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Why some U.S. school districts are adopting a 4-day school week

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Many school districts are switching over to a four day week. Is this a good idea?

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Love them or hate them, standardized tests play a major role in education today. Whether they are achievement tests measuring subject-specific knowledge or aptitude tests measuring scholastic readiness, the goal of the assessments is to provide a yardstick to evaluate student performance across state standards.

But the thing is, there are both proponents and opposers out there on standardized testing, and the practice has ignited a debate-probably even in your own breakroom-about the effectiveness of these tests and how well they measure student achievement. Both sides are vocal about the pros and cons of standardized testing and the high stakes increasingly riding on the outcome. Low scores can prevent a student from advancing to the next grade or lead to school closings and teacher dismissals while high scores factor into tenure decisions and continued federal funding.

Here's a look at the arguments educators and psychologists are making to determine whether or not we should be conducting standardized testing, and the lasting effect they have on our students.

The history of standardized testing

First, let's start with some background. Standardized testing has been around for a long time with a storied history of evaluating university prospects, job candidates, and other forms of aptitude and intelligence.

Starting in Imperial China, standardized testing used to be used in a rudimentary form to determine one's eligibility for positions in the government of the ruling class. In the early 20 th century, Alfred Binet developed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which later became the infamous IQ test. Throughout World War I, the military used Army Mental Tests to determine the best positions for new recruits. And in 1936, IBM developed a system of automating test scores by scanning bubbled-in answers.

The SAT that we know today was first introduced in 1926 by the College Board. It contained 315 questions covering areas like vocabulary, analogies, and math proficiency, fairly similar to what modern students have to do.

The No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core State Standards Initiative, passed in the last couple of decades, are prominent examples of test-based accountability policies.

Arguments in favor of standardized testing

Proponents say these tests measure student achievement, ensure teachers and schools are accountable to taxpayers and provide consistency.

Measure of achievement for college readiness

For many students, standardized testing provides them with a valuable outlet to set themselves apart from their high school. Tests like the SAT and the ACT give students the chance to show that, even if their high school didn't offer a large number of Advanced Placement courses or extracurricular activities, they're still bright and motivated students with a lot of potential. On the other hand, students enrolled in highly competitive high schools get the chance to demonstrate that they are intelligent and qualified, even if being surrounded by a pool of similarly talented students prevents them from being in the top 10 percent of their class.

Consistent assessment

In the classroom, every teacher grades differently, with different standards for evaluation. When all admissions committees can see is the overall GPAs, nuances between teachers with lower and higher expectations are lost. As such, standardized testing acts as somewhat of an equalizing force, providing colleges with the only relatively objective data point with which to compare prospective students.

Teacher evaluation

Several states have tied student performance to teacher evaluation. The National Council on Teacher Quality reported in January 2014 that "about a third of all states had adopted evaluation policies requiring teacher evaluations to include objective measures of student achievement as a signiﬁcant or preponderant criterion in teacher evaluations."

But the report noted, "Over the past five years, 37 states have improved their overall teacher policy grades by at least one full grade level because of significant reform, particularly in the areas of teacher evaluation and related teacher effectiveness policies."

In addition, the latest report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that students in grades 4 and 8 taught by teachers with a master's education scored higher on standardized math and reading assessments than students whose teachers hold only a bachelor's degree.

Arguments against standardized testing practices

Opponents say the tests promote a "teaching to the test" curriculum and undermine innovation and critical thinking and are not the best evidence of student performance.

Teaching to the test

With so much riding on the results, teachers often feel compelled to teach to the tests. In some schools, less time is being spent on the sciences, social studies, and the arts to prepare students to take the tests in math, reading and writing.

Some observers have found that teaching informed by the test focuses the curriculum on essential content and skills, eliminates activities that don't produce learning gains, and motivates teachers and students to exert more effort.

Questions and answers

Standardized tests feature multiple-choice or open-ended questions; some tests combine both. Because answers are scored by machine, multiple-choice tests generally have high reliability. Open-ended questions ask students to write a short answer or an extended response.

Critics say multiple-choice tests are too simplistic, while advocates note that technology improvements feature items that demand more critical thinking before choosing a response. Open-ended questions allow students to display knowledge and apply critical thinking skills, but most require human readers.

Too many tests?

Even though the public supports testing and accountability, many worry that there is excessive testing, burdening teachers and students. In addition to the high-stakes assessments, some districts are administering benchmark assessments periodically to monitor the effect of instruction before the state tests are administered in the spring.

