Scott MacLeod's Anthropology of Information Technology & Counterculture
To a global, virtual, free, open, {future degree- & credit-granting}, multilingual University & School for the developing world and everyone, as well as loving bliss ~ scottmacleod.com
Nice to meet and talk with you at Stanford Law CodeX yesterday and thanks for your presentation, Steven. I also blogged before your presentation about it here - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2018/09/sequoia-sempervirens-reaching-out-to.html - with some further ideas about where World University and School is heading, and even re ~200 online law schools in countries' official languages. Steven Stewart was the actual presenter on Thursday at Stanford Law CodeX, and a computer scientist based in Canada:
[codex_group_meetings] TODAY! CodeX Group Mtg (9/20 @1.30p): CourtQuant; QuantStamp - SLS N112 (or via Zoom)
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This talk from Thursday, September 20th should appear here:
CodeX is a multidisciplinary laboratory operated by Stanford University in association with affiliated organizations from industry, government, and academia. The staff of the Center includes a core of full-time employees, together with faculty and students from Stanford and professionals from affiliated organizations.
The primary mission of the Center is to explore ways in which information technology can be used to enhance the quality and efficiency of our legal system while decreasing its cost. Our goal is "legal technology" that empowers all parties in our legal system, not the legal profession per se. Such technology should help affected individuals find, understand, and comply with regulations; it should help enforcement organizations monitor and/or enforce compliance; and it should help regulatory bodies analyze proposed regulations for cost, overlap, inconsistency, etc.
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WUaS is also exploring the idea of facilitating an Universal Basic Income when we code our upcoming wiki re our "front end" Mediawiki, together with our backend "Wikidata" for all 7097 living languages and then for all 7.5 billion people, as a cryptocurrency with blockchain ledger - possibly with the backing of ~200 countries' central banks (but possibly not, after listening to Neha) ... but staying in communication with MIT's thinking in these regards (Neha and Joi Ito for too). While this would help an enormous number of people, it's also an entrepreneurial opportunity.
WUaS seeks to offer online Bachelor, Ph.D., Law, Medical Degrees, as well as I.B. high school diplomas in all ~200 countries' official languages, but while we're CC-4 MIT OCW-centric for Bachelor and Ph.D. degrees first in English based on its ~2400 courses, MIT doesn't have a law school or medical school, so hopefully WUaS will emerge out of Stanford for law and medical OCW, again in all ~200 countries' official languages, with lots of smart contract potential, for example.
WUaS seeks to become the MIT / Harvard / Stanford / Oxbridge of the internet, and again in all ~200 countries' official and main languages, for free-to-students' CC-4 MIT OCW-centric online university and high school degrees.
Ok, CAWS! (the wiki-like co-authoring system, not the other one) -- it's been 11 years since the initial study, and MIT Lab folks have been puttering around some since. https://core.ac.uk/display/1507391
Anyone know about a usable CAWS interface / platform / app in 2018? Would be perfect for our research team.. other wiki-like alternatives for co-authored welcomed, please include links so we can check them out!
"Collaborative learning is known as an effective learning method and various different kindsof technologies have been developed to support and facilitate collaborative learning. Many ofthese technologies are used to support the functional activities of a group of learners byenabling students to communicate, share documents and materials, track the work of thegroup, or distribute and allocate tasks."
Many thanks,Scot
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Check out Miraheze Mediawiki -
Miraheze now has a new blog for announcing technical developements and other Miraheze-related news! Check out https://t.co/N1McrlNaHn
I'm also an appreciator of Google classroom for collaborative learning - as well as the many group video conference technologies out there.
And the "Threads" ' software in the HarvardX / edX / JuryX course is designed around collaborative learning in the helpful edX platform with other possible related technologies.
And I may be facilitating ScratchEd drag and drop programming language MeetUps at Stanford in the future. And Scratch is also great for collaborative coding.
Reem, author of the paper, just started an interesting thread in the Wikimedia Libraries' email list. I didn't realize he was in London.
Thanks for the paper and question,
Scott
From: Scott MacLeod
To: Scot Campbell ; Koh Fujinaga ; Ants Fraser Fujinaga ; Scott MacLeod
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2018 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: looking for a few good CAWS
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Thank you very much, Scott. I'll check it out!
