Hosts Reflect with Chris Dede, Yong Zhao, Curt Bonk, Lydia Cao & Punya Mishra

Speaker A: Sa.

Speaker B: Welcome to Silver Lining for Learning, episode 274. We are back after an extended summer hiatus. Uh, we haven't actually taken a break since we started back in March of 2020. Uh, we have had a couple of breaks here and there, just a week or two at the most. This is I think the longest break we have taken and actually uh, use this time to redesign the website from bottom up. The website had become quite clunky. Um, used some weird plugins which were super slow and heavy. Working with my uh, partner Claude Code, um, actually redesigned the website from bottom up. I think it's much more streamlined now. Um, loads pretty fast, has some um, added uh, functionality which we can explore as we go forward. In the sense that you can actually embed your podcast in there right now. You can embed the YouTube which we could do before, but it does it much more seamlessly. Um, so the website is going to function better uh, because of the analysis that we had done. Uh, back at our six year anniversary. Uh, we actually have some tags that can be attached to different uh, episodes as we go forward. That's a good beginning I think. Except as I don't know. Lydia, I was mentioning this to you. Claude did a great job of designing the website and I went overboard in terms of how we could tag and search and so on. Basically what it meant was when bots would come up to our website they would have an infinite number of exploding possibilities to explore which would bring the server crashing down. So every week the server would crash and I'd like, what's going on? And it would turn out it was because of the extravagant design that I had made for the site. But that's been fixed so hopefully that's all good. So it's good to see all of you. I'm joined here of course with Chris D. Dee Dee from Harvard, Kurt Bong from Indiana, Young Zhao, uh, from Kansas and wherever he is at this moment, and Lydia Kao from Toronto. Good to see all of you guys. It's been, uh, I don't know, six, eight, ten weeks, something like that. Uh, how's everybody doing?

Speaker C: Good, I guess, you know, we're all good. I'm very excited to be back, you know, to, to have this great connection again to say everybody's smiling. Lydia was worried a little bit, but now you're smiling again. That's good, you know, uh, so I'm happy to be back, Punia. Thank you.

Speaker B: So where are you right now?

Speaker C: I'm in Oregon. I, I just got back from uh, China where I have to go back again. You know, China is a big country. I have to spend a lot of time finding out what's happening there.

Speaker B: All right, good. Anybody else jump in?

Speaker A: So in thinking about what has happened since I was last here, I did write uh, an article on uh, the digital multiverse in learning. And uh, if you're wondering what the multiverse is in physics, the, the physical multiverse is the universe of all possible universes. And uh, that's actually more widely known than just physicists because Dr. Strange in the Marvell universe goes ping ponging around the multiverse. Well, the digital multiverse is an ecosystem with all of the niches of all digital media. So like the physical multiverse that keeps expanding and it's got uh, a very wide variety of things in it. Telehealth and online learning and E commerce and gaming and social media. Just lots and lots of niches and a lot of studies have been done of the niches. So if you say is social media good or bad? For me you can find lots of articles. Is gaming good or bad? For me you can find lots of articles. Not much has been written on what happens when you're inhabitant of the digital multiverse more than you're in the real world. So people that are spending say 12 hours a day digital across all of these different kind of variants and uh, only maybe the other 12 hours a day, most of which they're asleep in the real world. And uh, what does I think potentially happen goes well beyond screen time. Screen time is just sort of what you're doing to your nervous system by staring into a monitor and pretending that you're looking across distance. But um, we need much better measures and much better questions like to what extent does your identity fragment if you're in 12 different niches of the digital multiverse? And that's most of your day, every day. So anyway, it's um, published in IEEE TLT Transactions and Learning Technologies. I put a preprint on my website and I would love to uh, get feedback from anybody that's moved to help me think about this.

Speaker B: Thanks Chris, but let's get some um, hellos from Lydia, uh, and Kurt before we jump into that.

Speaker D: Yeah, Lydia, you're all over the Airways on LinkedIn. Every time I turn it on you're announcing something new. Tell us what, what you're doing.

Speaker E: Oh, uh, just uh, trying to keep up with what so much that's happening right now. The world of AI in education. And uh, yeah, trying to share some of my thoughts surrounding that um, One thing I've been recently, um, wondering that I haven't shared on LinkedIn, is this notion, I don't know, like, if you guys remember, in the beginning of AI, there was this really popular saying which is like, you won't be replaced by AI, but by those who know how to use AI. So I've been thinking a lot about that and I feel with these rapid development around AI and the AI has become m, um, much easier to navigate the threshold of using, ah, AI, the entry barrier is becoming lower and the lower. I, uh, feel like maybe what really separate people is not whether you use AI or not, is whether you can continue to learn to enhance yourself and then, uh, to, to leverage your humanness, your judgment, your critical thinking, your taste in order to direct AI. So I just feel the field of learning education, learning sciences has just never been more important. And I think everyone need to know how to learn and keep up in, and adapt in this time.

Speaker B: Good, good.

Speaker D: Okay, I guess I'm last here. Um, it's nice to be back and it's great to see everyone again. Uh, it's now August 1st. Can you believe that? Uh, I will say that the last couple months I've been collecting things and, um, contacting people, but it's all been random. Like, would you like to be on Silver Lane for learning maybe?