A 2006 Center on Education Policy report found that teaching a curriculum aligned to state standards and using test data as feedback produced higher scores than emphasizing test-taking skills.

Other performance measurements

Test scores attract most of the attention because they are quantifiable and allow comparisons. But other measures can show how well schools are performing. These indicators include:

High school graduation rates and the number of dropouts.

Enrollments in advanced placement and other college prep courses.

College acceptance rates, including scholarships.

College remediation rates for recent high school graduates.

Although standardized tests make it easy to compare school performance, they are just one of many measures that should be used to evaluate student ability and readiness for college and career. What do you think? Join us on Facebook to talk more about this topic.

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Do Standardized Tests Accurately Show Students' Abilities? | Resilient Educator

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Love them or hate them, standardized tests play a major role in education today. Whether they are achievement tests measuring subject-specific knowledge or aptitude tests measuring scholastic readiness, the goal of the assessments is to provide a yardstick to evaluate student performance across state standards.

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Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like. -Anton Chekhov

The disagreement this summer between two currently-reigning U.S. tech titans has brought new visibility to the debate about possible risks of Artificial Intelligence. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been warning since 2014 about the doomsday potential of runaway AI. Along the way, Musk's views have been challenged by many but the debate went mainstream when another billionaire celebrity CEO, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took issue with what he believes to be Musk's alarmist view.

This tiff of the titans is worth noting because of the high stakes and because their opposing views represent the most common schism over AI. Is it a controllable force for good, or a potentially uncontrollable force that, unless managed properly-or even shut down-places humanity at an unreasonably high risk of doom?

Of course, this debate isn't new. Many intellectual luminaries have been deeply interested in this issue for decades, and most people are familiar with these opposing views. In 1942, Isaac Asimov published his first set of rules of robotics designed to avert Science Fiction AI rebellions. And possible dangers of AI have been explored and contrasted in Science Fiction blockbuster films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator and Matrix series, Ex Machina, and many others.

Unfortunately, these depictions of AI are excessively adversarial and simplistically anthropocentric. The diametrically opposed views of Zuckerberg and Musk-at least those portrayed by media-are like the Coca-Cola and Pepsi, or mainstream republican and democrat ends of the ideological spectrum, leaving out the tastiest and most satisfying among possible or even likely outcomes.

Before considering alternatives, here is a bit of relevant context for thinking about the prevailing views, starting with the anti-AI side.

On this side, there are many AI doomsday scenarios, but the most common ones come in two basic flavors:

The Terminator scenario. AI perceives humans as a threat and launches countermeasures. The Terminator scenario might take place surreptitiously at first, with AI only launching an open offensive when it has grown powerful enough for an essentially zero-risk takeover.

The Divergence scenario. AI goals diverge from and compete with human goals. Vastly more capable and rapidly evolving AI simply pursues its goals and starves humanity of the resources needed for sustainability. This AI doesn't view humans adversarially, it just doesn't care about their welfare.

The primary driver of doomsday scenarios is self-improving intelligence, absent some rule(s) or control(s) that ensures friendliness to humans. Timescales for creating measurable improvements in AI might become short relative to humans, allowing rapidly improving AI to leave slowly improving humanity in its evolutionary wake. The first theoretical description for this "intelligence explosion" was published by I.J. Good:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."

The Terminator scenario is the one that most of us know best because it lends itself to wonderfully dramatic fiction and blockbuster films featuring awesome computer graphics.

The Divergence scenario sounds less threatening until you consider what life would be like if all key resources for staying alive disappeared. It is less well known but experts in potential AI threats take it very seriously.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Mark Zuckerberg and AI proponents believe increasingly powerful AI is important to creating the best future. They don't necessarily view AI as a risk-free endeavor, but they believe that, over the long-haul, costs will be outweighed by benefits.

AI proponents currently have some major practical advantages over opponents. The main advantage is that smarter AI provides huge economic benefits-estimated by McKinsey and Company at $50 trillion in just the next eight years. Plus, proponents can point to actual progress. Although the current generation of AI is probably not on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, we do have self-driving cars; more precise medical diagnoses and better medical care; and countless hidden examples that are deeply embedded in the fabric of our lives.

A main problem for any pro- or anti-AI position is the inherent unpredictability of a self-improving intelligence. Our ability to control an increasingly intelligent AI in order to avert possible doomsday outcomes is often called the " AI control problem."

