Learning to Play the Cards with Purpose

cogdogblog. CC BY 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become involved in an honor society to which I was elected in college. I’ve mused a great deal since then about the split between two assumptions, namely a) my own naive ones regarding said society’s asserted raison d’être (service to development of the mind and hence social responsibility, love of learning much more robust than the instrumentalist “lifelong learning” touted in corporate culture), and b) the more realistic draw of membership as calling card in the game of standard-issue success: financial security, enviable social status, satisfaction with self. I reflected yesterday on this rift after reading the text of a speech on AI and/vs. thoughtful education and the exploration involved in learning. The “speculative creatures” that humans are, says Kirsten Macfarlane, “have risk coded in”—which is not the case for AI, which “(correctly) has risk coded out.” And where “purpose” is concerned,…