This presentation was given yesterday by Audrey Watters at ALT-C 2014. Sometimes they say an image says a 1000 words, but in this case the story is not that easy to understand with only the images. Luckily mrs Watters has posted her notes online too. So we have to opportunity to read such phrases as “Our “gigantic sin”: we failed to love and care for our technological creations. We must love and educate our children. We must love and care for our machines, lest they become monsters.”

One thing her presentation made me wonder: if computers will be as smart to be able to truly teach, will there still be a reason left for the humans to be thought.

Probably there will be, who will control the machine, or the machine that controls the other machines. Still…

An excerpt from the presentation notes:

I’m in the middle of writing a book called Teaching Machines, a cultural history of the science and politics of ed-tech. An anthropology of ed-tech even, a book that looks at knowledge and power and practices, learning and politics and pedagogy. My book explores the push for efficiency and automation in education: “intelligent tutoring systems,” “artificially intelligent textbooks,” “robo-graders,” and “robo-readers.”

This involves, of course, a nod to “the father of computer science” Alan Turing, who worked at Bletchley Park of course, and his profoundly significant question “Can a machine think?”

I want to ask in turn, “Can a machine teach?”

Then too: What will happen to humans when (if) machines do “think”? What will happen to humans when (if) machines “teach”? What will happen to labor and what happens to learning?

And, what exactly do we mean by those verbs, “think” and “teach”? When we see signs of thinking or teaching in machines, what does that really signal? Is it that our machines are becoming more “intelligent,” more human? Or is it that humans are becoming more mechanical?

Rather than speculate about the future, I want to talk a bit about the past.

It’s definitely a book I’ll want to read.