In fact, I'm just going to edit out that bit to de-emphasize the term itself.
As I replied to solipsist, I'm now wishing I had asked what experiences people here have at the intersection of interface design and machine intelligence and gone from there. I find UX design and other fields I mentioned as huge and nebulous--it could be equally about hex codes for button shadows as "humane representations of thought"--but my post is not necessarily reigning that in coherently.
Perhaps I overemphasized the "term introduction". Since the first two comments seem to be questioning whether this term and grouping of ideas should exist at all, now I'm wishing I could go back and frame the post as, "Is anyone here thinking about these kind of things?" Once the activity and attention of the community is better resolved, I could re-examine whether any part of it is worth promoting or rebranding.
I want to bring up some questions that I find crucial to consider about technology in the present day. To contrast with Friendly AI, these questions are about our interaction with technological tools rather than developing a technology that we trust on its own with superhuman intelligence.
1. How are computational tools affecting how we perceive, think, and act?
The inspiration for this post is Bret Victor's new talk, The Humane Representation of Thought. I highly recommend it. In particular, you may want to pause and reflect on the first part before seeing his sketch of solutions in the second. In a nutshell, we have a certain range of human capacities. The use of... (read 590 more words →)
Any suggestions of where to get programming gigs?
(Similar to Fluttershy) Culturally, there's a belief that college years are our formative years, and we should be learning to be good, well-rounded (in the liberal arts sense) people. But college is a huge time and money commitment, and the job market is competitive, so I think college ought to be used strategically for advancement in academic or well-paved professional tracks (doctor, lawyer). My college, Harvey Mudd, had a noticeable emphasis on ethics in science and technology and humanities as a hearty side heaping to technical topics. Ideally, ethics would be strategic for career advancement, but in the real world (software engineering), it's never seem to come up in my job placement.... (read 362 more words →)
There is an academic field around this called intelligent tutoring systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system). The biggest company with an ITS, as far as I know, is Carnegie Learning, which provides entire K-12 curricula for it: books, teacher training, software. CL has had mixed evaluations in the past, but I think a fair conclusion at this point is that ITS significantly improves learning outcomes when implemented in an environment where they are able to use software as it's intended to be used (follow the training, spend enough time, etc).
As far as I know there isn't anything quite like this in a widely deployed online system with community discussion as you suggest. Grockit (http://grockit.com) is... (read more)
Your approach -- targeting home-schoolers who are "nonconsumers" of public K-12 education -- is exactly the approach advocated by disruption theory and specifically the book Disrupting Class. Using public education as analogous to established leaders in other industries, disruption always comes from the outside because the leaders aren't structurally able to do anything other than serve their consumers with marginal improvements.
ArtofProblemSolving.com is one successful example that's targeted gifted home-schoolers (and others looking for extracurricular learning) in math. I'm sure there are others. EdSurge.com is a good place to look for existing services, which you can sort by criteria including common core/state-standards aligned (you do have to register for free to get... (read more)
I've explored using spaced repetition in various web-based learning interfaces, which are described at http://cicatriz.github.com I'd love to talk more with anyone who's interested. Based on my experiences, I have reservations about when and how exactly spaced repetition should be used and don't believe there's a general solution using current techniques to quickly go from content to SRS cards. But with a number of dedicated individuals working on different domains, there's certainly potential for better learning. I've been working on writing up a series of articles about this. Again, contact me if you want to be notified when that is released.
This seems to contradict the very powerful effect of learning from failure and corrective feedback. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/why-do-some-people-learn-faster-2/ for an accessible overview.
I'd conjecture this works better when someone can already perform the desired behavior and wants to form a habit, whereas learning from failure comes in when new information needs to be stored and reorganized.
This brings to mind the infamous case of Google censoring search results in China according to the government's will. That's an example of a deliberate human action, but examples will increasingly be "algorithmic byproduct" with zero human intervention. Unlike humans the algorithm can't questioned or intimidated by the media or taken to a court of law.
Legally and professionally, I suppose the product team could be taken responsible, but I definitely think there needs to be a push for more scrutinizable computation. (There have been discussion along these lines in terms of computer security. Sometimes open source is cited as a solution, but it hasn't necessary helped--e.g. Heartbleed.)