Episode 112: Dawn of the AI With Steven Toy, Chief Executive Officer at Memrise
Steve is a tech and EdTech journeyman. He has been involved with adult literacy since the start of his professional career and used his interest in technology and AI tools to help teams accomplish their goals in a myriad of industries ranging from music, publishing, online travel, tax, mobile apps, and of course education.
Presently he is using AI to help people learn a language and develop better habits in the area of nutrition.
What Is Memrise and Membot?
The best place to start is to know the fundamental pedagogy which is “We think the best way to learn a language is to go to a country and survive.” The reason this is the best way to learn the language is that we are forced to hear it in different contexts, with different accents, at different speeds, and we have to decode it. We then have to start using that language early on in the learning process. Most of us do not want to do it because we are afraid of looking stupid. It is that fear of judgment that stops us in our tracks. However, when you are in a country trying to communicate, you cannot avoid using that language. The three buckets are to learn some words, immerse yourself in hearing them, and then try to use the language early on. That is the 3 legs of the pedagogical stool Memrise calls to learn, immerse, and communicate. The learning part has been done for quite some time from being able to help people words with algorithms that do space repetition. There was a lack of ability to get enough content and enough interesting content that they knew was fit for purpose for each individual learner, based on the words they know. With the AI tools presented, we are ingesting content out there in the world, breaking it down into words and phrases. The learners then compare that to the words that they have learned. Content is now being filtered out in the works based on the words the users know. The users might have a different 200 words early on in their journey and Memrise we can present their content, relevant to the 200 words they have, and relevant to their interests.
Problems with AI being used wrongly
To start with the lowest level of education, all of the ways people can cheat have mostly been addressed already. The plagiarism software has not been caught up yet but it will. If we go up a level of extraction to say “Okay, what might people do with these things?”, then we have the issue of malevolent humans with a new tool. The answer is not going to be to do something with the tools, it is going to be how so we all come to an agreement about how these tools are allowed to be used. OF that step is not done, then we are never going to figure out how to regulate the tool. It is not okay for recommendation engines to take somebody who asked a question and have it promote things that are verifiably untrue. Until we can agree on that level and that is the level we have to agree, we will never get ahead of the issue and root cause. AI is a tool that can allow bad people to do bad things faster but AI is not in itself malevolent.
The Future of AI and Where It Is Headed
Ai is going into the future way after then we thought. There are very, very few people in the world who thought we were going to be where we are right now one year ago so this explosion that we are sitting in the midst of is telling us it is coming faster and faster. AI is going to push us back in the direction of finding places and people and organizations and institutions that we can trust. We're gonna bottom out with so much misinformation and disinformation that life just becomes unmanageable. We would wipe it and start to look at ways of trusting information and institutions and science and things that have been proven, and that is gonna take us in a direction that we’re not currently headed. We are currently in a direction where people have less faith in institutions and less faith in fundamental facts. These things, even if by virtue of making the situation worse for a little while, are going to drive us to collectively figure out how to solve things. All of this is going to accelerate us to a point where we're going to cooperate more, learn how to trust each other more, learn how to put the things that are necessary for trust in places, and leave us all better off.
Contact Steven Toy
Website: http://www.stevenctoy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenctoy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sctoy
Learn more about Memrise:
Website: https://www.memrise.com/press
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/memrise/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/memrise
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/memrise/
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Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.
N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.
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