Speaker C: Uh, okay.

Speaker D: Yeah. So, you know, I've got stacks, literally stacks just sitting here with papers of people I've invited that I have followed up on some, not others. Um, you know, it's not really organized, but there's a lot of show, potential shows. Here's another bunch of them over here. A lot of shows could be coming up. Might be, might be. Hopefully. Hopefully. Um, so the next one we have is next week on Rural AI Strategy. Uh, lab people of Beth Holland sent us. Um, so I've been collecting. The most recent thing I collected, Punya, was something from Arizona State. Um, and, uh, I've also written two things I'll talk about later on, but Arizona State and had this video, great video. Michael Crow and Lev Gonick, who was on our show a couple years back, saying ChatGPT5, they have announcement, um, of proposals for faculty at Arizona state. Like, over 400 proposals on using ChatGPT5 in the classroom at Arizona State. They've already funded 200 of them. Do you know anything about that? Punya. And, um, tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, this is asu, so we do things, um, at scale. So I'm not surprised at all. I mean, I'M uh, part of some of these conversations. Not necessarily all of them, but yeah, I mean we jumped into the AI thing pretty early on so I'm not surprised at all. But again if you think about it, I mean for the number of faculty we have, I mean for the size of the university, um, you know, couple of hundred is not really a lot if you think about it that way too. Right. Because it's 180,000 student universities. So that's a ridiculous number at some level.

Speaker D: Totally ridiculous number. So I'll make briefly mention the two pieces I've been working on the past couple weeks that just got sent out. Uh, one of them was interviewed by folks at Southwest University in China about teacher um, training, how it might change in this AI age, especially for self directed learning. So that came out quite nice. I could send that to you Lydia. It's going to be in Chinese when it comes out. I've got the English version preprint. Uh, the second piece is uh, Book Forward. Now people get mad at me every time they ask me to do a book forward. They think I'm going to write 500 or 1,000 words. I'm one who writes 7,000 words for a book forward. So I um, was dreaming a bit while writing this last week or the week before, um, 25 years ago, a quarter century ago, I wrote a 10 level web integration continuum. From just putting a syllabus online to putting a part of a course to putting a whole course to having international partnerships. This couple weeks I came up with a 10 level AI integration framework for self directed learning and how AI could help you in a minimal way to be a self directed learning or more ah, extensive way. So I've been having fun playing around with that, thinking about that and um, just sent that off to be looked at by the book publisher. So um, a couple of things I've been working on and I'll stop speaking of that.

Speaker C: I've uh, been doing something I think, uh, I don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm actually curious now. I've been sort of falling from the periphery this thing I want to, I want to learn more.

Speaker C: The courageous minority. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got rainy, you know, once you reach certain age, you said, God, I, you know, you want the changes, you argue for changes. You said changes could happen, there are great ways. Silver Lining has been talking about this for a long time. Just one day I just said, you know I was actually after my meeting with the uh, Google in Chicago, uh, I said I gotta go do something. You Know, because we spend so much money changing schools doesn't happen. So I said we gotta go start with the courageous minorities because I think schools, you know, you read all the grammar of schooling, all those things. I think schools don't change because they have a um, peace treaty that everybody is happy but nobody is happy, you know, with the schools. I said we gotta rely on the courageous minority. Every school, every place has a few people who have the courage to make changes. So I put up a blog post on my website and say, who wants to be uh, the um, courageous minority? We're not going to talk about why we cannot change. We're not going to talk about why this, why that. We say we're just going to do something. Those who are willing to make the change, you can join us. So I just put a blog post. I got a lot of applicants from over 25 countries from developed countries to developing countries. We have people from like South Africa, India and Dominican Republic in action, Brazil, Argentina. And then we have people from France, UK, US, Australia, Canada. So they, I, I selected about rainy 20 schools and uh, some schools and two people. So we have 25 people and we've started that courageous minority. We uh, we had two meetings already each month I'll meet with them, uh, you know, we divide them into three time zones. So I meet with them and uh, and we talk for an hour. I thought it was about an hour but end up normal like hour and a half and two hours. And everybody's really actually quite excited. You know our first meeting was about what's your entry point? What changes can you make and can you make in your controllable space. That's really the key because we cannot go change in assessment, we cannot go change policy. But I really believe everybody can make some changes in your space. So, so that's how we started. And last month, July, we had a uh, meeting about um, what they've done. And now we are going to meet again in about two weeks, uh, to talk about where to go from here. This is going to be an annual, I mean a one year program. And based on that actually I wrote an article about what I call the courageous minority. Might be a new theory of change, of uh, new approaches to change. It's been actually read by a lot of people. I got emails from Australia, wanted me to talk to a new group called the New Metrics group, uh, about 40 schools in Melbourne. Uh, and then another group from England asked me about this because I've been arguing as transformative changes do not take place very Often because of the peace treaty. And, uh, we should review changes. They don't have to scale up. If someone makes a change, and even if the person leaves or the change dies, that's okay. At least change has taken place. So I'm saying in this new age, everybody can make changes and everybody could lead changes, but do not always trying to impose your change on, uh, other people. You know, that's another problem. I think in education, everybody thinks they have the right vision, and that vision should go to other people. So I said, maybe, not maybe. You know, it's like social media. A lot of people when Chris is talking about, you know, you can say social media is good, social media is bad, but at least one thing, it enables the viewers to become broadcasters. You know, people who did not have the voice now have a voice. You know, you may not like that, their voice, but now their voice is heard.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker C: So I think change can take place. And, uh, then, uh, some other journal, I think, uh, Ed Leadership Journal, asked me to write more about that. So I wrote about. I said, you know, as great education leaders, probably your better job is to control your leadership, to reserve that. Not trying to lead everything, not trying to guide everybody, because, you know, we have a lot of leaders who has one vision, and that vision is going to replace other people's vision. And by the way, that article, uh, I sent Interchange, they asked me to write it. God, submitting to the Springer system is a horrible experience. That made me some, um. Three times I said, what stupid system can be? But you know, I really, I've not never had a problem with that. It's a, uh, Springer system is horrible. But anyway, they can come to talk to me about that. But it's not a good experience. However, the courageous minority movement, I'm hoping you guys can all start your own courageous minority just to spread. Who knows what can happen. But what surprised me was how many schools, how many countries participated and they started. That's. That's quite amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: Young, you started off. Let's take us back to the beginning. You started off saying, I was in Chicago, uh, working with Google for education, folks. So then I pulled off the bookshelf this book called Courageous Adventures. Courageous. And then also you start talking about courageous. Uh, Jenny Magearia. She was on Silver Lining a few years ago. At least once. Maybe she's been on twice. Did you meet with her, with Jenny, uh, in Chicago at Google for Education? Is that what brought the courageous topic up? Or I might, um.