While I don't think either side of this AI debate is unreasonable, there should be a third major position in this discussion (Estep and Hoekstra). This third position is that in any scenario-even those in which AI might pose a serious long-term threat-unaided human, natural intelligence (NI) also poses an unpredictable yet proven and serious threat to any possible bright future. Paradoxically, one of the frequently implied motivations for the Terminator scenario is that AI will be an astute judge of this human threat (to sustainability and the future generally), and will act defensively to neutralize it.

The reason we should always consider this perspective in the AI discussion is simple: human history (including the present) is unfortunately punctuated with atrocities marked by human complicity ranging from impotence and inaction to nefarious design and intentional harm. Wars, genocides, slavery, famines, dust bowls, extinctions and other large-scale crimes and calamities are the work of well-intentioned people-often groups of passionate ideologues who believed even during the extremes of their misdeeds that they are the good guys.

Whether or not some of these people were good or bad certainly is debatable, but this is not debatable: In many cases, things didn't turn out as they imagined or planned. The same is true across human endeavors and predictions of the future, and science has given us insights as to why.

The evolutionary theoretic framework for understanding human cognitive limits and self-deception established by Robert Trivers, and filled in with many empirical details by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others (reviewed by Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow) helps frame the debate about AI. This recent science allows us to follow through on Chekhov's advice-to help us see what we humans are really like.

One reason we typically debate the risks of developing AI absent a discussion of the dangers of NI is that we have no choice; we are stuck with NI. It is the devil we know, while superintelligent AI is something we don't yet know. Our focus on the hypothetical dangers of AI absent consideration of the proven dangers of NI might be considered a classic case of ambiguity aversion, a willingness to accept a characterized cost instead of an unknown cost, even if the latter might be far less or even zero.

And even though we don't know what AI will be like, we think of it as the other, not part of our tribe; and we reasonably fear that it might similarly view us the same way. Because AI is so clearly not us, we would rather take our chances and bet on humanity-flaws and all-rather than put our future in the virtual hands of an alien being. We can accept a future replete with pain and suffering if it is a human future. No amount of harmony and bliss is sufficient to accept an AI future without humans.

But what if superintelligent AI is our only hope for creating a bright future? In other words, instead of AI being the means of our doom, we might be doomed without it. Let's call this the AI Guardian scenario.

Even though NI is not likely to cause a cataclysmic doomsday for humanity, as in the Terminator scenario, it does pose a serious and ongoing threat. And now that we are armed with a much more clear scientific understanding of the human mind and how it evolved, we know that certain flaws of human perception, veracity, and cognition aren't a result of evolutionary neglect, but result instead from uglier aspects of how evolution actually works. There is good evidence to suggest that certain human traits and behaviors like violence, deception, sexual coercion and assault, superstition and more have been favored by natural selection (see Pinker, The Blank Slate).

With such issues in mind, we should be very wary of preventing AI from taking preventive action against human intentions or actions. After all, we have yet to demonstrate that we are rationally managing our present-never mind the future. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was the most polarized in memory, and both sides seem to agree that many on the other side-in either case, a large fraction of the electorate-voted irrationally. My purpose in mentioning this is not to start a partisan political debate here, it is to show that in matters of serious consequence, and on very large scales, many of us already seem to accept that a sizable fraction of the population behaves irrationally.

There is a near-universal acceptance that investing in better AI will produce great economic benefits, though this is rarely discussed, except in terms of education. The same is true for NI. But we should not limit NI improvement strategies to education, but instead consider the full range of options that we typically consider when envisioning improvements to AI-in other words, engineering. If we improve human behavior and decision making, any doomsday scenario becomes less likely.

To plan and implement the best solution to this critical problem, we should reconsider our underlying discriminatory anthropocentricity; our us versus them perspective at the root of our fears of AI. A self-improving AI might view us in the way we view our own parents and mentors, but being far more capable it might provide assistance far beyond our current means to help ourselves. It might design and administer therapies or upgrades for us.

Potentially the most promising approach to preventing an AI doomsday is to continue to merge NI and AI, to become one-I. There might be no better way to ensure that an advanced intelligence will view and treat us as one of its own than to gradually eliminate the barrier between us. This approach might be the one point of agreement among the apparently divergent views of Musk, Zuckerberg, and myself. Musk's company Neuralink is working on a concept he calls " neural lace," a brain-computer interface technology, and Facebook too is reportedly working on their own brain-computer interface tech.

