Artificial Intelligence, Human Agency and the Educational Leader

2021 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-238
Author(s):  
Monica Monin

Abstract Artificial intelligence technologies and data structures required for training have become more accessible in recent years and this has enabled artists to incorporate these technologies into their works to various ends. This paper is concerned with the ways in which present day artists are engaging with artificial intelligence, specifically material practices that endeavour to use these technologies and their potential non-human agencies as collaborators with differential objectives to commercial fields. The intentions behind artists’ use of artificial intelligence is varied. Many works, with the accelerating assimilation of artificial intelligence technologies into everyday life, follow a critical path. Such as attempting to unveil how artificial intelligence materially works and is embodied, or to critically work through the potential future adoptions of artificial intelligence technologies into everyday life. However, I diverge from unpacking the criticality of these works and instead follow the suggestion of Bruno Latour to consider their composition. As for Latour, critique implies the capacity to discover a ‘truer’ understanding of reality, whereas composition addresses immanence, how things come together and the emergence of experience. Central to this paper are works that seek to collaborate with artificial intelligence, and to use it to drift out of rather than to affirm or mimic human agency. This goes beyond techniques such as ‘style transfer’ which is seen to support and encode existing human biases or patterns in data. Collaboration with signifies a recognition of a wider field of what constitutes the activity of artistic composition beyond being a singularly human, or AI, act, where composition can be situated in a system. This paper will look at how this approach allows an artist to consider the emerging materiality of a system which they are composing, its resistances and potentials, and the possibilities afforded by the exchange between human and machine intentions in co-composition.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Diakopoulos

This chapter describes algorithmic decision-making (ADM) systems. ADM systems are tools that leverage an algorithmic process to arrive at some form of decision such as a scoring, ranking, classification, or association that may then drive further system action and behavior. Such systems could be said to exhibit artificial intelligence (AI) insofar as they contribute to decision-making tasks that might normally be undertaken by humans. However, it is important to underscore that ADM systems must be understood as composites of nonhuman actors woven together with human actors such as designers, data-creators, maintainers, and operators into complex sociotechnical assemblages. If the end goal is accountability, then transparency must serve to help locate the various positions of human agency and responsibility in these large and complex sociotechnical assemblages. Ultimately, it is people who must be held accountable for the behavior of algorithmic systems. The chapter then highlights what is needed to realistically implement algorithmic transparency in terms of what is disclosed and how and to whom transparency information is disclosed.


Author(s):  
Christopher Coker

What are humanity’s biological origins? What are the mechanisms, including culture, that continue to drive it? What is the history that has allowed it to evolve over time? And what are its functions – how does it survive and thrive by exploiting the features that define us as a species? These are the four questions of the ‘Tinbergen Method’ for explaining animal behavior, developed by the prize-winning Dutch ethologist Nico Tinbergen. The book contends that applying this method to war – which is unique to humans – can help us better understand why conflict is so resilient. The author explores these four questions in both past and present, and looks at our post – human future, assessing how far scientific advances in gene- editing, robotics and AI systems will de- center human agency. From the ancient Greeks to Artificial Intelligence (AI)  the book is an exploration of humankind’s propensity to warfare and its behavioral underpinnings. What it offers are new ways of thinking about our species’ unique and deadly preoccupation.


Author(s):  
Paula Boddington

This chapter focuses on the production of normative codes or standards in response to ethical issues concerning artificial intelligence (AI). Codes can be a useful part of ethics, but have limits and dangers. Standards can be especially useful in technical achievement of goals and exploring possibilities. However, codes of ethics are embedded within far wider questions of value—values which may not be explicitly included in the codes themselves, but which are assumed or referenced within wider societal values and norms within which the codes are nested. These values themselves can evolve. As such, when it comes to AI, people need to be prepared for even larger shifts in how they think of value. Moreover, given the power of AI to augment or replace human thought and human agency, people need to consider basic philosophical questions about human nature in order to assess how humans might fare in response to AI.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cox

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are likely to have a significant long-term impact on Higher Education (HE). The scope of this impact is hard to grasp partly because the literature is siloed, as well as the changing meaning of the concepts themselves. But developments are surrounded by controversies in terms of what is technically possible, what is practical to implement and what is desirable, pedagogically or for the good of society. Design fictions that vividly imagine future scenarios of AI or robotics in use offer a means both to explain and query the technological possibilities. The paper describes the development of eight such design fictions that capture the range of potential use of AI and robots in learning, administration and research. They prompt wider discussion by instantiating such issues as how they might enable teaching of high order skills or change staff roles, as well as exploring the impact on human agency and the nature of datafication.


Author(s):  
David L. Poole ◽  
Alan K. Mackworth

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document