22 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords”

  1. I really enjoy SDA. Kate (and Robert) do an excellent job bringing us all the news that has been printed … fit to be or not. Politics Trudeau BLM Communism Trump Freedom Liberty conservative Leftist Dog Show

    I get an ‘A’

    1. – and don’t forget, Falun Gong organ harvesting Uighur Tienanmen Square Hong Kong Taiwan invade etc etc etc…

  2. Thus proving that artificial intelligence can be just as low IQ as human intelligence. The programmer must be a typical liberal.

    1. You meant to say lazy, would-be techie looking to cash in his stock options. Maybe this Edgenuity company doesn’t have enough woke, female, “racialized” board directors. Maybe it has too many.

    1. Nah. I had my students convinced that I used the staircase method. I’d stand at the top of some stairs and toss all the exams or lab reports towards the bottom.

      The ones that went the shortest distance were, obviously, lacking in substance and, therefore, got low grades.

      Similarly, the ones that went the furthest were full of you-know-what, which was laid on with a trowel. Therefore, they got low grades as well.

      The ones that landed midway, plus or minus a short distance, were properly written and, therefore, scored the highest.

      One hilarious aspect of that was that I’m sure some of them actually believed me, though they could never explain why their papers or reports were returned all covered with my comments scrawled in red ink. (“How many pens did you use to grade my exam, sir?” “Didn’t you know? I order red ink by the tanker from a small island in the South Pacific. They give me a volume discount.” And, yes, I’m sure some of the kiddies believed that as well.)

      1. You graded the English Competency Exam at UBC? You bastard!

        I failed because I was done in 20 minutes and doodled all over the “preparatory notes” page because they wouldn’t let me leave until after a half hour (which was the latest anyone could show up and still write the test). The grader decided that he/she/it couldn’t tell the difference between my periods and commas (among other petty quibbles). A recent arrival from Iran who spoke only broken English re-wrote every second line of the text he was supposed to condense, and passed. He said he took an hour and a half to write it.

        I had naught but disdain for the English department after that.

        1. Never taught English, though I had to endure some dreadful prose while grading lab reports.

          The kiddies should have been pleased when their work was returned all covered in red, and some actually were. That meant that I looked closely at what they did. Not everything was a penalty. Often, I just made comments to draw their attention to something they should watch out for or could do better next time.

          I’m glad I don’t have to do that any more.

  3. Thomas Sowell says that the biggest benefit of being a Harvard graduate is that he never has to be impressed by anyone from Harvard again.

  4. You do not need to “test” kids for them to prove that they understand concepts and information. Nor do you need to label kids with grades. There are plenty of ways for kids to demonstrate that they are ready to advance to new concepts and content.

    You just need to ensure that kids understand concepts and information and can go on to learn additional richer and more complicated topics and ensure they can think and communicate.

    The current way of teaching kids is useless and costly. It forces every kid to learn the same boring crap with whatever fad of the day education system some dingbat educator is infatuated with.

    New online and interactive curricula allow customization of a program with each kid’s individual interest and learning style.

    So a kid is doing poorly in school but loves sports. OK, run the kid through a sports oriented curriculum. Math, statistics, composition, reports all with a sports content. OK, so maybe the kid is in love with cars. Physics, chemistry, tonnes of math there, car styles and design, composition, reports etc.

    Same with cooking and food or arts or music, space/dinosaurs and volcanoes. It is endless. School and learning could be wonderfully engaging, rich and fun for kids. But instead we have this moribund, archaic and useless system infected with union oriented and entitled left wing teacher-zoids.

    One third of all kids drop out of high school with the primary reason being given is that “they are bored”. No wonder they are bored. School is useless. It was for me. I barely survived. Once I left stupid K-12 I went on to get graduate degrees and productive self employment.

    1. School and learning could be wonderfully engaging, rich and fun for kids.

      Real life isn’t any of these things. You’re setting the kids up for worse failure by teaching them the world will conform to their petty and ephemeral interests.

      Oh, and this isn’t AI, although I wouldn’t expect either Verge or SDA to know the difference. It’s simply keyword scanning. The real story here is “public schools use cheap, poorly designed tool instead of doing their jobs”.

      1. Real life can be wonderful and beautiful. It about working hard and having the right atitude. It’s about learning to fail, being strong, picking yourself up again and going for it.

        Come on Dan. Drop the pessimistic outlook on life. Some of the happiest people I have met live in conditions that would propel a spoiled Canadian brat into eternal misery.

  5. Well the education system had pretty much reached bottom anyway. Now they can fire all the teachers (eliminating their ability to indoctrinate children) and continuously upgrade the A.I. until it’s smarter than a 5th grader.

  6. As a very old man I will relate a story that some may find pertinent. When in grade nine our school decided that there were going to be IQ tests done on we grade nines. Well, never fuck with a bunch of intelligent smart assed boys. We screwed their system three ways from Sunday as they used to say. A friend of mine was told he would never graduate high school, he became a very rich businessman and lawyer who got his degree from a major university in Montreal. I was told something similar and wound up managing several different companies and was the national manager for one. There were about ten of us a holes who were far more intelligent than those trying to herd us and we all laughed at them all the time. We were all successful in our lives. School and learning, sometimes.

  7. Memorizing a word salad without comprehension is successful education by Marxist standards. You want to weed out anyone that can think independently and tell the sheep how smart they are.

  8. To be fair, if you know all the keywords relevant to a short answer there is a good chance you know the correct answer. Some teachers do little more than check that certain words appear. The problem is that you might know the answer but express it so you don’t catch the words they think you should use. The only risk for giving the score, though, is that you might just pack in all words with even a tangential connection. They need to add some negative marking.

    1. Wye bother teeching kids to right they’re answers in complete sentences? Wye bother with capitalization (so tuff to do with you’re thumbs, anyway) or spelling? Uh, communication is not, like, that important, ‘n stuff.

  9. If a software company uses the phrase “artificial intelligence” to describe a product that parses for keywords, it’s not AI – it’s a query. I’m amazed at how much software is just plain bad.

    1. That software company has at least one department filled with excellence. Sales and marketing. Programming? Not so much.

      BTW, what is worse: that this company has poorly conceived and executed software, or that their client, the educators, doesn’t know (or care) how it works and whether their students are receiving any benefit.

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