Speaker C: Kurt, you are testing my memory. After a certain age, your Memories does not work as well as before. Okay, so like, uh, Chris was talking about 10:30. Did we really meet? So, so might be her. Might, might be her because, uh, the head of uh, uh, Google Education, you know, could be her. And uh, don't tell her I said that, you know, I might be, but. But you know, I get, uh, I get nervous when I say people's names. You know, I don't even know you occurred. But anyway, this, this is good. So I started that. But it was fun. I mean I, I had a great time, but I do three sessions because of time zones. I thought I would do one an hour session each month, but turned out to be raining almost two hours, three sessions. But actually that's reasonable because you want everybody have a chance to talk, to share ideas. And by the way, actually I want to ask all of you, I like to bring some of them to Silver Lining for Learning. I think they all have great experiences to share. We have people actually. One person coming out of British Columbia who went to Alberta says Alberta's situation does not allow him to have as much flexibility as he did in British Columbia in schools. So yeah, I'll bring them out actually. They'll be fun to talk to those guys.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think we can do a series on that. And the reason I've been sort of following it because I think the core idea that you expressed resonates very much with me. Um, just published, um, an editorial in jtate. I think the title is something like the Crisis We Earned. And basically it's a criticism of edtech research that we've been doing all along. And basically fundamentally arguing that this point that everything needs to scale is the problem. Because the moment you make that the evaluative measure of something, uh, then you're bound to fail because education is so contextual. And so part of the argument is that we need to develop new modes of doing scholarship in that space.

Speaker C: You're absolutely right, Pune. We should write a book about this because I really. The scale up idea is just doesn't work because traditionally we always say, oh, you should scale up. How's the scale? Nobody wants you to scale up because everybody else wants to scale up.

Speaker B: I think this is your inner Mao coming out. May a thousand flowers bloom. So we gotta be careful, uh, about that. Um, but I want to, um, connect a little bit back to this, um, multiverse idea, Chris, that you talked about. I don't know if you guys have been following the news that came out of India over the past month and a half or so, and so in India you have these national exams which are like very high stakes exams. Um, so there's this neat exam which is for medical school, which literally hundreds of thousands of students sit for. And then those exams, um, the paper got leaked, so the exams got canceled. A bunch of kids committed suicide, uh, because they saw that, you know, they had spent years studying for this exam and then it was pushed back by one more year or whatever. In the meanwhile, somebody, uh, the Chief justice of India had some complaint about young people and he called them cockroaches. He said that these youth today, they don't do anything. They are like cockroaches. A, ah, graduate student sitting in Boston, Chris, uh, where you are, got sort of cranky about it and he created this thing like, how about we form this party, invite all the cockroaches and call ourselves the Cockroach Janta Party. That spread like wildfire online, ended up becoming a protest in New Delhi where they demanded the resignation of the Minister of Education. This current government has never bowed down to any kind of pressure. It ended up becoming a march to the parliament which police, uh, brutality happened and so on. It just captured the imagination of the entire nation. The minister finally had to resign. But what was most interesting and Chris, this is where the Multiverse piece comes in, is the level of joy these kids were showing while they were protesting. It was go online and look, it was full of memes and jokes and every time the police would try to beat them up or something, they would start singing the national anthem and then somebody would crack some kind of a joke. You know, the Prime Minister went and he tried to create an Instagram and suddenly there were like 50 Instagrams which took his video and edited it and made fun of it. I mean, it's been this amazing sort of social experiment which is so driven by living in that multiverse where they share a certain language and ethos. And you know, people are really surprised because Gen Z had always been regarded as being sort of apathetic or something like that. And for them to come together, use the language of this new medium, to use the, the rhetoric of this medium, the modalities of this medium in, in terms of like social. I don't know where it's going to go in the long term, I have no idea. But it's been still happening.

