ai homework, evolution in action & talking points for life
CC#52 - How to Accelerate Technological Progress, Connections are What Matters & COP27
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🧑🏫 AI Homework
How is school going to look like with generative AI tools being readily available to every student? Some interesting ideas on future applications for ChatGPT and the like.
Here’s an example of what homework might look like under this new paradigm. Imagine that a school acquires an AI software suite that students are expected to use for their answers about Hobbes or anything else; every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system. Moreover, instead of futilely demanding that students write essays themselves, teachers insist on AI. Here’s the thing, though: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator.
What is compelling about this new skillset is that it isn’t simply a capability that will be increasingly important in an AI-dominated world: it’s a skillset that is incredibly valuable today. After all, it is not as if the Internet is, as long as the content is generated by humans and not AI, “right”
📈 How to Accelerate Technological Progress
This is basically a very digestible summary of the existing scientific literature on what is needed to get people (and societies) to innovate - from the importance of role models, over efficiency in science to communication.
Innovation happens when people apply knowledge to problems. There are lots of points where we can nudge that process along faster. More people (or more robots to take on some of their tasks). More people considering innovation. More knowledge. Better organization of science. More communication of knowledge. More resources to innovation. More benefits from innovating. Better management of innovators. Each of those might only have a small impact individually; but they stack up. Moreover, they compound, year on year.
A collection of ‘simple’ concepts that can be seen as modules of a person’s worldview. Maybe some of them will also change your life?
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do
Food for Thought.
💚 Being honest, I haven’t followed the COP27 climate summit much, but I must say I also didn’t really see/hear much about it in the news, social media etc. So I found this post really interesting to catch up - it summarizes the Good, Bad and Ugly at the UN’s COP27 Climate Summit. My main takeaway: Its good that we finally have a ‘loss and damage fund’ for poor countries that have to bear consequences of climate change. Its bad that there was nothing decided with regards to phasing out fossil fuels (which is the only way we still have a chance to reach the 1.5 degree goal).
🐸 Around Chernobyl you will find more dark colored frogs than usual. Why? Scientists hypothesize its because of Melanin - which is responsible for the dark color but has also been shown to absorb and dissipate part of the radiation energy in mushrooms. So this might just be an example of rapid evolution - impressive.
📊 RTutor allows you to upload some data and ask for specific data anlyses (e.g. quantiles, mean, regressions) and visualisations (e.g. barplots, scatterplots). It then uses AI to translate your prompts into R code and returns you back the desired output. Downside: You still have to deal with the errors yourself (e.g. if the data types don’t match your prompt). Curious to see where and how these type of applications will impact the future of data analysis!
Random Stuff.
🎶 Riffusion is an AI music generator based on Stable Diffusion. You can type in a prompt and a fine tuned version of Stable Diffusion will generate pictures of spectrograms from it which will then be turned into sound. Definitely not yet at the same quality level as AI image generators but nonetheless impressive.
✨ Maybe an idea for a late new years resolution?
🗣️ Talking Points for Life is ‘is a library of ready-to-use messages for challenging social situations’. I guess we have all been in situations where we just didn’t know what to say or how to communicate in a thoughtful way - this might be worth taking a look at if you know you might be having a ‘difficult conversation’ coming up.
Personal Update.
Spent some time ski touring with friends back home in Austria. Depressingly little snow - I fear we need to get used to this. Maybe even the ex-president of the Austrian skiing association will eventually realize this - he famously said in 2018 that ‘the ski sport will not get any problems through climate change’:
Other than that, I spent time pushing forward some research projects I am quite excited about but also going down some -probably rather unnecessary - rabbit holes (if anybody wants to talk about finite Gaussian mixture models, I think I would almost dare to call myself an expert on that by now).
Also weather in Copenhagen is awful at the moment (strong wind + heavy rain + biking is just not a good combination) → currently doubling up on hygge and coffee ☕️
…and I am in the midst of starting up a new project with the University of Copenhagen PhD association. Stay tuned ;)