you can read about it in a lot more detail here<\/a>.)<\/p>\nStill, all of that old stuff is powerful iconography: BASIC, mainframes, the Apple IIe, etc. It reminds us of how far we\u2019ve come in a few short decades.<\/p>\n
I was interviewing Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, about her early experience, and she was reminiscing about these nascent technologies.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just as punch cards were coming off, and people were actually able to program interactively, and we learned to program in BASIC,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was this magic box that did what I said, and we got to write cool things like little games and such, and even back then, I saw the potential.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of her early philosophy on programming, she explained:<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I was enamored by the intellectual beauty of mathematical models of the real world \u2026 the beauty of taking something that was complicated and vague, and really building something that was mathematical and predictive, and allowed you to make smart decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, she noted, there was the desire to apply these beautiful things to the real world.<\/p>\n
\u201cElegance is great, but does it help anybody?\u201d she asked. \u201cDoes it help actual people, and do I perceive, can I actually viscerally feel, the impact that it’s having on people’s lives?\u201d<\/p>\n
The MacArthur Genius Award<\/p>\n
Koller also described how winning the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation \u201cGenius Grant\u201d was further motivation during her career:<\/p>\n
\u201cI’d received a whole bunch of academic awards and accolades,\u201d she said, \u201cbut those were always among what seemed like a relatively small group of qualified individuals \u2026 this was an award for which any resident of the United States was eligible to receive that award. And I was like, why me? What have I done to deserve being selected? I felt like I hadn’t actually earned that recognition. And I spent much of my career following that, trying to kind of earn it retroactively, which I think was another pivotal moment on my journey to do something that is truly meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Leap of Faith<\/p>\n
Koller also talked about the process of leaving Stanford to build Coursera.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no idea how to build a company,\u201d she said, comparing the decision to jumping off a cliff, when you don\u2019t know where the bottom is. \u201cIt was definitely driven by what I saw was an incredible opportunity to have a massive impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
She addressed questions about course completion rates, noting that to date, Coursera has around 150 million \u201clearners.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the people who came in to take the MOOCs weren’t actually planning to finish them,\u201d she said. \u201cThey viewed it as akin to picking up a non-fiction library book, and reading a few chapters, and walking away feeling like they’d learned something, and they felt like they had achieved what they wanted to achieve. Having said that, even among the people who came in with the declared intention to complete, our completion rate was lower than we would have liked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Different Types of Students<\/p>\n
Later, Koller talked about various categories of students that they see at Coursera.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were the career-oriented learners who were there for improving their career prospects, and those tended to congregate more on the STEM disciplines,\u201d she said. \u201cWe did have some who were taking courses in English, and wanted to become writers or journalists or something. We had people who were just lifelong learners, who were just taking courses in whatever, Greek history, because that’s something they were curious about. And then there were people who wanted to improve their chances of getting into the right colleges, and were taking (a course) either as high school students, or they’d not gone to college directly out of high school, and wanted to be prepared for a college experience. Those were the three demographics.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Clinical Work<\/p>\n
In terms of medical research, Koller also described working on an AI-driven process to reverse ALS disease pathology in motor neurons.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe printed over 12 billion motor neurons in health and disease from different genetic backgrounds,\u201d she said, \u201csome from ALS patients, some from healthy controls, some healthy controls mutated with an ALS-causing mutation, and phenotyped them densely, and identified using AI as a first-ever ALS disease axis, which is what happens to a motor neuron when it gets ALS.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a cure, she said, of the application of this research. Not yet. Koller uses the term \u201cdisease modification.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt significantly changes the trajectory of the disease,\u201d she explained. \u201cIt’s not just palliative – it’s not just about the symptoms. It truly changes the disease progression: will we get it to come to a complete halt? I don’t know. I really hope so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Let me also include this fairly involved comment on superintelligence and what Koller hopes is being built now:<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is to build, for human biology and disease, a formal foundation that allows us to make predictions that will eventually turn out to be true a large portion of the time,\u201d she said, calling this type of research a \u201choly grail\u201d for humankind. \u201cAnd think about when physics was transformed, when we finally put calculus together with physics, so that we had calculus as a predictive framework of what’s going to happen in physical systems. We don’t have that for biology, because it’s really too complicated. But AI, together with the right kind of data, I believe can provide that kind of fundamental predictive framework that will allow us to know which experiments to do, because we know which ones are going to turn out the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Outcome<\/p>\n
If you watch the video, I then ask Koller about the prospects for humanity: of whether we will rise to the occasion, recognize the benefits of AI, and get on a healthy path, or just get lazy and outsource our lives to robots.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s going to be a subset of us that continue to work towards something greater,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n
I hope you enjoyed this foray into the past, and thoughts on the world of education, then, and now, in the AI age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 10: Coursera Co-Founder Daphne Koller getty Do you remember PC-DOS? Monochrome? As a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[249195,49,48,267999,267998,268000,28770,61],"class_list":["post-749234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-nbsp","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-coursera","tag-daphne-koller","tag-john-d-and-catherine-t-macarthur-foundation","tag-stanford","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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