“Linguistic Skills in Schools”: A Salon for The Societal Effects by Artificial Intelligence
In the summer of 1956, a group of academics, scientists, and engineers gathered for two months on the Dartmouth College campus at Hanover, New Hampshire to, in the words of attendee Dr. John McCarthy, "concentrate on a problem of devising a way of programming a calculator to form concepts and to form generalizations..." The four organizers, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, Nathaniel Rochester, and Marvin Minsky, were titans in their fields of Computer Science, Information Theory, and Cybernetics. What resulted would later be coined by Dr.
McCarthy as "Artificial Intelligence:" the beginnings of a field that now includes many types of activities that are associated with Human Intelligence: Learning, Reasoning, Perception, and Decision-Making.
Now we are inundated with the revolutionary software concept of Large Language Models. And yet, the public feels at wit's end with the results: how can something deemed as revolutionary as electricity cause such friction and degradation of quality of life in the sphere of the personal life?
Join us for an evening of conversations around a collection of over 200 published articles on the development of Artificial Intelligence to speak authoritatively on the terms of this new phase of technology. Each event in the series will focus discussion round fields of life pursuits to allow deeper reflection on how we live with this new tool.
“Linguistic Skills in Schools” is the topic of the second installment (“EDUCATION”) because school is the opportunity for a child to learn the tools to live a life in society. Beyond defining social bonds in their community, it is the time for a soon-to-be adult become civically prepared and pursue the employment opportunities they want. Google Gemini integration into the G-Suite for schools is certainly providing “A.I.-First” education, yet are we providing enough oversight into how this software is used for/on developing minds? Like a graphing calculator is for geometric, a students must still master long-hand division and algebra; what do we lose when A.I. selects our words for us?
Light refreshments of snacks and canned drinks will be provided.
Join us on October 9th at 5:30p for the second installment: EDUCATION—“Linguistic Skills in Schools.”
Admission is $30 per person, $10 for veterans, seniors, and students. All events proceeds to go the Hart Cluett Museum.
Other Series Dates:
October 23: Creativity—"Art and Algorithmic Production"
November 30: The Environment—"Data Centers and Our Finite Resources."
December 11: Community—"Belonging and Technological Connections"