Conceptually radical, possible breakthrough technologies such as these are typically pitched with great conservatism, complete with an extremely narrow lens through which we are asked to view the future. Facebook suggests that their technology is being designed simply to enable people to control a cursor or keyboard with their minds. At the other end of the spectrum, Musk has envisioned much broader and radical uses of a merged intelligence. He openly admits that a main reason he has joined those of us who advocate developing AI along a path of merger and interdependency with human NI, is in large part to solve the AI control problem.

The merger of humans and AI might have this great advantage, which has rational appeal, but it might be a path we take for other, more emotional reasons. Consider our subtly implicit yet increasing desire for oneness with our tech. Our devices have become extensions of ourselves in a way they have never been before. They already stir our passions in complex ways. We feel awe and exhilaration when they perform at their peak. We feel separation anxiety when we are apart. We feel betrayal when they let us down at a critical moment. Many of us at times choose to engage with them rather than with other people, our own kind. As we routinely cradle, gaze at, and press our fingers and faces to these extensions of ourselves, there is no good reason to think we aren't feeling the initial hints of the desire to erase, completely and irreversibly, the dividing line between us and them.

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The Simplistic Debate Over Artificial Intelligence

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Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like. -Anton Chekhov The disagreement this summer between two currently-reigning U.S. tech titans has brought new visibility to the debate about possible risks of Artificial Intelligence. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been warning since 2014 about the doomsday potential of runaway AI.

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Should Cell Phones Be Allowed in School? | American University

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Cell phone use is increasing, and policy makers, researchers and teachers are trying to decide if cell phones should be allowed in school. Learn more.

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" Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before - as long as we manage to keep the technology beneficial."

Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute

What is AI?

From SIRI to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with human-like characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google's search algorithms to IBM's Watson to autonomous weapons.

Artificial intelligence today is properly known as narrow AI (or weak AI), in that it is designed to perform a narrow task (e.g. only facial recognition or only internet searches or only driving a car). However, the long-term goal of many researchers is to create general AI (AGI or strong AI). While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task.

Why research AI safety?

In the near term, the goal of keeping AI's impact on society beneficial motivates research in many areas, from economics and law to technical topics such as verification, validity, security and control. Whereas it may be little more than a minor nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid. Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. As pointed out by I.J. Good in 1965, designing smarter AI systems is itself a cognitive task. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind. By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a superintelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes superintelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of superintelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

How can AI be dangerous?

Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect AI to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent. Instead, when considering how AI might become a risk, experts think two scenarios most likely:

1. The AI is programmed to do something devastating: Autonomous weapons are artificial intelligence systems that are programmed to kill. In the hands of the wrong person, these weapons could easily cause mass casualties. Moreover, an AI arms race could inadvertently lead to an AI war that also results in mass casualties. To avoid being thwarted by the enemy, these weapons would be designed to be extremely difficult to simply "turn off," so humans could plausibly lose control of such a situation. This risk is one that's present even with narrow AI, but grows as levels of AI intelligence and autonomy increase.

2. The AI is programmed to do something beneficial, but it develops a destructive method for achieving its goal: This can happen whenever we fail to fully align the AI's goals with ours, which is strikingly difficult. If you ask an obedient intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for. If a superintelligent system is tasked with a ambitious geoengineering project, it might wreak havoc with our ecosystem as a side effect, and view human attempts to stop it as a threat to be met.

As these examples illustrate, the concern about advanced AI isn't malevolence but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we have a problem. You're probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you're in charge of a hydroelectric green energy project and there's an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. A key goal of AI safety research is to never place humanity in the position of those ants.

Why the recent interest in AI safety

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many other big names in science and technology have recently expressed concern in the media and via open letters about the risks posed by AI, joined by many leading AI researchers. Why is the subject suddenly in the headlines?

The idea that the quest for strong AI would ultimately succeed was long thought of as science fiction, centuries or more away. However, thanks to recent breakthroughs, many AI milestones, which experts viewed as decades away merely five years ago, have now been reached, making many experts take seriously the possibility of superintelligence in our lifetime. While some experts still guess that human-level AI is centuries away, most AI researches at the 2015 Puerto Rico Conference guessed that it would happen before 2060. Since it may take decades to complete the required safety research, it is prudent to start it now.

Because AI has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can't use past technological developments as much of a basis because we've never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us. The best example of what we could face may be our own evolution. People now control the planet, not because we're the strongest, fastest or biggest, but because we're the smartest. If we're no longer the smartest, are we assured to remain in control?

FLI's position is that our civilization will flourish as long as we win the race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we manage it. In the case of AI technology, FLI's position is that the best way to win that race is not to impede the former, but to accelerate the latter, by supporting AI safety research.