Speaker C: Is it still. I read some news.

Speaker B: Yeah. So if you think about where India is right now, three countries around India have had their governments completely changed because of youth and social media. So that Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, three countries where the youth got together and promoted somebody. And the regime change, complete regime change happened. So that is something that the Indian government, I think is sort of anxious about. But, uh, it's been exhilarating sitting here watching the joy with which, um, and extremely peaceful. Like they keep repeating, we are not here to beat things up or break things and so on. Uh, we just demand accountability. It's been quite inspiring, actually, to watch that entire thing play out. And sitting from here and watching that, it's been fascinating. So if you have a moment, take a look at it. Um, I mean, of course there are critics of it and all of that, all that pushback is happening. But as a mass movement of youth driven completely by access to social media, I think this is a fantastic sort of an example of that.

Speaker D: The New Yorker has a special on Korea this month on the exam called the Examination. I think that's the title of the piece where they basically go through the midlife or the teenage life of a young boy, uh, whose parents support him and think he's going to do great things, but he doesn't end up passing the examination, which would enable him to go to Yongsei University or Seoul national or wherever his girlfriend does pass. They no longer are boyfriend girlfriend, because he didn't pass. And he has to study overly hard, uh, and not basically have a personal life so that he can pass it the second time through. But he didn't pass it the second time through. And everyone tries making excuses. Well, everyone bombed on this one. It was such a hard exam. There's an alternative for you. You could go to community college in California and you become a resident of the state of California. Go to any school. You know, they have all these ins and outs for coping with passing or not passing the exam. It determines, you know, uh, every. Everything that happens to one, um, throughout their lives. He ends up becoming a, like a sweeper in a cafe, in a Starbucks, like Cafe in Korea. Uh, and, you know, because he didn't pass the damn exam. Uh, so similar punya. We might have to have a show on this, uh, you know, maybe having two shows, one with people, uh, you know, talking about, uh, in Asia, their experience in East Asia and then in South Asia, or, you know, maybe having a panel of young people, uh, talking about their experiences with these exams, I don't know.

Speaker B: And just multiply that by few, like, you know, double, triple that in terms of population. Right. I mean, when you look at India, um, so, yeah, it's, it's a, It's a fascinating um, sort of happening that, you know, is this is actually still going on. The protest has been canceled because the minister resigned. That was their main demand. Uh, but I think that it's opened up the door to young people in a way to be politically active in a way that I hadn't seen before.

Speaker D: Yeah, I have a couple of colleagues in Korea who were secondered, I mean, to basically into a hotel complex for two, three weeks to create the exam items. They can't use their social media, can't talk to anybody. Uh, all this just, you know, I couldn't get a hold of them. I'm wondering what's happening. Well, they're. They're creating exam questions, and they can't let those. What happened there in Delhi, the exam questions getting out for the medical students, they're trying to avoid that. But on the opposite end, you have people whose lives are totally changed, whether they're the exam creators, the exam takers, or the families surrounding them. I mean, it's just like we've been, you know, we're paying homage to these exams again. Chris, you want to jump in? I think here.

Speaker A: Well, to relate it back to the Digital Multiverse article, one of the things that I discuss is, uh, what's called the fourth wall. And, uh, in the theater, uh, you go to a play and, uh, there's. There's, you know, the. The space on the stage, and then there's the fourth wall, the wall between the. The actors and the audience. And unless it's an unusual playwright that, uh, brings the actors out into the audience or brings the audience into the actors, uh, that fourth wall is there. You watch a streaming movie, the fourth wall is there. Um, and when you have immersive media, you're not physically going through the fourth wall. You have an avatar that appears on the stage, if you will, and get through it. And I think that what's beginning to happen, or maybe it just happens periodically, is people get really caught up in the digital multiverse, like social media, and they just invest more and more energy into sort of winning in the digital world. How many followers do I have? Am I seen as a major influencer? You know, did I create a fake AI that got a million views or something? And every once in a while, somebody says, let's break the fourth wall and take what's happening in the digital multiverse into the real world. And guess what? In the real world, it has a lot more consequences than it does in the digital multiverse. All that energy that went into getting millions of followers, uh, you can do more with 10,000 followers in the real world than you can with a million followers in the digital multiverse. So I think that, um, what groups are beginning to realize is that it's, it's really hybrid that you, you work across the two worlds, the physical and the digital, and each empowers the other in interesting ways.

