AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Education (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This is interesting. It’s a little bit of a diversion, but I recently had an experience with a very close friend of mine who very readily condemned Joe Biden for pardoning his son. I don’t feel so strongly about that pardon because this is a father who has lost two children and a wife, and this is his only surviving son. Given that power, he is bound to make that choice. In my opinion, I don’t know any parent who would not make that choice. If I do the theory of mind experiment, I don’t see any father or any parent making any other choice given that power. The real question is, should a president have that kind of pardoning power?

That is the real question. The real question is if not Joe Biden should be condemned.

I think the point that you’re making about black and white thinking is something that is worrying me greatly. I think there is no process in the education system that addresses the harmful effects of this kind of black and white thinking – highly judgmental, highly easy to jump to. This also comes from the Daniel Kahnman research on Thinking, Fast and Slow.

It’s very easy to judge people instantly without making any kind of thought experiment, any kind of empathy experiment, and just making a black and white judgment on people. I think with social media, people are very ready to jump into decisions and points of views and just condemning people and then generating hatred around that.

Gus Tai: What I would add, Sramana is this. I cover it in the course that I teach as well. Kahnman is highlighting that the human operating system has both capabilities. Through adaptive reasons or if it needs to, it just does fast black and white thinking, and then more gray type of thinking.

There are situations when black and white (thinking) is helpful. I like to highlight this with this example. When you’re driving down the street and you see a red light or a stop sign, you stop.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Gus Tai: You don’t reflect upon it. That’s a right application of that heuristic. However, if you believe that the world is more complicated and richer, and history shows that it is, then that requires a slowing down and seeing different points of view and then realizing with humility that we have incomplete information and incomplete capability for assessing.

So, from the standpoint of just knowing we don’t know, what we don’t know is infinitely larger than what we do know we know and what we know we don’t know. In this realm of inputs and causality, we should pause and say, “We have an incomplete understanding of this, and this is the best I can do in this moment.”

That is wisdom. I think most important decisions are wisdom decisions, not black and white right or wrong decisions. When it’s black and white, it doesn’t require wisdom. It’s just black and white. Wisdom matters, so cultivate it and train it.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. For those of you who are listening and thinking about startup ideas, this one, this last segment of the conversation we’ve had about mental health and wisdom training is a complex area. If you decide to do a startup in this area, you’re going to have to think about what Gus pointed out as this whole painkiller versus vitamin issue.

It is not easy to monetize and commercialize these kinds of applications. This is much more complicated than building a Chemistry application that is bilingual between French and English, or something that has much more deterministic paths to commercialization and monetization.

I have, obviously, a lot more things to discuss Gus, but I’m reluctant to open up another big area and then get cut short. I will say one thing that is a very positive development to underscore in this conversation.

When the concept of MOOCs came about, people were very excited that all this knowledge and lectures from the top universities and colleges are freely available on edX. But it didn’t have that kind of impact.

Why didn’t it have that kind of impact? For human beings to be able to study in a self-motivated manner, they have to be self-motivated; and the vast majority of human beings are not self-motivated.

This segment is part 5 in the series : AI Investor Forum: Gus Tai on AI in Education
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