The Top Myths About Advanced AI

A captivating conversation is taking place about the future of artificial intelligence and what it will/should mean for humanity. There are fascinating controversies where the world's leading experts disagree, such as: AI's future impact on the job market; if/when human-level AI will be developed; whether this will lead to an intelligence explosion; and whether this is something we should welcome or fear. But there are also many examples of of boring pseudo-controversies caused by people misunderstanding and talking past each other. To help ourselves focus on the interesting controversies and open questions -- and not on the misunderstandings -- let's clear up some of the most common myths.

Timeline Myths

The first myth regards the timeline: how long will it take until machines greatly supersede human-level intelligence? A common misconception is that we know the answer with great certainty.

One popular myth is that we know we'll get superhuman AI this century. In fact, history is full of technological over-hyping. Where are those fusion power plants and flying cars we were promised we'd have by now? AI has also been repeatedly over-hyped in the past, even by some of the founders of the field. For example, John McCarthy (who coined the term "artificial intelligence"), Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon wrote this overly optimistic forecast about what could be accomplished during two months with stone-age computers: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College [...] An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer."

On the other hand, a popular counter-myth is that we know we won't get superhuman AI this century. Researchers have made a wide range of estimates for how far we are from superhuman AI, but we certainly can't say with great confidence that the probability is zero this century, given the dismal track record of such techno-skeptic predictions. For example, Ernest Rutherford, arguably the greatest nuclear physicist of his time, said in 1933 --- less than 24 hours before Szilard's invention of the nuclear chain reaction --- that nuclear energy was "moonshine.'' And Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley called interplanetary travel "utter bilge'' in 1956. The most extreme form of this myth is that superhuman AI will never arrive because it's physically impossible. However, physicists know that a brain consists of quarks and electrons arranged to act as a powerful computer, and that there's no law of physics preventing us from building even more intelligent quark blobs.

There have been a number of surveys asking AI researchers how many years from now they think we'll have human-level AI with at least 50% probability. All these surveys have the same conclusion: the world's leading experts disagree, so we simply don't know. For example, in such a poll of the AI researchers at the 2015 Puerto Rico AI conference, the average (median) answer was by year 2045, but some researchers guessed hundreds of years or more.

There's also a related myth that people who worry about AI think it's only a few years away. In fact, most people on record worrying about superhuman AI guess it's still at least decades away. But they argue that as long as we're not 100% sure that it won't happen this century, it's smart to start safety research now to prepare for the eventuality. Many of the safety problems associated with human-level AI are so hard that they may take decades to solve. So it's prudent to start researching them now rather than the night before some programmers drinking Red Bull decide to switch one on.

Controversy Myths

Another common misconception is that the only people harboring concerns about AI and advocating AI safety research are luddites who don't know much about AI. When Stuart Russell, author of the standard AI textbook, mentioned this during his Puerto Rico talk, the audience laughed loudly. A related misconception is that supporting AI safety research is hugely controversial. In fact, to support a modest investment in AI safety research, people don't need to be convinced that risks are high, merely non-negligible -- just as a modest investment in home insurance is justified by a non-negligible probability of the home burning down.

It may be that media have made the AI safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones. As a result, two people who only know about each other's positions from media quotes are likely to think they disagree more than they really do. For example, a techno-skeptic who only read about Bill Gates's position in a British tabloid may mistakenly think Gates believes superintelligence to be imminent. Similarly, someone in the beneficial-AI movement who knows nothing about Andrew Ng's position except his quote about overpopulation on Mars may mistakenly think he doesn't care about AI safety, whereas in fact, he does. The crux is simply that because Ng's timeline estimates are longer, he naturally tends to prioritize short-term AI challenges over long-term ones.

Myths About the Risks of Superhuman AI

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline: " Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind." And as many have lost count of how many similar articles they've seen. Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because they've become conscious and/or evil. On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers don't worry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, and robots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car? Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, it's irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AI does, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isn't malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans don't generally hate ants, but we're more intelligent than they are - so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and there's an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines can't have goals. Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target. If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose. If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldn't exclaim: "I'm not worried, because machines can't have goals!"

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids, because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isn't with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection - this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can't control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it's possible that we might also cede control.

