Once in a while, something new appears that monumentally changes the way we as a society do things. It is met with a mixture of fascination and panic, as some wholeheartedly embrace it, while others see the end times coming.
For many years, we have seen warnings about artificial intelligence: what could happen if it went wrong somehow? What if the machines started to replace us or took control? What about our jobs, our careers, our lives?
That question is being answered, as of last November. Sometimes AI is used for good and sometimes not. But there is no question—it’s here to stay. Continue reading
No matter what you may have planned, or how cool or timely it may be, or how exactly it may fit into the material you had planned to cover that day, you’re going to run into a situation where something goes awry. Perhaps it’s a technology issue at work, and that great piece of software you were going to demo just isn’t going to work on the classroom computer. Could be that for some reason, half the class just didn’t participate in the online exercise you had so meticulously planned. What if you have been assuming that an exercise was going to go one way, only to find that it has gone in a completely unanticipated direction?
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.