New Series Offers Quick Insights on Today’s Issues
Quick Insight is a series of short videos in which experts from academe and the larger community surrounding the academy address a single issue in which their expertise and lived experiences gives them special insight. The issue may be related to a research question, and pressing current headline, or an examination of the infrastructure supporting higher education.
Each edition will see the guest face the camera and after introducing themselves launch into the question they will address. The videos aren’t intended to be the last word on their subject matter, but more like the first one offered at the beginning of a friendly conversation with a knowledgeable and engaging friend.
The first dozen videos in the series will post weekly through August 25. Links to the videos in the series will appear below as they post.
Mahzarin Banaji on the Bias in the Machine
Mazarin Banaji, the experimental psychologist at Harvard University widely known for the implicit association test she and her colleagues developed, has spent decades studying how unconscious processes shape human decisions. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Banaji and colleagues began investigating whether these AI systems also would contain implicit biases. The answer is yes, and in fact, drawing on work by Alex Todorov, she notes that that LLMs not only replicate human biases but sometimes amplify them.
Michael Bhaskar on AI Can Improve Itself
One of the promises of artificial intelligence is that it can be so smart it can identify its shortcomings and avenues for improvement – and then act on that. The benefits of “recursive self-improvement” sits at the heart of this video from Michael Bhaskar, the author 2013’s The Content Machine: Towards a Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Digital Network and 2017’s Curation: The power of selection in a world of excess, as well as the current head of Microsoft’s Futures Team.
Tom Chatfield on What Skills We Need in an AI Age
Philosopher Tom Chatfield, the author of widely read guide to critical thinking, discusses the role that artificial intelligence can play in helping human beings learn in this Quick Insight video. His message is that AI need not — and in fact must never — supplant human thinking but should enhance it. These are similar to ideas he fleshed out in a recent white paper. Among his most recent accomplishments, he designed Critical Thinking and Understanding AI business courses for The Economist and is co-creating an AI critical thinking “cognitive co-pilot” for universities.
