
Growing up with AI - kawera
https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/growing-up-with-ai-how-can-families-play-and-learn-with-their-new-smart-toys-and-companions-fe9abcc6e152
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zawerf
I am really jealous of what the more creative/motivated kids growing up today
have access to.

When I was a teenager not long ago, I was mostly motivated by cheating in
games which got me learning basic scripting for keyboard/mouse macros which
then led me to increasingly complicated stuff for botting.

But there are so many more motivating factors for learning how to code today,
and they have never been more accessible. For example if you want porn of your
high school crush? You gotta train your own deepfake for that. You will start
off as a script kiddie but when you grow up you can tell people you've been
training neural networks since you were 12.

~~~
matte_black
Jesus, I would have hoped they would achieve more noble pursuits instead of
jumping straight into artificial child porn.

~~~
soared
Kids are not into noble pursuits.. I learned html/css and webhosting stuff by
making phishing sites of for my favorite video game.

~~~
matte_black
When I was younger _I_ was into noble pursuits. I loved to study programming
and would talk about ways I would want to help the world with my future
skills.

That's all gone now... At some point I started to get darker and more cynical,
and began to see technology not as a way to improve the world, but rather as a
way to take what is mine. It started as a few disappointments here and there,
then into short bouts of anger, then expanding into a constant simmering rage.
Don't know if I'll ever recover.

What happened...

------
Jun8
This is a great project but I can't help say it: I don't like Scratch (and
similar block-based languages). They are limited, in some cases by design
(e.g. opening files in Scratch) but usually by their very nature. I very much
prefer the safety wheel way of learning to ride a bike: use the real thing
with addons until you don't need them.

Maybe I'm wrong, any thoughts from people who worked with kids? I can give
anecdotal evidence from my son (had no problems with Python or CHIP-8) but
that's a sample size of 1.

~~~
jpk
I've worked with kids from elementary to high school age. One of the obstacles
for getting nearly any kid into coding is conditioning their response to
things like syntax errors and the other obtuse-looking things compilers and
interpreters like to spit out.

For example, a kid can spend an hour adding a tree of dialogue to their text-
based dungeon crawler, only to get a compilation error they've never seen
before. They might have forgotten a curly brace somewhere and I'll help them
find it, then they give it another go only to find out they forgot a semicolon
or misspelled a variable name. That series of events can be pretty
demoralizing, and it takes some coaching to get them through.

The above is obviously a teachable moment to test early and often, but the
point is kids often lose motivation in the face of errors they don't yet know
how to interpret. On the other hand, kids get really interested when they can
see the fruits of their labor come to life, which can happen without a lot of
friction in Scratch.

So to give students a taste for that success without the slog through syntax
errors and stuff, things like Scratch are fantastic. Especially for younger
kids where attention span and getting bored or disinterested come more easily.
We quickly move on to real languages, though, and the concepts they picked up
in Scratch are easily portable to Python or whatever else.

~~~
sandov
When I learned to program (I was ~13 years old) using Small Basic I had no
issues whatsoever with the errors the interpreter gave me, even though they
weren't even in my native language. It was pretty obvious to me that I had
committed a mistake at some point of my code.

For kids younger than that, maybe it's better to learn scratch, but I wouldn't
trade Small Basic, it's a great language to learn, the only bad thing is that
it's made by Microsoft and only runs on Windows.

~~~
jpk
Yeah, in my experience teenagers (especially those that are highly self-
motivated) can see stack traces and stuff as just another part of the puzzle.
It's the younger and less motivated kids that tend to get frustrated.

Edit: I'll also point out this:

> It was pretty obvious to me that I had committed a mistake at some point of
> my code.

How a student handles this is also often a sticking point. "Oh no, another
error, I'm bad at this, maybe this isn't for me." Is an attitude that I've had
to turn around. It goes a long way to convince a kid that it's actually the
computer's fault because it isn't smart enough to understand what you're
trying to tell it. So you have to be really specific in how you write to it.
Then suddenly error messages are informative clues on the way to making your
program work, rather than the computer scolding you for being a bad coder.

------
ThomPete
One of the things I love about voice interfaces the most is how they allow for
us to remove abstraction between what we want technology to do for us and how
we get it to do it.

The last major step we had for making technology more accessible and easy to
use for more people was the touch screen which made it possible for anyone to
understand what "click the button" or "drag the folder" means.

My kids speak with Google Home all the time. They get more and more creative
with what they ask it for.

Furthermore, you can interact with it at naturally at a dinner table or in a
meeting room without having to look down at a screen. It really just becomes a
natural no-obstructive participant of the group of people which I think is
going to be it's biggest

Whatever weirdness my generation feel around speaking to tech it will be
totally normalized by the coming generations.

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organicmultiloc
Most of these articles have the same narrative, summarized as: We have seen
how dangerous and important technology is with elections, now it's more
important than ever we educate everyone about AI.

As if the two concepts follow or are related at all, it seems more like a
extremely convenient way to pivot the conversation to this new area of hype in
technology while not actually owning up to anything.

How about we talk about anti-trust law, privacy, and busting up Facebook and
Google instead?

~~~
billybolton
I want something to new to come up and shatter Facebook, Google etc. We need
more internet companies, and right now Facebook & Google reek with a vile
stench. They lack creativity and innovation. They are the IBM of the current
generation.

~~~
stochastic_monk
As far as fundamental research goes, they are both currently doing a lot of
the very best machine learning research.

What they are as companies is an entirely different matter, in which case I
would not doubt your comparison.

Take, for example, the decreasing quality in user experience in map apps over
the last few years. Mining our data is apparently much more valuable than
doing a simple job better.

~~~
baxtr
Apple maps got way better! Granted, coming from a difficult starting point...

~~~
stochastic_monk
It strikes me as not a coincidence that they are also the company in the big
few which most highly values its users' privacy. Still not great, but it's
something.

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GuiA
One point that is not raised or discussed, which I think is important, is that
these learning platforms are not “the real thing”. They’re just artificial
environments with building blocks designed for making toy projects, but no
engineer would ever use them to build something of significance.

This is not to take away from the work - I’m a big fan of Cynthia Breazal’s
group and the work her graduate students have done over the years. But it
would be nice to see effort put into removing the artificial separations
between user/programmer, or learner/professional. An apprentice carpenter uses
real hammers and table saws, an apprentice baker uses real flour and sugar and
ovens, so why are apprentice programmers using the plastic playset/ez bake
oven equivalent of Tensorflow?

(and if the answer is just “because tensorflow is too hard for a 7 year old”,
then how can we get somewhere where there is something as powerful, if not
more so, than Tensorflow, while also being accessible to 7 year olds?)

~~~
Retric
An apprentice carpenter often does not use 'real' power tools. Nail guns for
example are significantly more expensive and dangerous than a hammer, but also
more specialized.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Students routinely are given machines/equipment/tools that is massive overkill
for the task they are being asked to do so that it can be assured that their
effort is spent learning instead of fighting their way around the limitations
of their tools/equipment.

~~~
Retric
An apprentice is not really just students in that they are paid reasonably
well. That pay is based on the idea their going to get a job done reasonably
efficiently while not breaking stuff or getting someone hurt.

Put another way, you generally don't give interns root access to production
servers.

------
dalore
I would love a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion for
my daughter.

