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Australia To Grade Written Essays In National Exam With Cognitive Computing
New submitter purnima writes: Australia keeps on giving and giving. Each year school kids in Australia sit The National Assessment Program (NAPLAN) which in part tests literacy. The exam includes a written page-long essay aimed at examining both language aptitude and literacy of students. Of course, human-marking of such essays is costly (twenty teacher-minutes per exam). So some bright spark has proposed that the essays be marked by computer. The government is convinced and the program is slated for the 2017 school year. Aside from the moral issues, is AI ready for this major task?
Since machines cannot yet understand the semantics of complex English text, they will use some simplistic rules as a substitute. These rules will be things like "average sentence length" and other such metrics, which as soon as they are discovered by students, will be used to game the system. Instead of producing essays born of rational and coherent thought, they will instead make them to match the things being measured while being utterly devoid of meaning.
That's because all of us colonials and ex-colonials are burdened with the English factory educational system that was designed to produce bureaucrats for the Empire. The reason computers are capable of grading products of the educational system is because the system is made to create human computers.
Our - US, Australia - educational system needs to be completely changed - not reformed. I think the template to use is Maria Montessori's system. In the future we are going to need creative people who can discover new things and solve problems: not follow rules and memorize things: computers do that better.
It seems like every attempt to unify or improve the education system just puts us on a path to a worse "education".
Everyone is caught up in bullshit about metrics right now. Precisely how dumb are our kids, etc etc. Instead of spending money on education, they're spending it on figuring out what the results of not spending money on education are. Really brilliant work, there. But it makes them look busy, so mission accomplished.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hell, why not. While we're at it, why don't we automate the student process. Dump the students and educate AIs instead. Computing solutions always work, just ask any nerd about self-driving cars.
At some point, and it seems that that point is arriving now, people will realize that the driving force behind technological change, as far as money people are concerned, is to eliminate jobs, and that the good jobs are not realy being replaced, and cannot be replaced. AIs grading papers gets rid of more pesky teachers who make a living wage. A self-driving car doesn't fit the picture until you realize that millions of people make a living *driving trucks*, and self-driving trucks will eliminate their jobs (in theory, if it works, and I don't see it working) and make oodles of money for capital and kick millions of truck drivers, along with all the taxi and Uber car drivers, out without a dime. (Uber is VERY interested in self-driving cars. Guess why).
Some jobs are being made. And capital is desperately trying to commodify and cheapen such labor, to the point of demanding governments force coding classes on all kids. There are such jobs, but no where near enough, and those are mostly dropped onto cheaper kids, not newly dumped middle-aged workers.
Asimov was on point, decades ago, when he wrote that inevitably automation would eliminate most jobs, and that the biggest problem - in his view, opportunity -- would be finding something for people to do. I would say that people without purpose are the most dangerous force for destruction and stupidity on the planet - worse than global climate change.
Capital and people who work for capital, and neoliberals and business conservatives who support capital, tend to have well-paying white collar jobs and live among other people of their class, and don't see anything amiss. They're fine. Step outside into the vast middle grounds of the world, and you'll see a growing sense of we're-being-fucked that will require an endless army of pepper-spraying drones and surveillance to keep from erupting into riots someday soon.