“Community-Based Inclusive Innovation” is derived from the “geography of innovation” field and some of its leading scholars. However, beyond looking at a region’s innovation system from the spatial perspective of firm concentration, business ecosystems, industry clusters, technology parks and innovation districts it suggests viewing innovation as a societal and communal…

Originally published by the Ottawa Business Journal in The 2023 Welch LLP Business Growth Survey (p. 41) While Ottawa’s tech sector has experienced its share of peaks and valleys, the one recurring theme throughout remains the perpetual need for top talent. Calls for attracting the “best and brightest” persist during…

Can AI do wisdom?

I had the opportunity to experiment with the Riffbot tool. Very impressive. At first, I was a little annoyed with the one-sided chat (aka, being asked all of the questions) then I tried "turning the tables" back to Riffbot so we could have a more conversational exchange. Once this more balanced mode was established I found the tool to be much more engaging. I was also impressed by its capability to review an article weblink I included in my prompt to inform our conversation. It not only read the article but added more nuanced thoughts and opinions. Well done!

Excellent post! As an outsider (of the education system) I am curious to find out whether there is a growing schism between progressive teachers (who are open and willing to experiment with AI in the classroom) and the school board administrators who, as gatekeepers of technology in schools, react to AI as a threat and resist any change.

Excellent article Evan! Along the same lines of your post you may appreciate Alberto Romero's perspective in his 2021 article on Medium "What No One is Thinking: AGI Will Take Everyone by Surprise". Romero posits: "Could we create an AGI without knowing it? Or even without having the ability to eventually know it? Our measurement tools aren’t infinite nor boundless. We could create an AI whose limitations can’t be assessed." Source: - https://towardsdatascience.com/what-no-one-is-thinking-agi-will-take-everyone-by-surprise-a76903474c79

It is hard to predict with any certainty just exactly how AI will alter "learning" and "teaching" in the education system. The only thing I can feel confident in saying is that the education institutions (including school boards, government departments of education, etc) will not be early adopters of AI. That would be unfortunate as innovative approaches to personalized learning (via AI) could support students in ways that we could not have foreseen.

Couldn't agree more. Education systems embrace the principle of linearity in their pedagogical models. While this is helpful in measuring student progress in "learning" it severely limits the students' ability to understand the nature and nuances of complex systems.

Excellent and thoughtful article. Makes me wonder if some of the recent advances in AI tools (text-to-image generators, etc) can be adopted in the practice of speculative design? I, for one, would like to see more AI-generated images instead of boring Post-It-Notes used in design sprints.