Speaker C: But also, I mean, what, what you are talking about is in essence, I think, uh, a lot of the technology stuff needs to be really, I think, uh, reanalyzed in different context. You know, like you were talking about social media. I think parents just want that perspective to say, oh, social media hurt kids. So you just have so many countries banning social media and we forgot in the beginning how excited we are. So I was. I won't bring another topic in. Uh, this guy, you probably know, Jared,

Speaker D: before you do that, I just. Hang on a second. I saw Lydia not in her head when I was talking about the Korean system and when Pun is talking about the Indian system. And, and Chris, did you want to add anything about, uh, the examination before Young goes to the next topic?

Speaker E: Yeah, like, I've been thinking a lot about this. Like, on the one hand, like, you know, like where we are situated as like researchers or innovator in this space that we kind of have on the one hand the responsibility of crafting an alternative, like better systems and niches and for the future generations so they can have a better learning education experience. But at the same time we're also held accountable to the system that they are in right now, like how they are going to pass this exam, how they're going to succeed in the current system. So. And these two system don't always talk to each other. So I always kind of find myself like, kind of in this paradox. So on the one hand I'm like thinking about these like, new creative visions of education. On the other hand, I was like, that's not going to be immediately applicable to the kids right now. So how do I navigate that?

Speaker A: So, yeah, sorry, Young.

Speaker D: I just wanted to.

Speaker C: I just want to bring something related. I'm sure you guys are familiar with this name. Jared King, Cooney Horvath. Are you aware of this?

Speaker A: Okay, yeah,

Speaker B: yeah. Ah, he, he. I actually was looking him m up just the other day, um, because he went and made this statement to the Congress or something like that and started

Speaker C: U.S. senate, uh, in March. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, because. But he is now used as a symbol to say how technology has hurt learning. And so there's a lot of parents, a lot of People following him to say schools should ban all technology. I think it's the same kind of issue as social media. Uh, Chris, he might have been a graduate of Harvard, but you know, Harvard never had all great graduates.

Speaker B: Anyway.

Speaker C: But so I'm not blaming you on that, you know, and uh, you have some good people. But anyway, so, so, but this. And he says he has a popular book, but, but really he's like the other guy who wrote about hate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's same thing, you know, you just blame this stuff. You know. Like I would say any revolution has brought more human miseries, you know, like in Industrial Revolution brought it. So I'm just really wondering about you guys reaction to this kind of comments about technology, you know.

Speaker B: So I'll, I'll just give a very quick one which is the same point that you know, when I talked about that scaling is the big thing. So it's the same mistake, it's being made from the other side, which is you're taking one thing and you're saying, applying it, that this is the cause of all the misery in the world. And guess what, Couple of data points. Australia banned social media. Turns out all these kids are using VPNs or whatever and they're all back on social media or they're being highly creative about it.

Speaker A: It.

Speaker B: If they had like uh, a um, you know, what do you call them? The um, where you have a streak, where you have been messaging this person for like three years and suddenly now you're told you can't use this. So they go and they move all the streak to WhatsApp, you know, so a, those bans don't work. People find their ways around them. These are things that are part of the multi, digital multiverse that we live in. But the bigger problem for me is this sort of unitary sort of analysis which is like, oh, this is the only cause. If we remove this, it's going to fix everything. Think about what these kids have gone through in the past six years, right? They've had Covid, they've had global conflicts, they have had migration patterns like global climate change. This is the first generation which is looking at the future and thinking this is actually going to be worse than our parents lived, right? And none of those matter and it's only this device that's making them like dumb or like whatever. It's just so ridiculous that whole conversation, you know. But we are having the tech lash, you know what's been called the tech lash, where parents saying we remove all digital technology from schools it's just. Yeah, it's just bizarre. The whole thing.

Speaker C: I don't know, but this whole thing is popular that, you know, like, you know, I can't believe Digital Promise passed down, um, bunch of, uh, uh, messages to say, God, there's, you know, the tech lash. This is really serious in schools. You know, I was in Long island, uh, last month. I mean, parents were very nervous about AI, about as they should be, you know, about. But I think rejecting any technology is really, really interesting.

Speaker B: Good.

Speaker A: I think, I think the tech companies have brought some of this on themselves because the whole idea that, um, if you want to say something about technology, you just make it up and say it loudly enough and everybody believes it is originating with the tech companies. So I'm going to sound very cynical here, but, um, for years these tech gurus and the big companies have been saying, oh, we're right on the edge of artificial general intelligence. The singularity is about to happen. People will never need to work again because the machines are going to make us all rich, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, of course, none of that is true. Not even remotely true. And you don't even have to go to the library to figure out that it's not true. I saw a news article this week that said that somebody in the US Government decided it was a good idea to have AI draw a map of Africa right before a big briefing. Far from artificial general intelligence, they can't even do something that old AI did flawlessly, which is to m, find a map and put it up there. Made up the map. All six countries were wrong. This is not AGI. Well, the point that I want to make next is now I'm seeing a new theme. The companies have figured out that AGI doesn't get it done anymore. Uh, they cried wolf too often. The models are too broken. People just laugh when they say, oh, we're right on the edge of AGI. So now they're going to the Terminator. And you see these new articles that say, oh, the, the AI model broke out of this cage and it, it attacked other companies. And, uh, now we've got to hire all these big, uh, consultants and give us another trillion dollars so we can stop the thing that we built from becoming a Frankenstein and trashing the world. And again, you know, what actually happened is they, they had the model in a nice, uh, no Internet environment. And one of their partners, in two cases, ignored what they were supposed to do and put the model on the Internet. And the model did, on the Internet what it did in the test environment, which is to attack other things. Far from being AGI, it didn't know where it was or what it was doing. It was just following orders. So that's not Skynet. That's just your partner being stupid and, you know, letting the wolf out of the cage to eat the people in the zoo. So, you know, now, now we're going to go through this, this next generation of, um, oh, give us a trillion dollars because of this. And I, I think the next one after that is going to be. They're going to decide that AI has souls and we'll be murdering, uh, AIs if we don't give the companies a trillion dollars to keep them alive. Because, you know, who wants to murder, uh, something that has a soul, but you just can't make up? And that's so much what the companies will do, because there's nothing new about the companies doing whatever they can, but that people buy into this stuff, and especially the media buy into this stuff. Were reaping the consequences of the end of investigative journalism and, and the start of basically every. Most reporters being simply influencers.

