Title: China’s New AI School Textbooks

Author: Bob Schmidt

Date: 05 January 2019 16:11:32 +00:00 or Sat, 05 January 2019 16:11:32 +00:00

Summary: Silas Brown is sceptical about an education initiative.

Body: 

It’s hard to write a review of a book I haven’t seen, but I’m worried about the hype that currently seems to be doing the rounds in the Chinese news media about a series of 10 books aimed at children aged 7 to 15 called ‘Future Smart Manufacturers on AI’, which aims to bolster China’s ‘talent pool’ by teaching children how to be ‘AI’ programmers. Titles in the series include Magic Animals on AI, Smart Life on AI (apparently a reference to the Internet of Things), AI in the Shape-changing Workshop (I’m not sure if that means 3D modelling or something else), Cute Pet ‘Little E’ in AI, AI Super Engineer, AI’s Backstage Hero: Python, AI in Future Towns, AI in a Wonderful World, AI Super Designer and AI’s Uses and Explorations. (The actual series name and titles are in Chinese only, with no official English translation, so all English translations here are my own.)

I always put ‘artificial intelligence’ in scare quotes because it’s not really intelligence, it’s just programming. People refer to computer-game characters as being controlled by ‘AI’ even when they’re doing nothing more than a simple loop with perhaps a one-line piece of homing logic added. People refer to Chess engines as ‘AI’ even though they’re mostly nothing more than optimised brute-force search algorithms. People refer to machine translation as ‘AI’ although it’s usually just an application of statistics (albeit with rather a lot of data), with perhaps a precious few researchers still working on ‘good old-fashioned’ symbolic knowledge reasoning (the sort of thing that used to be written in Lisp or Prolog). Nowadays ‘AI’ usually implies some sort of attempt at writing a ‘signal-to-symbol converter’ (as in computer vision) by throwing a load of training data at TensorFlow or equivalent and not quite understanding how it works (which means you don’t quite understand its limitations either, which is worrying), but if you’re going to call a book AI’s Backstage Hero: Python, that sounds to me like you simply want to write a general introduction to Python but your series editor is insisting that the word ‘AI’ must be in every title. This series might turn out to be something like the 1980s Usborne coding books that found their way into the children’s sections of British public libraries, but I get bad feelings about the fact that the underlying message seems to be that the only type of computer programming that really matters is something called ‘AI’ programming.

Non-programmers sometimes ask me, “Can you do AI?” and I always answer “No,” and then perhaps add “but the things I do might be called ‘AI’ by some people.” It has become such a wishy-washy word, I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean anymore. Whatever happened to good old Computer Science?

Silas S. Brown Silas is a partially-sighted Computer Science post-doc in Cambridge who currently works in part-time assistant tuition and part-time for Oracle. He has been an ACCU member since 1994.

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