Best,Scot
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Scott MacLeod<sgkmacleod@worlduniversityandschool.org>
Wed, Sep 19, 9:44 AM (2 days ago)
to scpromedia, Scott, Koh, Ants
Thanks, Scot, as well for your email.
In some ways collaborative learning is about people talking together - dialogue with specific questions (eg what is 'citizenship' in ancient Greece re Reed College's conference method in Hum 110, or this Socratic dialogue's question - as I see it. So group video conferencing or HarvardX JuryX's "Threads" web chat software or ScratchEd's group post-it approaches for learning coding with this drag and drop programming language as CAWS all can facilitate this.
Cheers, Scott
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Scot Campbell
Wed, Sep 19, 12:39 PM (2 days ago)
to me, Scott, Koh, Ants
Good calls there, I will check out Threads and ScratchEd too.
Was it difficult to launch your own full wiki platform (last year I think?). Curious what some of the technical/collaboration/communications challenges were, and might continue to be, in guiding your team in that start-up effort.
Best,
Scot
* Someone over in Romania, thanks to Wikidata's Product Manager Lydia Pintscher in Berlin, was very helpful in setting WUaS's new Mediawiki up. I think it could be easy, but folks would have to read the online guidelines.
WUaS has two wings - A) non-profit 501 c 3 CC-4 MIT OCW-centric in 5 languages with Wikidata in 300 languages, and B) for-profit general stock company planned in all ~200 countries' official languages - and is planning for all of Wikimedia's ~300 languages initially, and has yet to join our "front end" in Miraheze Mediawiki - e.g. - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/The_College_at_World_University_and_School - with our "back end" in Wikidata/Wikibase, A) for students and B) e.g. for inventory in a bookstore, and re machine translation for our 7,097 living languages' academic press with machine translation.
This will be a good CAWS platform, to be sure ... :)
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Excellent! What are some of the challenges you anticipate could crop up as you integrate the front end and back end pieces?
Scot
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Coding for an universal basic income for peoples and learners and wiki teachers in all 7,097 living languages, and for all 7.5 billion people ... and re identity questions is a biggie ...
MIT's Neha Narula, Joi Ito - and Drummond Reed (re identity qs - all on Twitter here - https://twitter.com/WUaSPress) ?
- CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best STEM-centric CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This transmission and any attachments are intended only for the use of the individual or entity to which they are addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, or exempt from disclosure under applicable federal or state laws. If the reader of this transmission is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify me immediately by email or telephone.
* I see, yes. Is there a CMS function here as well, for storing active contents such as films and books to share?
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Scot Campbell
Wed, Sep 19, 3:49 PM (2 days ago)
to me, Scott, Koh, Ants
Found this also, new draft Creative Computing Curriculum Guide 3.0 (geared to teaching young learners, draft attached)
Seeking to facilitate wiki adding all open libraries in all 7100 living languages - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Library_Resources - so am waiting on Wikidata / Wikimedia coding developments in some of these regards. Wikidata/Wikibase is in about 300 languages, with communities, so that leaves about 6,800 living languages, and Wikidata is a good language and coding base for this.... 'populate this list' ...
Thanks for the ScratchEd Meetups pdf, it really fits what we are doing now!
Cheers,
Scot
* Great, Scot,
Am exploring facilitating monthly ScratchEd Meetups out of the Stanford GSE. Maybe we could explore teaming up in these regards for both A) Scratch drag and drop programming and B) Lego robotics - WeDo2 and Mindstorms EV3 - with programming?
Yes, I've known about those European resources, they were among my initial finds. Nice letter from Reed, do you know of any prototypes that might model those values?
-Scot
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I think that WUaS can develop these Reed educational goals, for example, in Google group video Hangouts, and eventually INTO a realistic virtual earth (so 10 person group video into avatar bots in Google StreetView/ Maps/ Earth etc. with Time Slider as classrooms and STEM field sites), and emerging out of, for example, this wiki platform and the academic and open-ended subjects here - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Subjects ...
I'll construe culture here as discourse or customs, and learning as gaining knowledge socially and by communication (with language or gesture mostly for humans, for ex.).
