Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and CREATE Lab  Collaboration

The Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the CREATE Lab have a long-standing partnership and collaboration. From Hear Me to the Fluency Project and more, we have worked, learned, and grown together.

AI and Humanity Study Group Sessions

The AI and Humanity Study Group is a cross-role, cross-community study group exploring the impact and implications of artificial intelligence and new technologies for education and for the communities we serve. Although we didn’t necessarily planning to do a deep technical dive, we “played” with the ideas, trying to determine implications for preservice and practicing teachers and their learners.

What is artificial intelligence and how is it affecting our lives? Are we living in concert or competition with machines? What do educators in a rapidly changing world need to know about “explicit and unintended consequences of new technology on personal, organizational, and cultural levels”?

You can find and contribute to our annotated resource list here.

​Session #1: What is AI? What might it mean for educators?

Pre-Readings
What is AI? Stop pretending you really know what AI is and read this instead
How is AI showing up in our lives? What happens when your child's friend is an AI toy that talks back?
During the first AI and Humanity Study Group Session, the following questions emerged:
  • What does it mean to be human?
  • Are we training machines to be like humans or humans to be like machines, or both?
  • Can a machine be considered intelligent?
  • Does everything need to be efficient?
    • What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of efficiency?
  • How do we diffuse education about AI in an equitable and accessible way?
  • How do you temper the AI hype with AI education?
  • How can we inform policy when we don’t understand the system?
  • Is it more problematic if we treat a human as a robot or a robot as a human?
    • Do we need robots so we have something to treat as non-human or less than human?
  • Are machines slaves to us or are we also subservient to machines?
  • Who makes decisions about AI systems?
  • Who is being left out of big data?
  • Can we reverse the status quo in AI?​

Session #2: Singularities - Human or Robot or Both?

The pre-reading for session #2 is an excerpt from Feed by M.T. Anderson. We're also hoping you can watch at least one of these two Black Mirror episodes as pre-viewings for this session: Be Right Back (Season 2 - Episode 1) and San Junipero (Season 3 - Episode 4).

During the second AI and Humanity Study Group Session, the following questions emerged:
  • Is death the ultimate human problem that needs to be solved?
  • Where is the line between using AI to escape death (which seems unethical) and using it to escape the process of dying (which seems compassionate)?
  • How are implicit and explicit biases compounded along the path toward the singularity?
  • Can AI have emotional intelligence?
  • Who gets to decide what the norm is for emotional intelligence, and have we already begun to “program” our students into the singularity by teaching and monitoring SEL in schools?
  • How can it be that AI has gone so far down a path with so little public debate or ethical consideration?
  • How might we avoid going down the same path with AI that many technology tools have gone down in the classroom, or, expressed differently, how  do we teach the ethical domain of ANY technology without being caught in the trappings of teaching the tool for its own sake?

Session #3: Race, Gender, Equity, and Artificial Intelligence

The pre-readings for session #3 are:

1. Frederick Douglass’s Fight Against Scientific Racism
2. Female AI — Sci-Fi Vs. Reality

During the third AI and Humanity Study Group Session, the following questions emerged:
  • What is machine empathy?
    • With other machines?
    • With people?
    • How does this emerge in interactions between people and machines?
      • Person-to-Person interactions vs. Person-to-Machine interactions
  • What are new names for human-computer relationships/roles?
  • Why is it important to assign roles to the AI/Robots/Technology that we wish to humanize?
  • What is the relationship between the user and AI, like Alexa?
  • Remaking new rules for society: Do they need to be only human focused (+ benefit humans or punish them)?

Session #4: Economics of Artificial Intelligence

The pre-readings for session #4 are:
1. Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
2. How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually

During the fourth AI and Humanity Study Group Session, the following questions emerged:
  • What is the difference between a business (or a corporation) and a community member?
  • If a robot develops empathy has it become human?
  • Is reflection something even possible by/from a machine?
  • Can a machine be programmed to have feelings?
  • How can the AI field incorporate diverse needs, voices and perspectives into the design (e.g. accents in the AI’s voice, appreciation of all the names of children - rather than only standard/common names)?

Session #5: Education and Artificial Intelligence

The pre-readings for session #5 are:
1. Kids’ brains may hold the secret to building better AI
2. Artificial Intelligence: What Educators Need to Know