My Latest Podcast
My most recent podcast guest was Chandrika Tandon, after whom NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering is named. I’ve known Chandrika as an ex-McKinsey business consulting powerhouse who had a reputation for extracting value from businesses. What I didn’t realize until recently is that she’s really a professional musician at the core, and the other activities are fuel for her true passion: music.
We talked about a variety of things, including the reasons for her generous gift to NYU’s Engineering school, and her expectations of the school .
Chandrika has real nuggets of advice for young people on how to have impact in their professional and personal lives. It starts with learning by deepening the personal bonds with the important people in your life. Hers is a remarkable journey, that started in a conservative middle-class Indian household. Considering that her younger sister became the CEO of Pepsi, that household obviously had something brewing. So, check out my conversation with Chandrika.
Dog With Phone
In the last few weeks, I’ve had some fascinating conversations about Artificial Intelligence with audiences including lawyers, business people, university students, policy makers, and third grade kids.
Yup, real kids. I was invited to sit in on a third grade tech class at a local New York City Greenwich Village private school last week. I watched AS? nine year-olds created a digital banner using drag and drop tools. The toolkit included a generative AI ability for creating pictures from phrases.
After a gentle introduction, the teacher asked whether they knew what AI stood for. He said that his friend Vasant was an AI expert visiting from NYU. They all turned to me and said hi. They’d heard of NYU. One munchkin said “my brother is visiting NYU today!” Another said his mom went to NYU. A couple of kids said AI stood for Artificial Intelligence, but didn’t know what it meant.
I was itching to ask them how they thought about “real” versus “artificial.” For example, is a beaver’s dam real or artificial? What does it mean for something artificial to be intelligent?
Towards the end of the class, one of the kids asked the computer to generate an image for “dog with phone,” which she entered one finger at a time. She smiled as the machine generated an image of a big dog speaking into the handset of an old fashioned rotary phone.
Now try phone with dog, I suggested.
Huh? Phone with dog? She stared up at me. Do you think it will be different?
I don’t know. Try it.
She did. It came up with a totally different image. This time an iPhone was front and center, with a small dog crouching behind it.
Wow, why did that happen, she asked me? I could see that the wheels were spinning in her head.
I told her to think about how the words were related to the images. Was there a difference between Dog with Phone and Phone with Dog? What about Mom With Dog versus Dog with Mom? How do we make sense of a bunch of words, I asked. I hope to have set some wheels in motion.
AI For Kids
But the little girl got me thinking about the larger question about how to introduce kids to thinking about AI.
I know that universities are scrambling to understand how AI is redefining education. We are re-imaging what we teach and how we teach, and whether our evaluation methods are obsolete for the future world of AI. At the university level, our major goal is to foster critical thinking, which assumes that students have the foundational math and writing skills. At this level, AI could make students more productive by eliminating repetitive grunt work. Personally, I allow unfettered use of GPT in my classes, which I regard as no different in principle from using a search engine, but this does raise the ante for teachers as the AI becomes smarter.
The downside risk is that people become lazy and lose their creativity. This is a big risk when kids don’t have the foundational skills and are just learning how to think. In my conversation with the school’s principal following the class, she pondered whether AI might turn kids into editors of pre-existing content instead of creating things from scratch. That’s a great question. Will their writing become similar? Indeed, if they won’t need to create anything original, what will it mean to have an ability to write well or understand math? How do you test for the understanding of first principles? The risk is that kids don’t or won’t develop the basics and the ability to think abstractly.
Ironically, the best way to evaluate this is the old fashioned way: orally and using paper. This method is human-intensive and somewhat subjective compared to multiple choice questions or filling in the blanks, but it’s the only way to ensure learning. In the longer term, AI might ultimately come to the rescue here, at recognizing and responding to individual needs. This was the AI vision for education compiled in a book titled “Intelligent Tutoring Systems” by Derek Sleeman and John Seely Brown over 40 years ago. I can imagine a future version of GPT that has such the ability to tailor learning on any subject for anyone.
An equally important question at the primary school level is to choose the right metaphors to describe AI.
For starters, what is artificial about AI? Are artificial things “living” or “non-living?” And what are good candidate metaphors for describing “intelligence?” Geoff Hinton likened language model applications to “aliens who speak great English” and appear to understand us. An extra-terrestrial (ET), is one metaphor, which would come with some expectation of inscrutability. Another could be a teacher, but that seems overly authoritarian. Another might be a gamer, but that limits its potential role. Somehow, these different faces of AI need to be integrated into primary school education in a way that provides children with a perspective on AI, how to think about it, and how to use it productively. Considering the centrality of AI in their lives, it is important that children and their teachers understand it as deeply as possible, and use it as a tool for improvement, while avoiding its many risks.
If you wish to be involved in this area, please join this LinkedIn Group called AI for Kids.