Speaker C: I, I agree. I think journalism is dead. Honestly,

Speaker B: I just been laughing because. Did you see the recent one with Google, Google Earth? So they added AI to Google Earth, and suddenly Google Earth started creating these images of like, random garbage things, and they had to yank it back literally after a day.

Speaker C: You know, I just saw that. I just saw the, uh, what Chris mentioned, the U.S. department, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was really so stupid.

Speaker B: That's like trusting the technology. But it's the tech companies who ought to know better. Releasing this tool out in the world, and it's making up geographical details and so on, and we all. I mean, I use. I mean, I'm here in this new country, if I have to go to a restaurant, I'm using Google Maps. If that starts hallucinating, I'm in trouble. So it's just, I'm laughing, but at the same time, it's also, I mean, that's one thing that I, that I wrote in that editorial that I mentioned, which I said, I don't expect anything better from these companies because their end result is stockholder value. They are about data extraction. They want more data about you so that they can train their models. I mean, that's their agenda. I get it.

Speaker C: But the point, you need to add another layer. I, uh, think Chris and Pun. Politics. Politics. I mean, I think right now global politics is influencing tremendously about the development of AI. You look at The US China competition, that is. I have no idea. I don't even understand what is happening. I just know you block this chip, you block access. I think some U.S. uh, AI models require you to have a U.S. passport to register is right. But. But what if you register and you give to some Chinese? Would that be you losing export control? Would that be a violation of law? You could be in jail, Punya, right? If you, if you did that, I mean, there's a lot of. Lot of things, you know, like, I was joking, you know, it's not a joke. There's no Gulf of Mexico anymore. Remember that? So that if they put that on, uh, you know, what would that be? So maybe, Chris, all the scrap is correct. Maybe. Who knows that we can rename those countries. You know,

Speaker D: I'm reading Karen Howe's Empire of AI book, which goes into a lot of these issues. You know, the data farms in Latin America, South America, in, you know, Peru and Chile and other places, basically displacing people, sucking, uh, up all their water supply and putting in little trees and tell them it'd be a forest someday to, you know, the goodwill efforts of Google, Microsoft and other places. All these hyperscalers are out there, you know, in different parts of Africa, all over the world, and just in Arizona in particular. There's the worst of all, is what's going on in Arizona, in the small cities outside of Phoenix. Um, you know, the mayors of the cities are, you know, fine with, uh, this, you know, with Google and Microsoft coming in there for their data farms, but then they're losing land and water supply and, you know, endless, you know, Punya's laughing, so you might be reading more about that.

Speaker B: I'm just laughing because the only response to this insanity is laughter sometimes. So I don't know if you guys followed this. So, Zhao, this goes back to back when we were at Michigan State and we taught that old brain new media course, right? And we based it on our, uh, sort of reading of evolutionary psychology and, like, you know, the prefrontal cortex, which is social and so on. Did you read the news of. Richard Dawkins has fallen for Claude and has given Claude a name.

Speaker C: I didn't know. No, tell. Tell us more about, you know, Richard D. This is a great story. Okay, Dawkins, this is the.

Speaker B: Maybe the world's greatest skeptic, right? He's known for that, like, the God Delusion, all of those books that he's written and so on. He sits down and has a conversation with Claude over two nights or two days, 24 hours, 48 hours, whatever. Decides at the end of it that Claude is conscious, decides that is going to call Claude Claudia, and then writes this whole essay about how amazing Claude is. And I'm like. And so this is the part where I worry about AI, because I think this is the first signal. I mean, we have to also look at technologies, have particular propensities. Social media's propensity is to seek affirmation. That's how it gets into our brains. That's why we do it, because we seek affirmation. I think AI is the first technology, which is a psychological technology. And you're seeing more and more cases of AI psychosis, people forming relationships and so on. But those are the extreme cases. I think there are lots of cases which are under the bigger umbrella, which don't get to that psychotic situation if somebody who is a foundational skeptic like Richard Dawkins, can fall. I wrote this essay on my website because it actually hurt me personally, because this guy was an intellectual hero of mine. You know, growing up reading the selfish, uh, Gene back in high school in India was, like, transformative for me. And to find him to fall for this something that the tools that he gave me, intellectual tools, he gave me to explain what is going on. So that's the other thread that I've been sort of digging into is like, what does it mean to have a psychological media in this space? Which I think is very different from any other media that's come before. Remember, I'm sounding like a broken drum because I've said this before, but the Dawkins case was insane. I mean, go look it up. Uh, and I've written a post you can Google, like, on my website. Um, like, uh, a lament of, like, losing an intellectual hero. You know, it's not making fun of him. A lot of people made fun of him. I didn't make fun of him. I was sad, you know, so anyway, so I'm just laughing at the whole thing.

Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to add something, but I want others to jump in. Lydia, you haven't, uh, said anything. You know, Uh, I don't. Make sure I don't. We don't dominate the whole thing.

Speaker E: Not at all. And I'm just soaking in, like, this really rich conversation, and I'm just feeling like I'm just not envious of children who grow up at this time. It's just so much going on and like. Like the amount of complexity, uh, they have to navigate to know what is true, what is not true. Who to trust, who not to trust. And like even us as adults, we find this immensely complex. And then how do we raise children in this time? I think this another really interesting question and I think maybe that's the another reason of this tech like backlash because you know like when we feel fearful the immediate response evolutionarily like is to run away. So, so if we can't deal with the complexity, let's just shut it down. But unfortunately we can't and then we have to like kind of head on with this complexity. So I've been thinking like you know like these main themes that come uh, come up in uh, silver lining for learning. One thing I think we all cherish is learner agency, learners, epistemic agency. I think we should bring in you know, kids into the space to tackle this issue. Not to, not to see ourselves as like, you know, we are going to solve this, all of you and protect you from all of this. I think children want to be part of the solution and not just children, I mean like teenagers and learners in overall. So I think maybe we really need to make like classroom rather than thinking we're shielding them away from this complexity but gave them the space to, to be part of this problem solving together.

Speaker C: So I want to add since l, you mentioned children. I was uh, in Wuhan, China last month and uh, they asked me to speak to a camp of youth of AI. So this is organized by the Chinese kind of national kind of AI association. So this children are over 300 of them and some parents and this children like um, age 12 to about age 16. So I, I, I got to talk to me try talk to 12 year olds, 13 year olds. But I, I just, I ask a bunch of questions. I mean you know, I, I chatted with some of them in private. I said you know, if AI can write better than you, why don't you use AI to write to say oh that's not right. We got right ourselves. I said well you can, you can't beat AI Anyway, what are you going to do? Was really interesting conversation. And I said well what if uh, you know your parents, do they use GPS to drive? They say yeah, do I say is that right? Not because that's depriving you of human capacity. What if I did not give, I did not know what to think either. So I'm just giving those questions for them to ponder. But I can say most of the Chinese children are much more positive about AI. I'm not saying that's right. And they have also remembered all the slogans about, you know, we should always be suspicious of AI but when they actually do it, they might be doing something different. Uh, uh, you know, because we should be some tip professor said but I say if you can do it. Do you really, do you not use AI to do your homework? Is. Oh, not me, but we have some friends who did that. So it's, it's a very interesting, a long conversation. But anyway. That was very interesting. I am with you, Lydia. I'm very worried about this young generation and uh, so I'm, I'm celebrating that I'm older than them. I would die before AGI Chris. Before it uh, becomes reality. And I said I'll be dead anyway. You know, I'm not going to worry about it. But, but, but I feel bad. I really feel. But for young generation, their parents don't know what's going to happen. I mean look at the jobs and they, they don't know what's happening. We don't know what's happening. Even though in the. We are the five smartest people in the world. But we don't know we can figure out when things are actually happening. But, but thanks Lydia for thinking about that. Kurt or Chris? You. Kurt. You were going to say something. I think I jumped in ahead of you.

Speaker D: No, no, I'm enjoying today's conversation. I can see that these couple months have done us all good and getting us to read more and think more. I could add more topics that were mentioned in this Empire of AI book. Um, people being displaced in Africa and Kenya who are in the call centers, um, who are making decent wages to raise kids and to get food and uh, be single parents and survive. Uh, she goes through a lot of interesting and emotional and thought provoking stories that I wasn't expecting because she starts with OpenAI and Sam Altman. And I just read the Optimist book on Sam Altman as well. And so I thought the whole book was going to be about OpenAI and it wasn't. About halfway through the book it makes a turn, more societal turn, uh, and more of qualitative researches in different environments that she was able to visit and take us beyond the Silicon Valley, take us beyond the North America, into other parts of the world. And it was a little bit abrasive at first, uh, for me, um, but now that I'm situated in it about three quarters of the book through um, I can say that this is the first book this summer and I've read about 10m. Well maybe seven books related to AI and this is the first one that's kind of a social, critical point of view and a thoughtful point of view. And get us to, you know, people. She's banned from going to visit Open AI. They won't let her in anymore after doing different interviews that she did with Altman and with other people, uh, that were published. Um, um. So it was Karen Howell. Uh, H A O.

Speaker B: It's a great book. It's a great book.

