Category: Education

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Human innovation and the creative agency of the world in the age of generative AI

My newly published paper on the relationship between creativity, innovation & novelty, generative AI/LLMs, future potentials, and the creative agency of the world:
Peschl (2024). Human innovation and the creative agency of the world in the age of generative AI. Possibility Studies & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699241238049 (online first, open access)

Abstract
With the advent of Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, and, more generally, generative AI/cognitive technologies, global knowledge production faces a critical systemic challenge. It results from continuously feeding back non- or poorly-creative copies of itself into the global knowledge base; in the worst case, this could not only lead to a stagnation of creative, reliable, and valid knowledge generation, but also have an impact on our material (and subsequently our social) world and how it will be shaped by these rather uninspired automatized knowledge dynamics.
More than ever, there appears to be an imperative to bring the creative human agent back into the loop. Arguments from the perspectives of 4E- and Material Engagement Theory approaches to cognition, human-technology relations as well as possibility studies will be used to show that being embodied, sense-making, and enacting the world by proactively and materially interacting with it are key ingredients for any kind of knowledge and meaning production. It will be shown that taking seriously the creative agency of the world, an engaged epistemology, as well as making use of future potentials/possibilities complemented and augmented by cognitive technologies are all essential for re-introducing profound novelty and creativity.

Keywords: AI, cognitive technologies, creative agency of the world, creativity, 4E cognition, embodied cognition, engaged epistemology, future potential, innovation, large language models, possibility, radical novelty, World

Download here: https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699241238049 (online first, open access)

#AI #cognitivetechnologies #creativeagencyoftheworld #creativity #4Ecognition #embodiedcognition #engagedepistemology #futurepotential #innovation #LLM #radicalnovelty

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Inflation of innovation (Ö1 Dimensionen)

Die Inflation der Innovation

Das Neue und seine wortreiche Verhinderung
Von Mariann Unterluggauer

Ö1 Dimensionen | Radiosendung  | April 26, 2021

Seit den 1970er Jahren, ist die Anzahl an Innovationen gesunken, sagen Ökonomen. Diese Feststellung ist aus zweierlei Gründen weniger erstaunlich, als man vermutet könnte: Erstens nahm die Anzahl der Jobs, bei denen nichts produziert aber viel geredet wird, in der vergangenen Jahrzehnten zu. Und zweitens ist es gar nicht so leicht, mit einer Innovation Gewinne zu erzielen. Profit aber ist die Maßeinheit für Innovation – ob sie nun technisch, grün, transformativ oder disruptiv genannt wird.

Auf jeden Fall müsse Innovation weh tun, lautet ein Credo von Investoren in den USA. Und vorteilhaft wäre, fordert man in Europa, wenn sie auch an den Universitäten gelehrt würde. Klar ist, schnell muss es immer gehen: gestern entwickelt, heute am Markt. Sieht man sich innovative Lösungen aber genauer an, dann haben sie nur selten etwas mit Geschwindigkeit zu tun.

Häufiger schon mit fantastischen Wortkreationen, denn mit neuen Begriffen lassen sich auch alte Ideen verschleiern und verkaufen. Und bei all dem rhetorischen Dauerhype ums Neue wird dann auf reale Anstrengungen und notwendige Investitionen gerne vergessen. Kein Wunder also, dass das „Konzept Innovation“ nun kritisch hinterfragt und mancherorts überarbeitet wird.

→ Link zu Sendung (©/mit freundlicher Genehmigung: Mariann Unterluggauer [for educational purposes only])

 

English Version:

The inflation of innovation
The new and its eloquent prevention
By Mariann Unterluggauer

Since the 1970s, the number of innovations has declined, economists say. This finding is less surprising than one might suspect, for two reasons: First, the number of jobs that produce nothing but talk a lot has increased in recent decades. And second, it is not at all easy to make a profit with an innovation. But profit is the measure of innovation – whether it is called technical, green, transformative or disruptive.

In any case, innovation has to hurt, is a credo of investors in the USA. And it would be beneficial, they say in Europe, if it were also taught at universities. It’s clear that things always have to happen quickly: developed yesterday, on the market today. But if you take a closer look at innovative solutions, they rarely have anything to do with speed.

More often, they have to do with fantastic word creations, because new terms can be used to disguise and sell old ideas. And with all the rhetorical hype about the new, real efforts and necessary investments are often forgotten. No wonder, then, that the “concept of innovation” is now being critically scrutinized and revised in some places.

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The end of college?

Large corporations do no longer want to rely solely on students from „official colleges“ and higher education institutions in many cases. Instead, they design and offer their own online curricula fitting their specific needs and purposes. By that, they publicly educate their prospective employees and have the chance to get to know them well ahead of time.

