Artificial intelligence author kicks off Friends of the Library nonfiction lecture series; Naples Daily News, January 7, 2022

Vicky Bowles, Naples Daily News; Artificial intelligence author kicks off Friends of the Library nonfiction lecture series

"Over the past few decades, a bunch of smart guys built artificial intelligence systems that have had deep impact on our everyday lives. But do they — and their billion-dollar companies — have the human intelligence to keep artificial intelligence safe and ethical?

Questions like this are part of the history and overview of artificial intelligence in Cade Metz’s book “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World.”

On Monday, Jan. 17, Metz, a technology correspondent for The New York Times and former senior writer for Wired magazine, is the first speaker in the 2022 Nonfiction Author Series, sponsored by the nonprofit Friends of the Library of Collier County, which raises money for public library programs and resources...

"NDN: This was such a wonderful sentence early on in your book: “As an undergraduate at Harvard (in the 1940s), using over three thousand vacuum tubes and a few parts from an old B-52 bomber, (Marvin) Minsky built what may have been the first neural network.” Is that kind of amateur, garage-built science still possible, given the speed of innovation now and the billions of dollars that are thrown at development?

CM: It certainly is. It happens all the time, inside universities and out. But in the AI field, this has been eclipsed by the work at giant companies like Google and Facebook. That is one of the major threads in my book: academia struggling to keep up with the rapid rate of progress in the tech industry. It is a real problem. So much of the talent is moving into industry, leaving the cupboard bare at universities. Who will teach the next generation? Who will keep the big tech companies in check? 

NDN: I was amused to see that Google and DeepMind built a team “dedicated to what they called ‘AI safety,’ an effort to ensure that the lab’s technologies did no harm.” My question is, who defines harm within this race to monetize new technologies? Isn’t, for example, the staggering amount of electrical power used to run these systems harmful to the globe?

CM: I am glad you were amused. These companies say we should trust them to ensure AI "safety" and "ethics," but the reality is that safety and ethics are in the eye of the beholder. They can shape these terms to mean whatever they like. Many of the AI researchers at the heart of my book are genuinely concerned about how AI will be misused — how it will cause harm — but when they get inside these large companies, they find that their views clash with the economic aims of these tech giants."

The Death of a Fake Twitter Personality Reveals the Systemic Rot of Academia; Medium, August 11, 2020

Asher Elbein, Medium; The Death of a Fake Twitter Personality Reveals the Systemic Rot of Academia

"The creation of such an identity — as multiple Native scholars and writers have pointed out — isn’t just deeply disrespectful to the small community of Natives in academia, and it doesn’t just play into a gross American tradition of appropriation. It’s also coming at a time when Native people are being killed by Covid-19 at 19 times the rate of all other populations combined in New Mexico alone. Before McLaughlin was unmasked, Duarte says, she had been avoiding social media, which for those with family in the Four Corners region of the Southwest felt like a rolling obituary. She and Washuta both recalled hearing the news that a Native colleague had died and instantly wondering if it was someone they knew. Killing off a fake Native account through Covid-19 registers as doubly cruel.

“The behavior of this individual Dr. McLaughlin eclipses the actual work of Native colleagues,” Duarte says, as well as the struggles of LGTBQ Native people who themselves suffer disproportionate rates of violence. “It sort of feels like being rendered invisible many times over.”"

Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing; Inside Higher Ed, November 5, 2018

Hans De Wit and Phillip G. Altbach and Betty Leask, Inside Higher Ed; Addressing the Crisis in Academic Publishing

[Kip Currier: Important reading and a much-needed perspective to challenge the status quo!

I just recently was expressing aspects of this article to an academic colleague: For too long the dominant view of what constitutes "an academic" has been too parochial and prescriptive.

The academy should and must expand its notions of teaching, research, and service, in order to be more truly inclusive and acknowledge diverse kinds of knowledge and humans extant in our world.]

"We must find ways to ensure that equal respect, recognition and reward is given to excellence in teaching, research and service by institutional leaders, governments, publishers, university ranking and accreditation schemes."

‘Unwanted Advances’ Tackles Sexual Politics in Academia; New York Times, April 5, 2017

Jennifer Senior, New York Times; 

‘Unwanted Advances’ Tackles Sexual Politics in Academia

"Among the educators who recently found herself at the treacherous intersection of free speech and sensitivity politics is Laura Kipnis, a film professor, cultural critic and dedicated provocateur at Northwestern University. Responding to a new campus directive that prevented professors from dating undergraduates, she wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education in February of 2015 entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Within days of publication, she was brought up on Title IX complaints for creating a “hostile environment.” She spent 72 days in the public stockade for it, until the university cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Kipnis has now written a book, “Unwanted Advances,” about feminism, relationship statecraft and the shadow world of Title IX investigations. It is invigorating and irritating, astute and facile, rigorous and flippant, fair-minded and score-settling, practical and hyperbolic, and maybe a dozen other neurotically contradictory things. Above all else, though, “Unwanted Advances” is necessary. Argue with the author, by all means. But few people have taken on the excesses of university culture with the brio that Kipnis has. Her anger gives her argument the energy of a live cable."

