Technology-Using Professors Group News
"'Crowdsourcing,' the notion of using the wisdom of the crowd for sites like Wikipedia, could be making its way into academe as a grading method that holds students more accountable.
"A professor at Duke University plans to test just that this fall, when she leaves the evaluation of class assignments up to her students, using crowdsourcing to make students responsible for grading each other.
GR: Don't mistake this for an attempt to reduce the professor's workload -- there are sound pedagogical reasons why this is a great idea! Of course there are dangers to be avoided, as with any sort of peer review or peer feedback system. I also suspect the work required of the educator to implement the system would not be insignificant...
Monday, August 3, 2009
Want Responsible Robotics? Start With Responsible Humans
Want Responsible Robotics? Start With Responsible Humans: "When the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov penned the “Three Laws of Responsible Robotics,” he forever changed the way humans think about artificial intelligence, and inspired generations of engineers to take up robotics.
In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots."
"But while evidence suggests that Asimov thought long and hard about his laws when he wrote them, Woods believes that the author did not intend for engineers to create robots that followed those laws to the letter.
“Go back to the original context of the stories,” Woods said, referring to Asimov’s I, Robot among others. “He’s using the three laws as a literary device. The plot is driven by the gaps in the laws -- the situations in which the laws break down. For those laws to be meaningful, robots have to possess a degree of social intelligence and moral intelligence, and Asimov examines what would happen when that intelligence isn’t there.”
In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots."
"But while evidence suggests that Asimov thought long and hard about his laws when he wrote them, Woods believes that the author did not intend for engineers to create robots that followed those laws to the letter.
“Go back to the original context of the stories,” Woods said, referring to Asimov’s I, Robot among others. “He’s using the three laws as a literary device. The plot is driven by the gaps in the laws -- the situations in which the laws break down. For those laws to be meaningful, robots have to possess a degree of social intelligence and moral intelligence, and Asimov examines what would happen when that intelligence isn’t there.”
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