Over the past few weeks I’ve written four articles in a series called ‘If You Know You Know’. The series covers the discoverability problem (the blank text box tells you nothing), the capabilities that broke my mental models about AI, the access and equity barriers that determine who gets to discover what, and the gap between knowing something is possible and actually being able to do it.
If you haven’t read them yet, start here:
- IYKYK: How Do We Know What AI Can Really Do?
- IYKYK Part 2: Did You Know AI Can Do… That?
- IYKYK Part 3: Who Gets to Know?
- IYKYK Part 4: From Knowing to Doing
This fifth post is a call to action. In order to “lift the ceiling” on teachers’ mental models of what AI can do, we need to share as many examples as possible. And not just the obvious examples, but the weird, awkward, slightly broken examples of people pushing and poking at the edges of the technology.
You can’t teach everything AI can do (the list is unbounded and constantly changing). You can’t wait for people to discover it on their own (the interface prevents it). What you can do is engineer the conditions for recognition: put people in a situation where their existing expertise collides with an unexpected capability, and let the conceptual shift do the rest.
So, let’s set up a few of those collisions.
Get in touch, and let me know some of the weird and wonderful things you’ve done with AI. Read the earlier articles in the series for examples.
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