What sounds like a clever and interesting business- and recruiting model both for companies and students might turn out as nightmare after the end of the employment relationship, as the offered content is highly specialized and—in many cases—has become obsolete and useless with the rise of the next technology hype.

→ https://medium.com/discourse/you-dont-need-college-anymore-says-google-102d4beec668

→ https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/googles-genius-49-mo-course-is-about-to-replace-college-degrees-340f459aaa9b

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Course on the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence — MIT Media Lab

This course will pursue a cross-disciplinary investigation of the development and deployment of the opaque complex adaptive systems that are increasingly in public and private use.  We will explore the proliferation of algorithmic decision-making, autonomous systems, and machine learning and explanation; the search for balance between regulation and innovation; and the effects of AI on the dissemination of information, along with questions related to individual rights, discrimination, and architectures of c

Source: The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence — MIT Media Lab

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On Futures Literacies

Most academic and business curricula offer a good training in analytical thinking, critical thinking, planning, or making predictions. Although these skills are somehow concerned with “future issues”, they are implicitly or explicitly based on the assumption that the status-quo and/or on extrapolating past experiences or trends into the future can predict the future. However, our current world is highly unpredictable and follows an exponential dynamic leading to a high level of uncertainty (“VUCA world”). It can be shown that these classic tools simply do not work any longer in such an environment. Riel Miller at al. introduces the concept of futures literacy as a discipline of anticipation, which can be trained and refined to establish familiarity with the unfamiliar and with an unknown and uncertain future. This article develops this discipline and shows why it is key for any business and innovation process having the aspiration to shape the future in a thriving manner.

https://medium.com/copenhagen-institute-for-futures-studies/what-is-futures-literacy-and-why-is-it-important-a27f24b983d8

See also R.Millers (open source) book on “Transforming the future” https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000264644

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How ethics, AI, Europe’s Green Deal, and COVID-19 are connected

In their critical review of the European Commission’s White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (Feb 2020) two members of the High-Level Expert Group for AI (HLEG AI), Mark Coeckelbergh and Thomas Metzinger, come to the conclusion that “Europe needs more guts when it comes to AI ethics”. On the one hand, they highlight positive aspects of this paper, such as the emphasis on trustworthiness or the importance of recognizing psychological risks that are induced by excessive application of AI. On the other hand, they complain about the fact that the ethical dimension is almost absent in this document and that there are no plans to develop educational ecosystems training future interdisciplinary experts in AI ethics.
In the context of COVID-19, the authors point to interesting emerging opportunities of merging Europe’s Green Deal with an ambitious European AI approach as one strategy to recover from this crisis.

See: https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung/europe-needs-more-guts-when-it-comes-to-ai-ethics

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3 ways the coronavirus pandemic could reshape education

Not only our meeting culture has changed dramatically over the last weeks. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has changed the way students are learning, how teachers are teaching all over the world. Interestingly, it was just a matter of weeks that this switch of mode had taken place; suddenly things became possible which have been thought to be reserved only for “elite or alternative educational institutions”. This short essay by the World Economic Forum sketches some of these changes and highlights possible positive and negative long term implications:

  1. Education – nudged and pushed to change – could lead to surprising innovations
  2. Public-private educational partnerships could grow in importance
  3. The digital divide could widen

See here for article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/3-ways-coronavirus-is-reshaping-education-and-what-changes-might-be-here-to-stay/

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Guide to Machine Learning courses on the internet | Medium & BigThink

Training computers instead of programming them is at the core of machine learning and deep learning. In a nutshell, this means that computers are learning to “learn by experience” (as we humans do) and make predictions by learning from (normally, huge amounts of) data (see also here).

The link below provides a well curated collection and guide to machine learning and deep learning courses on the internet offered by the world’s leading universities.

For this guide, I spent a dozen hours trying to identify every online machine learning course offered as of May 2017, extracting key bits of information from their syllabi and reviews, and compiling their ratings. My end goal was to identify the three best courses available and present them to you. (David Venturi)

Read more: Every single Machine Learning course on the internet, ranked by your reviews

Read more: http://bigthink.com/jake-richardson/22-online-ai-education-classes-that-you-can-take-right-now

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Why we should bulldoze the business school | The Guardian

A critical review on business schools, their (hidden) curricula and their almost exclusively market/capitalism-driven strategies. Martin Parker describes the shortcomings of business schools, their limited view on humans, economics, management, and organizations, their ideologies and hidden agenda, and that they are “places that teach people how to get money out of the pockets of ordinary people and keep it for themselves.”

“But in the business school, both the explicit and hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.

…consider human resource management. This field applies theories of rational egoism – roughly the idea that people act according to rational calculations about what will maximise their own interest – to the management of human beings in organisations.” ()

Source: Why we should bulldoze the business school | News | The Guardian