Mar 16, 2024

Once More--What Does It Even Mean for a Machine to be Generative?

A Discussion with Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and James Gee

Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, and James Gee

Hosted by Daniel Shea

Summary

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.

James Gee : "I fundamentally believe that humans are a screwed-up species — one of the few species that will put themselves out of business in a shorter evolutionary time than any species that has lived on Earth. So, something must be wrong with us. And I think what's wrong with us is, we don't understand what sort of animal we are. That's why our schools are no good — we don't understand how humans really learn. We don't understand what a human really is. We have an elevated view of our own rationality, of our own intelligence, and the consequence is, we are depleting the world. So, the biggest attempt we can still make now is to use everything we can (including Chat) to retheorize who we are as a being before we put ourselves out of existence."

Your Host

Daniel Shea

I am a textician — that is, my work in research text resembles the work in research equipment done by a technician. Want to know more? Contact me at shea@kit.edu

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