My wife teaches 8th-grade algebra. She is very good at her job. She should be paid more than she is, but that is a complaint that often falls on deaf politician's ears. In any case, the time may soon come when at least certain parts of her curriculum are taught by a virtual teacher called Eve.

Eve is what's know in in the field of information systems an intelligent or affective tutoring system. It can "adapt its response to the emotional state" of its students (Blogging the Singularity).
The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, tell the story of creating Eve and the teaching system in the latest issue of the leading international journal on information sciences, Elsevier.

Because one-to-one teaching is known to be the most effective teaching method, Dr Sarrafzadeh says the researchers wanted to create a virtual teacher that could pick up body language and facial expressions – like a real teacher – to interact and to ensure they are holding the attention of students.

He says the realisation that software systems would significantly improve performance if they could adapt to the emotions of the user has spawned research and development in the field of affective or intelligent tutoring systems.

“With rising demand for long-distance learning and online tutoring, a computer programe capable of detecting human emotions may become a critical teaching tool.”

Although Eve was developed for one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds, she is a significant new character in the future of human computer interaction and could be a personalized virtual tutor by any name.

Linked to a child via computer, the animated character or virtual tutor can tell if the child is frustrated, angry or confused by the on-screen teaching session and can adapt the tutoring session appropriately.If you plan to go into teaching, it's unlikely that Eve will completely replace all teaching kind, but there can be no doubt that there will be significant and far-reaching implications. Maybe you should think about teaching computer engineering.

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“Pero el estadounidense James Hughes es más tajante: “La evolución biológica ha terminado o es mucho menos importante que hace 20.000 años. No existe ya una selección biológica real, lo que les pase a mis hijos dependerá de en qué condiciones vivan, no de sus características biólógicas”.

“But James Hughes, from USA, is more categorical: “biological evolution is finished or is far less important than it was 20.000 years ago. It does not exists further a real biological selection; what happens to my children will depend on the conditions they live, not on their biological characteristics.”

“Pero el estadounidense James Hughes es más tajante: “La evolución biológica ha terminado o es mucho menos importante que hace 20.000 años. No existe ya una selección biológica real, lo que les pase a mis hijos dependerá de en qué condiciones vivan, no de sus características biólógicas”.

“But James Hughes, from USA, is more categorical: “biological evolution is finished or is far less important than it was 20.000 years ago. It does not exists further a real biological selection; what happens to my children will depend on the conditions they live, not on their biological characteristics.”

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It has recently been brought to my attention that I seem to "lack ambition" (or something along those lines), in part because I've expressed being "at peace with uncertainty".

Honestly, I think there's been some misunderstanding here. Let me try and explain.

Merriam-Webster defines the word ambition as
follows:

Main Entry: am·bi·tion

1: a: an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power
b: desire to achieve a particular end

2: the object of ambition (her ambition is to start
her own business)

3: a desire for activity or exertion (felt sick and
had no ambition)



Of the four interpretive variations in the above definition of "ambition", there's really only one that does not apply to me -- I don't have any
"ardent desire for rank, fame, or power", so definition 1a can be thrown right out. But the rest seem to hold true, in the sense that yes, I want to do stuff, and that no, I'm not lacking in desire for activity.

I think what might be going on here is a clash between two different cognitive approaches to problem-solving and goal-setting.

The first approach (judging from what I've observed) consists of envisioning an ideal outcome, and then calling this ideal outcome "the goal". The frame of mind that tends to go along with this first approach is one in which it is apparently critically important to avoid "settling for less" than the ideal in discussing long-term potential outcomes. People who take this approach to the matter of longevity (for instance) might use terms like "living forever" and "immortality" quite casually, and react defensively when it is suggested that such superlatives don't exactly make sense as concrete engineering goals.

The second approach, on the other hand, acknowledges the aesthetic tidiness and inspirational qualities of envisioned ideal outcomes, but is not really concerned with defending ideal outcomes in terms of their appropriateness as concrete goals. People who take this approach prefer to start from the present and work forward, as opposed to starting with an "integrated vision" of the future and trying to work backward.

The difference here is subtle but important. I'm definitely in the camp of the second approach.

I also am well aware that little has been accomplished by those who say, "it can't be done!" with respect to specific goals -- though as Justin Corwin points out, these folks may very well go on to accomplish different things that they do see as feasible. In any case, though, the approach I favor is not about saying "it can't be done" (at least with regard to goals that don't appear to violate any known laws of physics).

Rather, it's about saying, "Let's try some stuff, and find out what can be done! And maybe along the way, we'll find out some other neat stuff that we can have fun with, and use to enrich our lives and improve future results too."

This strikes me as a far more open, imaginative, and frankly scientific approach than the one in which a person keeps finding himself compelled to defend the ideal he holds so dearly. (Science, after all, is not theology, and requires neither apologetics nor unwavering certainty in order to remain coherent.)

In engineering school, we often learned about different electronic devices through being introduced to "ideal" components. The ideal operational amplifier, for instance (per Wikipedia):

has infinite open-loop gain, infinite bandwidth, infinite input impedances resulting in zero input currents, zero offset voltage, infinite slew rate, zero output impedance and zero noise. Thus the inputs of an ideal op-amp under negative feedback can be modelled using a nullator and the output with a norator.

Real op-amps can only approach this ideal, and the actual parameters are subject to drift over time and with changes in temperature, input conditions, etc.

If we make the analogy between "medicine" and "operational amplifiers", I am perfectly willing to accept that ideal medicine should be able to prevent anyone who doesn't want to die from doing so (while simultaneously allowing people to maintain good health per their own standards for as long as they are alive).

Just as I am perfectly willing to accept that an ideal op-amp has infinite open-loop gain, infinite bandwidth, infinite input impedances, etc.

But like the ideal op-amp, ideal medicine is a concept. Not a device. And certainly not something that I need to "believe in" (in the concrete sense) in order to consider advocating for better, more effective medicine (of which longevity-oriented medicine is most certainly a vital component).

In short, saying that I "lack ambition" because I don't necessarily believe that the superlative form of a desired outcome is inevitable (even if we work really, really hard) is like saying that I "lack ambition" as an engineer because I don't believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is on the way to creating an ideal op-amp and that we all ought to be working feverishly on trying to build ideal op-amps because obviously we've stretched our existing pool of "non-ideal" components to their limits.

Engineers don't need ideal components in order to accomplish goals, and we sure as heck don't need to believe that the models we use to solve equations, etc., must somehow exist as concrete things somewhere in spacetime lest we all fall into despair and unrelenting pessimism. We also don't need certainty that a goal will succeed in order to make a goal worth attempting -- not being at peace with uncertainty is practically a surefire way to end up doing less than you would have otherwise, not more!

Of course, I think we should do everything possible to get medicine as close to the ideal as can be achieved in reality. There is nothing "cranky" about this. It's what medicine has been attempting from Day 1, after all! And perhaps someday we will approach something much closer to the ideal than what we have now. But first things first -- let's try a proof of concept, at least!

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