academic researcher is remembering that you are an author.

This left branching sentence forces the brain to ‘hold’ a lot of information about what the academic managers are doing before applying it to the action. It’s the kind of sentence that forces the reader to go back to the start after they have finished in order to really understand what is going on.

academic colleagues find out I’m blogging?

I try to keep a note of what I read, which I probably would not do if I was not writing a blog

admitting and correcting mistakes does you no harm

But I should be doing research, or reading papers, rather than writing blogs. The main activity that blogging has displaced for me is watching TV.

jargon comes so naturally

writing about contentious issues like austerity it is perhaps too easy to be rude

I do not fancy getting into online debating contests

I thought my posts would mainly be a useful resource for my students. Things I did not have time to say or elaborate on in lectures

Rather than reducing scholarship to blogging

Far from subjugating research to journalism

I share many of the fundamental concerns which I hear expressed about impact and public engagement – particularly the entirely justified fear that this agenda, as well as the broader changes within higher education within which it is unavoidably implicated, threaten the autonomy of academic work. I think there’s a risk that the production of academic knowledge (in the broadest sense of the term) becomes subjugated to the contingencies of the political cycle, particularly as its mediated by funding bodies and other intermediaries.

space between academic research and journalism

lead many, when confronted with the advocation of academic blogging, to see ‘blogging’ as corrupting ‘academic’

does academic blogging dangerously blur the boundary between research and journalism?

Find the Most Creative People in Your Field and Steal From Them

There’s almost a direct correlation between how much someone created and how original their work ended up being.

Art shares a lot of similarities with undervalued stocks.17 At first, when people hear of a novel idea, a lot of them will laugh it off as ridiculous, outlandish, unnecessary, or just plain dumb. It’s here that the artist “buys” the idea at its low value, then finds a way to refurbish and “flip it” into something of higher value that the world understands and appreciates.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer. He didn’t invent the mouse or graphical interfaces. He didn’t invent MP3 players or smartphones. He didn’t invent tablets or laptops or wearables. He literally invented nothing. He just did old things better

Focus on Doing the Work, Not Flashes of Inspiration

the second part of creative work: adding value

When I’m writing on non-housing topics is that “academic blogging”? Or just an academic blogging?

Some academic bloggers leaven the mix by interspersing their ‘academic’ posts with more personal posts about family, biography or travel. I’m not at all averse to that approach, but it isn’t really my style.

And if the world is going to grasp what’s happening then our writing needs to be digestible.

An academic blogger may feel constrained to topics only related to his or her academic research, whereas a blogger who is also an academic is free to explore wider fields of discussion.

To achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power and privilege, in short, it helps enormously to start there. “American meritocracy,” the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argues, has “become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.”

the best solution for creative blocks isn’t to try to think in front of an empty page and simply wait for thoughts to arrive, but actually to continue to speak and write (anything), trusting this generative process

It’s not thought that produces speech but, rather, speech is a creative process that in turn generates thought

Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.

3.) Who can cite blogs? Okay, now here comes the real hypocrisy. Although I cite blogs within academic writing, I explicitly forbid my undergraduate students from doing so. Their papers must include only peer-reviewed work unless I specifically approve of a non-peer-reviewed source. Oh, hi Privilege, nice to see you again. The key difference between my students and me (besides, of course, our taste in music and repertoire of Seinfeld quotes), is that I have a Ph.D. and they are working on Bachelor’s degrees. That is, we are differentiated by levels of education, and having a higher level of education gives me the privilege and power to determine the value of piece of writing, and denies this power and privilege to those with less formal education. To say it out loud feels like the academic equivalent of “Because I Said So.” At the same time, I have been trained in a particular field for several years. I have read the jargon-ridden journal articles, trudged through the 5-chapters-too-long books, and even contributed a few pieces of my own. Moreover, I have been a peer-reviewer, charged with making formal decisions about what is, and is not, a publishable piece of research. And so I take this training and I use it, again imperfectly, as a privilege, allowing myself to discern quality while urging others to wait until they have enough knowledge and practice to make such discernments. What “enough” is, however, remains quite nebulous.

one can counter the former point by noting the poor quality of some published articles, problematizing the false-security that comes along with a legitimizing label of “peer-reviewed.”

What would such an anything-goes literature review look like?

More ambiguous, of course, is the question of using content from these blogs, in their own right, as building blocks or even a foundation for, theoretical arguments.

Some of their work is published only in blog form

Should writers cite blog posts in formal academic writing (i.e. journal articles and books)?

AI agents can acquire novel behaviors as they interact with the world around them and with other agents. The behaviors learned from such interactions are virtually impossible to predict, and even when solutions can be described mathematically, they can be “so lengthy and complex as to be indecipherable,” according to the paper.

it might be killing three times the number of cyclists over a million rides than another model

Say, for instance, a hypothetical self-driving car is sold as being the safest on the market. One of the factors that makes it safer is that it “knows” when a big truck pulls up along its left side and automatically moves itself three inches to the right while still remaining in its own lane. But what if a cyclist or motorcycle happens to be pulling up on the right at the same time and is thus killed because of this safety feature?

A co-author of the paper, Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, is among a group of academic and media plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that makes it criminal to conduct research with the goal of determining whether algorithms produce illegal discrimination in areas like housing and employment.

We are all one giant human-machine system,” says Obradovich. “We need to acknowledge that and start studying it that way.

move away from viewing AI systems as passive tools that can be assessed purely through their technical architecture, performance, and capabilities. They should instead be considered as active actors that change and influence their environments and the people and machines around them.

propose to create a new academic discipline called “machine behavior.” It approaches studying AI systems in the same way we’ve always studied animals and humans: through empirical observation and experimentation

As algorithms have come to mediate everything from our social and cultural to economic and political interactions, computer scientists have attempted to respond to rising demands for their explainability by developing technical methods to understand their behaviors.

We've developed scientific methods to study black boxes for hundreds of years now, but these methods have primarily been applied to [living beings] up to this point

Koo's discovery makes it possible to peek inside the black box and identify some key features that lead to the computer's decision-making process.

Neural nets learn and make decisions independently of their human programmers. Researchers refer to this hidden process as a "black box." It is hard to trust the machine's outputs if we don't know what is happening in the box.

You see it in education. We have top-end universities, yes, but with the capacity to teach only a microscopic percentage of the 4 million new 18 year olds in the U.S. each year, or the 120 million new 18 year olds in the world each year. Why not educate every 18 year old? Isn’t that the most important thing we can possibly do? Why not build a far larger number of universities, or scale the ones we have way up?

A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most.