27 Comments
May 17Liked by Gary Marcus

What an inspiring life. 90 years old and still growing strong.

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May 17Liked by Gary Marcus

Love this for you!

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I did pr on a book of hers Caliban’s Children and we met about it’s purpose, the differences and similiarities between apes and humans with 98% (as i recall) o the same genes. She thought deeply about the big-brained primate.

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What an amazing moment!

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May 17Liked by Gary Marcus

Very cool, my kids don’t know about AI but anything animal and conservation related captures their attention. No surprise Goodall gets that humans are not machines ❤️

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Amazing! What an honor.

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That's awesome! Thanks for sharing the experience!

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She’s 90 and not a techie and she figured out in an instant that the real issue was letting corporations make the rules! However, we’ve let them make the rules for so long now that they’re unstoppable now. And even more dangerously, they’re fighting among themselves for supremacy in AI, using these powerful tools that even their own creators (from Geoff Hinton to Elon Musk) don’t fully understand. I’ve been studying neural networks since 1984 and I learned early on that we can never understand AI anymore than we can understand our own brains, or those of Jane’s chimps, even though we have tortured them in labs for decades now, trying to understand the most simple functions in their brains…. you too Elon Musk.

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Such a human (!) meeting lifts one's spirits, much needed these days...

BTW Would love to hear your view on the risks and benefits of AI for education specifically. Teachers are getting encouraged (obliged?) to apply AI in the classroom in order to be more productive or to make education more personalised for students, but a lot of it turns out to be snake oil or much more limited in its abilities than promised.

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Those who pressure teachers to use any form of AI in the field of education are totally irresponsible and clearly have no understanding of the limitations and dangers.

It is almost all snake-oil.

It is also very dangerous in so many ways.

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Cool. Thanks for sharing. And Goodall, living a life of service, and as a naturalist and educator, saw to the heart of some of most salient concerns: self-interested corporations, and growing good humans.

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Love her, I grew up in Tanzania and she used to come to my school every few months and encourage us to care about the environment, animals, etc. This was when the hole in the ozone layer was a major cause for concern. It is always a treat to see that she hasn't changed and is still the inspiring down to Earth person I knew as a middle schooler.

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Thank you for the vicarious thrill... a frisson.

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Wow! So glad you had the chance to meet her!

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What a fabulous experience! My thanks to you and all the others that are trying to make sense out of the chaos that is our world.

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Fabulous! Lucky you (and lucky her!)

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Goodall is a living beacon of hope - some things are still good in the world!

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