Grading online courses

Grading is an issue for fully online courses. How do you know who really did the work? I guess you could give oral exams over Skype and demand photo ID. I hate that idea. The issues associated with oral exams are well known.

One approach to NLU with A.s.a. H.

We would like to have AIs that can read texts written in human languages and learn from them. We have given A.s.a. H. the concepts/vocabulary of the Toki Pona artificial language.* There is machine translation software that translates from English to Toki Pona and from Toki Pona to English. If this can be improved it might prove adequate for our purpose.

* See my blog of 1 Oct. 2015.

A cost of specialization

Valuable concepts learned by one specialist agent can be (and are) passed on to the next generation of agents in that specialty. Such concepts may not be useful to agents of another specialty.* They may even be harmful.

* In terms of actual physical agents I now have 40-50 small robots like those in my blog of 8 Jan. 2018.

Error correction, forgetting, and big data

As the environment changes the concepts we use to describe it must also change. We need to forget some concepts entirely.* (Things like spirits, ghosts, slaves?) In the absence of forgetting concepts are modified by averaging over lots of additional experiences.** I.e., big data.

* See my blog of 28 Oct. 2018.
** See for example my original paper on A.s.a. H, Trans. Kan. Acad. Sci., vol. 109, No. 3/4, 2006.

Contemplating online labs

With countries on lockdown over the coronavirus pandemic universities are trying to go entirely online. In thinking about online labs I ask myself the question: Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon who had learned surgery online? Doesn't a science curriculum require something that remains truly "hands on?"

Avoiding big data

Humans are not expected to digest anything like the amount of data that is regularly presented to artificial neural networks. So, if A.s.a. H. is to be anywhere near as intelligent as humans are it should not need to see big data either.

Unintelligent mechanical life

It is generally believed that there was a time when there was life on earth but no intelligent life. We are currently looking for such an ecosystem on Mars or elsewhere in space. Could we have an ecosystem for mechanical life without any artificial intelligences? Could such a system then support a communist style human utopia? (See my blog of  20 January 2020.)