Every day people and AIs are being compared, their character—personas—and abilities.
There’s a much longer running Wolfram tradition. Comparing people with animals, sock puppets or desk toys. Which animal has the expression of which person you know? Which desk toy best represents the person sitting opposite in a meeting? Or which crocheted animal—a hobby of my daughter’s, prompted by my colleague Lianne’s vast constructed collection?
Read MoreOver the last few days, I’ve been asked how ChatGPT (particularly allied to Wolfram|Alpha) will affect education, how it relates to “computational literacy for all” and the computer-based mathematics education that my book The Math(s) Fix maps out. Actually, Wolfram is involved in Edtech in many other ways too; it will be great seeing how the full range of powerful integrations emerge that can deliver better education.
In this post, I want to zoom out to put this new technology in context hopefully to help to suggest how we might think about changes it should and shouldn’t cause.
Read MoreI'm usually going on about "computation" or in education, "maths". But I've come to appreciate just how much of computation's utility in modern life centres around data (rather than, say, algebraic modelling).
Clearly data science is a major, growing and vital field—one that's relatively new in its current incarnation. It's been born and is driven forward by new technology, our abilities to collect, store, transmit and "process" ever larger quantities of data.
But "processing" has often failed to elucidate what's important in the data. We need answers, not just analytics, we need decisions not just big data.
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