I'll further construe a robot as a physical "machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer" (Apple dictionary 2007) ... and extend this to avatar robots, so digital or virtual machines (e.g. think World of Warcraft, Pokemon, OpenSim and SL avatars).
Where this robot discourse and emerging customs include:
language,
coding,
memes (cultural replicating units - e.g. read Dawkins 1976),
nascent concept and research into the idea of a 'biological brain,'
symbols,
stories / narratives,
the educational systems and the students learning to code the machine learning of these robots teaching robots,
teaching science?,
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And re
ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy,
which I'll define here again in this blog as "doing anthropology as interpretive understandings and representations of what people do, as a wiki - group co-authoring system and platform - with collaborative virtual world building, where both physical and avatar robots, too could learn to do this, and be taught by other robots.
'social learning' is central ... and culture has a foundation where new information is gained or acquired socially and exchanged ...
“Without that ability to learn by observing others and interacting with them, we would not have culture, as evolutionary biologists Kevin Laland and Will Hoppitt argue: “Culture is based on information that is socially learned and transmitted.” “
“And once the robot knows how to physically interact with objects, it can begin to learn more complex tasks. For this, a human programmer uses the C-LEARN software to move the extremities of a virtual representation of the robot and thus demonstrate to its real equivalent how to execute each task. Unlike previous methods for teaching machines, C-LEARN allows the programmer to only have to demonstrate each action once.”
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But operant conditioning for non-human species, or schedules of reinforcement re one important behaviorism (BF Skinner) form of learning isn't what's happening here.
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... perhaps re the article's suggestion of learning being a process of "matching," more than memes, or imitation, is happening here in the gaining of knowledge, and indeed re article's "intuition of learning" something that psychologists might have studied as "Aha" moments (from the psychology academic literature from as early as the 1980s) in humans might be being codified robotically and with the C-Learn demonstration-learning software in new ways.
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Prof Hennessy, (and Larry who is chair of the Board at World Univ and Sch)
It was really great to see you recently at Stanford Law. (I always somehow feel honored and re your excellent guidance of Stanford for 16 years, and now as the Chair of Alphabet/Google). Re Directors and talking with the panel and legal questions, it was interesting to learn of the varieties of LINGUISTIC INDEPENDENCE there are too re a hypothetical Delaware Supreme Court ruling on this.
I heard a great Stanford talk yesterday by Professor and Sculptor/Artist Renmin Zhu - https://events.stanford.edu/events/798/79848/ - and am wondering whether and in what ways it might be possible to explore creating professorial and "ecological restoration" robots (where his "Art Saves Ecology" talk was about "ecological restoration" - and he's made amazing life-size sculptures over some 40 years) out of something like Google Poly and from designing these also in a realistic virtual earth (think Google Street View with time slider, Maps, Earth, Sketchup, Waymo re converting cars into robots, etc.) - and also designing these with Lego in Brick Street View (which is a virtual world coded by Swede Einar Öberg combining Lego Bricks with Google Street View - https://experiments.withgoogle.com/brick-street-view) for actual-virtual, physical-digital correspondence, - and as products for the Japanese and Chinese markets to begin. This would perhaps also dovetail with an US and Google Robot strategy re developing robots in all countries. (Would like to avoid Terracotta Warrior Robots from any of ~200 countries, as I see it).
How will and has the market for robots that learn with AI developed thus far, and re exporting to other countries - in all ~200 nation states?
In what ways could the WUaS, the US and Google create professorial and "ecological restoration" robots that learn as a category, but not warrior robots, and also inform international law about guidelines for export, re faculty in WUaS's planned online Law Schools - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/World_University_Law_School - in all ~200 countries' official languages?
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And to what degree could hypothetical professorial, art and "ecological restoration" robots, in conjunction with Prof. Zhu Renmin, be produced in China and the US, such that they learn re this MIT video (https://youtu.be/QQplTBx6rV0 embedded in the "The Era of Robot Culture" article), kind of by imitation - the "meme" idea here - (re a culture of robot learning, coded for by peoples and identities), in a way that wouldn't include becoming weapons or warriors, limited by law, and other kinds of coding?
