CURMUDGUCATION: Artificial Intelligence and Magical Thinking (HAL Knows How You Feel)

CURMUDGUCATION: Artificial Intelligence and Magical Thinking (HAL Knows How You Feel)

Artificial Intelligence and Magical Thinking (HAL Knows How You Feel)

From the moment you read the title, you know this article from Inside Higher Ed by Ray Schroeder is going to be a corker-- Affective Artificial Intelligence: Better Understanding and Responding to Students.

Schroeder opens with "As a longtime professor of communication, I am fascinated with the cognitive characteristics of artificial intelligence as they relate to human communication," and that's  a touch misleading. While he was an associate professor of communication back in the early 80s and a professor in a television  production unit at the  University of Illinois up until the late 90s, I think it might be a little disingenuous of him of him  to skip over his work since then. He ran the University's center for online learning until 2013, when he became the associate  vice chancellor for on learning. 2013 was also the year he became a founding director of the National Council of Online Education, a group that is "dedicated to advancing quality online learning at the institutional level." They are "powered by UPCEA, the association for professional, continuing, and online education."

"Dave, are you sad, or just gassy?"

In short, Schroeder is writing not as a professor with some academic curiosity about AI, but as a guy whose professional life for the past two decades has been centered on promoting and advocating for computer-driven instruction. That would have been appropriate to mention here, but IHE didn't even give Schroeder a bio blurb at the end of his piece.

So here's the set-up:

One of the challenges in person-to-person communication is recognizing and responding to subtle CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Artificial Intelligence and Magical Thinking (HAL Knows How You Feel)