For this week’s task, I chose to work with the phrase “Education is not about…”
In modern society, the function of predictive text is applied in many ways. For instance, when you type words in text messages, Google search engine and even when crafting emails, you will get suggestions from the computer, attempting to complete your sentences.
As you can see in the picture, I typed in the phrase and an algorithm calculated the top three most popular results. I was a bit confused with the search result “education is not about degree quotes”, therefore I clicked on it to investigate further. It turned out to be many motivational quotes about how education is more than receiving a title or a “degree”. The search result implies what most people perceive the meaning of education to be. In the past, people thought education was learning from textbooks and gaining new knowledge; however today, education goes beyond facts and grades.
For the next part, I used my phone and typed in the phrase using three articles and the connectives “to get”, “to be” and “the” to see what options the computer would generate. During the process, I felt like playing the game of complete my sentence, as I chose the words provided by the computer. I noticed the string of words would continue to form longer sentences, so I stopped choosing once the sentence sounded logical or made some sense. The first two sentences were similar to the google search result, which suggests that education has a higher purpose then merely putting food on the table or physically attending school. The third sentence did not make much sense because the predictive text did not offer the choice of “student’s”. It would probably read better as “Education is not about the student’s need to know what to do, but…” This phrase reminds me of how I was a student and the instructors used the “chalk and talk” approach to lecture us and tell us the “correct answer”. The three statements I generated did not sound like me, as they were more formal than my usual style. I tend to keep my tone quite casual. As McRaney mentioned in his podcast, the algorithm calculates the data and make suggestions accordingly. However, the prediction of the future comes from the past, which means the machine learned from individual’s viewpoints that includes bias. We need to be aware that time changes and some things are no longer the same (i.e doctor and pilot can be addressed as both he and she).
Reference
McRaney, D. (n.d.). Machine Bias (rebroadcast). In You Are Not so Smart. Retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/youarenotsosmart/140-machine-bias-rebroadcast
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