Feds Target 'Predatory' Publishers; Inside Higher Ed, 8/29/16

Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed; Feds Target 'Predatory' Publishers:

"The Federal Trade Commission on Friday filed a complaint against the academic journal publisher OMICS Group and two of its subsidiaries, saying the publisher deceives scholars and misrepresents the editorial rigor of its journals.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, marks the first time the FTC has gone after what are often known as “predatory” publishers. Such publishers exploit open-access publishing as a way to charge steep fees to researchers who believe their work will be printed in legitimate journals, when in fact the journals may publish anyone who pays and lack even a basic peer-review process."

The New Cheating Economy; Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/28/16

Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education; The New Cheating Economy:

"Business is booming right under colleges’ noses. It’s not just papers and assignments anymore. Now it’s the whole course."

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Think back to the early days of MOOCs. Professors at Stanford and Harvard and other places were suddenly teaching really big classes, free. Hundreds of thousands of students at once were in those courses. It was an unprecedented giveaway of what had traditionally been the most expensive education in the world.

Back then, I met several students who were binging on the courses the way you might binge-watch a season of your favorite show on Netflix. They took as many courses as they possibly could, powering through and finishing as many as 30 courses in a year. When I asked why they were in such a hurry, the most popular reason was that they thought it was all too good to last. As one of those binging students told me, "I’m just afraid this whole thing might end soon." Surely, universities would change their mind about this, or the start-ups working with colleges might lock things up.

Fast forward to last month, when Coursera did something that stirred up all of those concerns again. On June 30 the company deleted hundreds of its earliest courses, as part of a shift to a new software platform. Reaction, as you might expect, was negative on social media and blogs. One programmer called it cultural vandalism...

Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues."

The Future Of Open Access: Why Has Academia Not Embraced The Internet Revolution?; Forbes, 4/29/16

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; The Future Of Open Access: Why Has Academia Not Embraced The Internet Revolution? :

"One of the most remarkable aspects of the story of the web’s evolution is that the collective output of the world’s universities has remained largely absent from the open online world, even as most other forms of information have shifted to some form of open online access. In the case of encyclopedias, entirely new forms of collaborative knowledge documentation like Wikipedia have emerged, while journalism has shifted to free advertising-supported distribution and even music and videos are increasingly legally available through ad-supported streaming services or affordable licensed download services.

Academic papers, the lifeblood of the scholarly world of academia, have resisted this transition. To those outside academia it might be surprising that most universities don’t publish all of their books, papers, presentations and course materials on their websites for the world to access...

Yesterday Science published a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Sci-Hub, one of the most infamous academic pirating sites, which provides free access to more than 50 million illegally acquired papers. One of the most fascinating findings is that its download traffic comes not exclusively from the developing world for which journal subscriptions are often claimed to be inaccessible, but also extensively from major Western universities which likely have legal subscriptions to the journals already. One of the reasons for this, the article claims, is the cumbersome and difficult-to-use web portals that university libraries provide to their holdings, making it incredibly difficult to locate a paper even if the university has a legal subscription to the journal. Having spent more than a decade and a half in academia at multiple institutions from public to private, I can personally attest to just how difficult it can be to navigate library portal systems to locate a particular paper...

As the drumbeat of open access continues to grow, the fierce debate over the future of how academic research is published and distributed will only rage louder. In parallel, as the trend towards open access expands to data sharing and replication, the pressure to change how academia does business will reach a breaking point where change will become inevitable. In the end, it is a fascinating commentary that the world of academia, from which the modern web sprung, has been among the most resistant to change and one of the last to embrace the internet revolution."

Mizzou, Yale and Free Speech; New York Times, 11/11/15

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; Mizzou, Yale and Free Speech:

"More broadly, academia — especially the social sciences — undermines itself by a tilt to the left. We should cherish all kinds of diversity, including the presence of conservatives to infuriate us liberals and make us uncomfortable. Education is about stretching muscles, and that’s painful in the gym and in the lecture hall...

My favorite philosopher, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, argued that there was a deep human yearning to find the One Great Truth. In fact, he said, that’s a dead end: Our fate is to struggle with a “plurality of values,” with competing truths, with trying to reconcile what may well be irreconcilable.

That’s unsatisfying. It’s complicated. It’s also life."