Last year, Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel suggested that we in Australia should become “human custodians”. This would mean being leaders in technological development, ethics, and human rights.
A recent report from the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) brought together experts from scientific and technical fields as well as the humanities, arts and social sciences to examine key issues arising from artificial intelligence.
A similar vision drives Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. The institute brings together researchers from the humanities, education, law, medicine, business and STEM to study and develop “human-centred” AI technologies.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford similarly investigates “big-picture questions” to ensure “a long and flourishing future for humanity”.
The IT sector is also wrestling with the ethical issues raised by rapid technological advancement. Microsoft’s Brad Smith and Harry Shum wrote in their 2018 book The Future Computed that one of their “most important conclusions” was that the humanities and social sciences have a crucial role to play in confronting the challenges raised by AI
Without training in ethics, human rights and social justice, the people who develop the technologies that will shape our future could make poor decisions.
As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), we must be vigilant to keep our classes relevant to the rapidly changing workplace and the emerging digital aspects of life in the 2020s.
deployment of 5G delivery to mobile computing
Certainly, 5G provides a huge upgrade in bandwidth, enabling better streaming of video and gaming. However, it is the low latency of 5G that enables the most powerful potential for distance learning. VR, AR and XR could not smoothly function in the 4G environment because of the lag in images and responses caused by a latency rate of 50 milliseconds (ms). The new 5G technologies drop that latency rate to 5 ms or less, which produces responses and images that our brains perceive as seamlessly instant.
Lots of words will be typed about how it compares to the real thing. Here, let me save it for you, it doesn’t. Real life is analog, far sharper, far more interesting, and far more fun than anything you can experience in VR. Even for decades to come.
VR is more accessible than real life and, soon, the numbers of attendees will dwarf those who can attend in real life (somewhere around 70,000 attended last year). It is more interactive (and you can navigate it much faster). It is more comfortable for sure. Are these tradeoffs worth not going?
It is really about how the world now works, and reflective of ideas that first gained ground in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, the French theorist Jean Baudrillard contended that the difference between actuality and mere simulation had long since broken down, a notion encapsulated in the postmodern concept of “hyperreality”.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his book Intimations of Postmodernity, summarised Baudrillard’s portrayal of a culture in which “images represent nothing but themselves, information does not inform, [and] desires turn into their own objectives”.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning,” wrote Baudrillard in 1981.
Discussion in my faculty meeting this morning: academic advisor shared that even though students previously said they wanted synchronous courses (because they were more like f2f courses) they now are dropping synchronous in favor of asynchronous. I find this hard to believe. Is anyone actually experiencing this?
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