The Interesting Controversies

Not wasting time on the above-mentioned misconceptions lets us focus on true and interesting controversies where even the experts disagree. What sort of future do you want? Should we develop lethal autonomous weapons? What would you like to happen with job automation? What career advice would you give today's kids? Do you prefer new jobs replacing the old ones, or a jobless society where everyone enjoys a life of leisure and machine-produced wealth? Further down the road, would you like us to create superintelligent life and spread it through our cosmos? Will we control intelligent machines or will they control us? Will intelligent machines replace us, coexist with us, or merge with us? What will it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence? What would you like it to mean, and how can we make the future be that way? Please join the conversation!

Recommended References

Many of the organizations listed on this page and their descriptions are from a list compiled by the Global Catastrophic Risk institute; we are most grateful for the efforts that they have put into compiling it. These organizations above all work on computer technology issues, though many cover other topics as well. This list is undoubtedly incomplete; please contact us to suggest additions or corrections.

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Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - Future of Life Institute

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What are the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI)? Why do we need research to ensure that AI remains safe and beneficial?

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The debate over standardized testing can be heated. Some say that standardized testing is the best way to accurately evaluate students. Others believe that standardized testing provides skewed, inaccurate results.

There are many pros and cons of standardized testing. It's important to cut through the debate and identify exactly what these tests are designed to do, and why.

What is standardized testing?

Standardized tests attempt to take an "across the board" measurement of a student's educational ability. It is used to determine current averages and identify high and low performers so that each student can be treated accordingly. All test takers answer the same questions and are scored the same way. This makes it possible to compare individual students based on their performance. The testing sample can be as small as a classroom or as broad as the entire country.

Why standardized testing is important

Whether to identify struggling students who need help, or gifted children for possible advancement, standardized tests provide benchmarks of average performance so this is possible. These benchmarks also help decide the distribution of federal funds to schools across the country.

Standardized tests remain part of our education system, but are they really helping or hurting students?
Let's look at some of the pros and cons of standardized testing.
Pros of Standardized Testing

There are a number of reasons standardized testing is good:

1. Standardized testing can provide benchmarks for parents and teachers. This allows parents and teachers to see how a student is doing compared to other students in his or her class, city, and country.

2. Standardized tests can help identify problem areas in individual students, as well as schools and curriculums.

3. It provides guidelines for curriculum. Standardized tests give teachers a structure of what needs to be taught. This helps keep classroom material consistent across the country.

4. It prevents subjective grading. This helps to eliminate marking bias and ensures rationale behind each test question.

5. It is a practical and accurate way of evaluating what a student does or does not know across areas like math, reading, and writing.

Cons of standardized testing

While this method of testing can provide value, there are also a number of reasons standardized testing is bad:

1. It can create major stress. Students feel the pressure when it comes to performing well on tests. Test scores can affect student confidence. This can lead to students developing a negative attitude about their abilities and a dislike for school.

2. Teachers may end up "teaching to the test" rather than giving students a deeper understanding of a subject. This also creates a classroom atmosphere that lacks creativity and can limit a student's learning potential due to boredom.

3. It evaluates student's performance without considering external factors. Standardized tests don't consider factors like test anxiety, home life, or the fact that some kids are extremely bright but just don't test well.

4. It only considers a single test performance upon evaluation. It does not consider how much a student has grown over the course of the year. This can be a disservice to teachers who worked to help their students grow, and students who put in their best effort to improve but performed poorly on one test.

5. It creates a limited scope of learning and success. Standardized tests only measure specific areas like reading, writing, and math. They don't provide a full picture of soft skills needed to learn, such as creativity, motivation, and cooperation.

How to prepare for standardized tests

Teaching students good study habits can help relieve test-taking stress and anxiety. This is one of the main factors cited by standardized testing critics as contributing to out-of-character scores.

If you are concerned about the performance of your child, there are ways to improve - the easiest of which is to hire a tutor.

A tutor can help students develop a test-taking strategy, manage their time, and improve critical thinking skills. Holding frequent tutoring sessions can help identify a student's strengths and weaknesses. This will give him or her a better idea of how to best prepare for a test.

What's your opinion on standardized testing? Are they helping or hindering? Should they stay or should they go?

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Pros & Cons of Standardized Tests - GradePower Learning

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The debate over standardized testing can be heated. Some say that standardized testing is the best way to accurately evaluate students. Others believe that standardized testing provides skewed, inaccurate results. There are many pros and cons of standardized testing. It's important to cut through the debate and identify exactly what these tests are designed to do, and why.

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Critics point out that the change can be tough on lower-income parents, who may have trouble paying for childcare on the day their kids no longer have class. Also, low-income students rely on public schools for almost half their meals — breakfasts and lunches during the week. Paul T. Hill, a researc…