{"id":1137,"date":"2020-11-23T03:32:59","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T03:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.educationperfect.com\/?post_type=article&p=1137"},"modified":"2024-09-19T14:49:41","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T04:49:41","slug":"how-ai-internet-and-the-attention-economy-are-changing-education","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.educationperfect.com\/article\/how-ai-internet-and-the-attention-economy-are-changing-education\/","title":{"rendered":"How A.I, Internet and The Attention Economy are Changing Education."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u2015\u00a0Pink Floyd<\/p>\n

I have a vivid memory of being driven by my father to an industrial estate for my very first driving lesson. I felt so nervous about the strange machine I was sitting in and couldn’t imagine taking the wheel in my sweaty adolescent hands. I had no confidence that I could command this unimaginably complex system of gears, wires, cogs and combustion. It felt so powerful and so dangerous.<\/p>\n

Thinking about how to grapple with modern information technology and seemingly intelligent machines reminds me of that first driving experience. There appears to have been a recent shift in how we perceive the internet and artificial intelligence. Some sobering realities have surfaced around how our internet participation can be harnessed and utilised. The documentary,\u00a0The Great Hack, is one of many sobering illustrations of how important it is to raise mindfulness and awareness around machine intelligence and data usage and warns of an ever-increasing need to prepare youth to interact with technology critically.\u00a0If feels hard to imagine that we can take control of such things.<\/p>\n

While we are wondering about so-called, \u2018artificial\u2019 intelligence, our own, natural intelligence, is being harvested every single day. How we learn is first dictated by what we want to learn. What we want to learn, is often influenced by external factors and driving forces we may or may not always be aware of. It appears that a new task of the educator is to raise awareness and foster reaction skills to these forces which increasingly operate within\u00a0The Attention Economy.<\/p>\n

Elon Musk described this as being a result of Limbic Resonance. The human energy we feed into our information networks about our fears, loves, hates, likes and dislikes, fuels movements, policies, trends and talking points and in return; increases our engagement. In other words, the way our moral, philosophical and biological processes work in response to the chaos of social media and modern media communications, is also what becomes represented and generated by the complex algorithms which sort through the noise. This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is our inner mind, leaping from our skulls and co-mingling with other minds. It is the collected, collated and collective intelligence of the internet.<\/p>\n

The philosophical implications of this aside, we must accept that we are already cyborgs. The devices we carry which connect us to this network are now more prevalent than your shoes in terms of daily utility. Do you bring your phone to the bathroom?<\/p>\n

Our students are born into this cybernetic world. They are raised experiencing devices which obey their commands and take it for granted that all factual information is easily accessible without the use of their natural recall ability. Like it or not, many of your students do not feel it is necessary to know or remember much of the information you may feel essential to be hard-wired into your brain. The difficult reality we face when adapting to the educational requirements of our students is that this technology isn\u2019t going away. Requiring students to memorise anything is just becoming increasingly unreasonable and perhaps inevitably futile. In addition to this, they are likely more susceptible than us to the manipulation of the cyber network(s).<\/p>\n

Research conducted in 2019 on the effects of the internet on human cognition have uncovered some troubling conclusions which have deep implications for how we educate. Published on May 2019 in the World Psychiatry Journal,\u00a0The \u201conline brain\u201d: how the Internet may be changing our cognition\u00a0explores the consequences of internet information reliance. A section on transactive memory suggests that:<\/p>\n

\u201c…the Internet is becoming a \u201csupernormal stimulus\u201d for transactive memory-making all other options for cognitive offloading (including books, friends, community) become redundant, as they are outcompeted by the novel capabilities for external information storage and retrieval made possible by the Internet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This unnerving observation can perhaps be more easily understood anecdotally by considering the current nature of casual debates. How often have you been involved in a heated discussion, argument or debate where the phrase \u2018look it up\u2019 has been used? How frequently do you, or your conversation acquaintances, refer to something that you \u2018read online\u2019? It is becoming the norm to halt a discussion, while multiple parties google the necessary information to verify one\u2019s stance or \u2018fact check\u2019 a statement. This may seem like an improvement in transparency, efficiency and truth keeping, but it raises some important questions:<\/p>\n