Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: While schools debate what to teach students about powerful new A.I. tools, tech giants, universities and nonprofits are intervening with free lessons,” writes the NY Times reports in Hey, Alexa, What Should Students Learn About AI?
Senior Amazon executive Rohit Prasad visited a school in Boston called STEM Academy to observe an Amazon-sponsored AI lesson using Alexa, according to the article, “And he assured the Dearborn students there would soon be millions of new jobs in A.I.”
“We need to create the talent for the next generation,” Mr. Prasad, the head scientist for Alexa, told the class. “So we are educating about A.I. at the earliest, grass-roots level.”
A few miles away, Sally Kornbluth, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was delivering a more sobering message about A.I. to students from local schools who had gathered at Boston’s Kennedy Library complex for a workshop on A.I. risks and regulation. “Because A.I. is such a powerful new technology, in order for it to work well in society, it really needs some rules,” Dr. Kornbluth said. “We have to make sure that what it doesn’t do is cause harm.”
The same-day events — one encouraging work in artificial intelligence and the other cautioning against deploying the technology too hastily — mirrored the larger debate currently raging in the United States over the promise and potential peril of A.I. Both student workshops were organized by an M.I.T. initiative on “responsible A.I.” whose donors include Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
The article emphasizes that schools face a big question: Should they teach AI programming and other AI-related skills employers will seek? “Or should students learn to anticipate and mitigate A.I. harms?”
Last week, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million to settle federal charges that it had indefinitely kept children’s voice recordings, violating the federal online children’s privacy law. The company said it disputed the charges and denied that it had violated the law. The company noted that customers could review and delete their Alexa voice recordings. But the one-hour Amazon-led workshop did not touch on the company’s data practices.