Would this be akin to US and international regulations limiting sales of arms across international borders? EG Country X can't sell these fighter plane vehicles, or their designs, but this can sell these transportation vehicles and their designs, as a proxy and history for selling robots that learn with machine learning across international borders?
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Nothing says #backtoschool like introducing your students to their class pet. Can’t have a real pet in the classroom? Why not design engineer & code your own?! https://bit.ly/2xeQaA6 #LimitlesswithLEGO
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A skillful Lego roboticist at this stage could probably A) code a Lego robot to push a gurney with a Lego patient away from their Lego family members, and B) cut the Lego patient open.
And in doing this, this same skillful Lego roboticist could probably code one Lego robot to teach another Lego robot to do the same surgical procedures.
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How to plan, and code for, in the era of robot culture, that no repurposing of these hypothetical surgeon robots into weapons could occur, for example, and by hacking or innovating?
I'd think this might have parallels with the licensing and laws pertaining to, for example, Chinese and American human surgeons, working in either country ... such that there are both norms, penalties and histories - informing discourse and customs - where they don't become weapons, for example.
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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts the internet will split in two by 2028 — and one part will be led by China
Former Google CEO predicts the internet will split in two by 2028 — and one part will be led by China https://t.co/zZMHCEyrbC
So if part of this discourse or these customs involve a distributed open network neutral internet - as a single network, and involving unicode too - what happens if Eric Schmidt's prediction takes form - and especially re teaching and learning about the developing knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence?
Libraries would be key here in many languages, and accessible online.
And student international travel to great universities in other countries would be key here too.
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It's also possible robots may eventually teach robots to create a PHYSICAL (so digitized paper, coins, bank cards, etc.) single Cryptocurrency with blockchain ledger - backed by ~200 central banks, post-dollar as international currency and post-EURO as regional currency for 19 out of 28 nation states - and that the doing of this would inform the "era of robot culture" - and machine learning (which will be central to robot culture) - in very far-reaching ways.
This would be a kind of Olympics' model of ~200 nation states wanting to play together informing "the era of robot culture" and learning.
...
and especially re taxation in all 200 countries in an era of robotic learning ...
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See, too, Neha Narula’s recent Tweets about cryptocurrency and blockchain -
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"Somehow, the computer scientists have gotten their hands on money and the world might never be the same." I did an intro podcast with the very fun @seanmcarroll:
"Somehow, the computer scientists have gotten their hands on money and the world might never be the same." I did an intro podcast with the very fun @seanmcarroll: https://t.co/IdaHq2cHWO
Designing professorial & "ecological restoration" robots with Lego in Brick Street View (a virtual world coded by Swede Einar Öberg combining Lego Bricks with Google StreetView https://experiments.withgoogle.com/brick-street-view for #ActualVirtual & #PhysicalDigital correspondence https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2018/09/heteractis-magnifica-culture-of.html ~
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So would it be possible to design and produce "Professors of Surgery," "Artist Professors of Zen Buddhism," "Professors of Art" and "Ecological Restoration" ROBOTS, and develop them in China and the USA for Chinese, Japanese and American markets, and as a way even to teach and grow knowledge at World University and School, since these (Lego?) robots could be developing into Professors.
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So a culture of robots teaching/learning from other robots could involve developing from this MIT CSAIL robotic learning C-LEARN software in a realistic virtual earth (think Google StreetView+), and importantly with eventually developing realistic avatar bots of real people (e.g. with a film-to-3D app), and at the cellular and atomic levels too (and for tele-robotic surgery) to study comparatively learning in actual humans, learning in digital humans, learning among physical robots and learning among virtual robots - and with doing brain research about this as well, as this unfolds/demonstrations - for documentation and publishing even - with the TIME SLIDER aspect of Google StreetView where "Pegman," its avatar bot, will grow {~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg ~}. Cool ... And developing the C-LEARN software in Google Street View and potentially with Lego robotics with Brick Street View for WUaS matriculated students would all be part of this. More research is needed.
I'm an anthropologist who also finds fascinating the internet, ideas, poetry, sociology, art, science, philosophy, history, music, love and life ~ as well as the anthropology of information technology & counterculture :) -
scottmacleod.com
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