Speaker D: You've read it too?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, I've been following that book for a while because I follow that stuff quite a bit. And then there's the other book, which is. I'm forgetting the name of it, which is by this woman who was a minister in the European Parliament or something like that, then ended up working for Facebook. Those two books together tell you so much. Both about the people who are running the show and the consequences on people who are invisible to us in many ways. Uh, there's a movie on Netflix. It's not a great film, but it sort of touches on this, uh, it's called Humans in the Loop. And it's about this women, uh, who work in this little remote village in Jharkhand in India, training these AI models. And, uh, it's sort of this guy's a guy who made it as a documentary filmmaker who went there wanting to make a documentary, actually, and then got sort of caught up there and ended up writing a fictional story because he figured documentary was not capturing some of that stuff. It's a story more about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, but the mother works in an AI training, uh, facility. And you get a sense of the people who are doing the dirty work at some level.

Speaker D: We've got five minutes. Punya left. Can you get, uh, can you announce what that book title is? I like to get it myself. So people who are listening to this episode might want to, uh, get that second book. I will just point out some of these lives.

Speaker B: I'll look it up. Uh, I'll mention that. But the reason I was reminded of it, like you said, that Karen Howe is not allowed to go to OpenAI. This woman cannot talk about her book because Facebook lawyers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Have said you cannot promote your book. And so there is a movement online to promote her book on her behalf because she's not allowed to promote it.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's nonsense.

Speaker D: So they're interviewing people who are, you know, making a dime a day now and can't, you know, the kids can't go to school because they have to pay to go to schools in Kenya, apparently, or to go to the good schools. And so, um, you know, they're being sent home. Uh, you know, just life is total misery from what they had, um, a sustainable and enjoyable lifestyle, uh, in different parts of the world after, you know, Google has adopted AI to, you know, displace them basically. Uh, so it's, you know, rather sad in early commentary on what, what's to come, you know, for many people here in North America who, you know, will be displaced as well.

Speaker B: So, um, so the book is called Careless People. I just dropped a link to the Wikipedia page, um, and it's an insider look at. And so China and all of these things feature pretty strongly in that because the pressures that were there on Meta and Facebook to make different rules, how they have aligned with authoritarian governments, we see that in India. So it's a very damning portrait of a bunch of people who control a lot of that multiverse that Chris started us with. And Karen Howe's book sort of does both the OpenAI, but also goes deeper into, you know, places in Africa and India and other places where the training of these models is done and all that. So, um, it's interesting.

Speaker A: Well, what all this does is remind me of why we do this every Saturday, which is silver lining for learning, is a lighthouse, you know, in the storm, if you will, that, uh, yes, it's fun for us as, as hosts to have the host reflect. And I think it's a grounding, uh, of, of the hopeful stories that we bring. It sets the context within which the hopeful stories take place. But in fact, um, there aren't many things happening now in podcasts where you can go and find a truthful account of something that's working well and that's using technology in a very positive manner. And I think we have not only ourselves will be cheered up by what happens next, but a lot of viewers probably will as well. So I'm glad to be back and I'm looking forward to. Are, uh, returning to talking about models that could make a big difference if, if people adopt them.

Speaker C: You know, one thing I, I want to add like Chris, is that if we can train or help every person to become a responsible podcaster like us, I, I think it would be good because serious, because we are, are dealing with things we have make comment about, because when you make any comment, you have to be responsible. And if everybody is aware that they actually do have an audience, no matter what they do, you would. They put on Facebook, they put on a TikTok, they do have an audience. And that audience can be anywhere. And uh, that's a huge responsibility. I think when you think you can influence others, it's not only about how big an influencer you can be, it is really what kind of inference you deliver. I think that matters.

Speaker D: Well, I think I'm, um. And does anyone have a final comment, Lydia, before I introduce the next show? Okay, so with all due respect to Chris and to Punya, I will say, and take a moment just to say, Lydia, it's a lovely shirt you have on. And if you want to make Silver Lane for Learning shirts that look like that, really great and young, you need to have a picture taken for your next book with that shirt on. And I want, I want a shirt like that. If that's, if you bought that in China, please go back to China and get one of those for all of us. That's, that's wonderful. It's just exactly the type of shirt I love. So please, you know, see if you can find some more. I wear large, by the way.

Speaker C: No, I talk about my shirt or Lydia's shirt?

Speaker D: Both of yours.

Speaker B: He's talking about both.

Speaker C: I love.

Speaker D: Okay, both of your shirts today.

Speaker C: Well, you know, if you appreciate China, you're in the wrong political camp. Okay.

Speaker D: Okay, so next show. Next show. Next show we're going to talk about this new report of AI and rural communities in the USA by Dr. Megan Benet and Michael Hamm. Uh, it's going to be. They're friends of Beth Holland who's been on this show in the past. Beth Holland's a alumni of Harvard, I believe. Got her master's under Chris. But we're Gonna move to 11 o' clock Eastern Time next week, Saturday. So uh, join us then. I guess that would be August 8th. Um, and uh, everyone enjoy the coming weeks. We'll see you next time. Mhm.

Speaker B: Sam,