Latest news with #SungjooYoon
Forbes
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Building Change On Preferences And Tech Shifts
Carefree young woman smiling happily while playing music using a smartphone and earbuds. Cheerful ... More woman with curly hair enjoying her favourite playlist while standing against a blue background. There's a common phenomenon I've observed pretty frequently with people talking about the AI revolution is now upon us. They're basically comparing today's tech world to that of the past waves of innovation that gave us the Internet, big data, the cloud and everything else. To be sure, none of this sprang fully formed out of nothing. It came incrementally – and was built piece by piece. There's a good argument that the Internet laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence work to flourish. At the very least, it provides the playground or environment for digital activity that AI can direct – as when Claude or some other model starts to actively use the Internet as an agent. So from time to time, we might look in a more granular way at what has happened, and why. The 15-Year Flywheel This came up in a recent TED talk by Sungjoo Yoon who began by talking about his romantic exploits early in life, and how he understood the fickleness of a particular partner who decided to leave him for his best friend. He made the analogy to consumer trends and market changes, where companies have their 15 minutes of fame with a product or service before something else takes over. He called this 'tectonic shifts' in the market, for example, the eventual supplanting of the 1969 command line interfaces that were fundamental to the development of the early personal computer. 'We saw, in 1969, the creation of the Thompson Shell, the first Unix shell that you could just prompt if you knew the terminals, and it gave rise to the modern terminal commands,' he said. 'You could type in stuff, and it would do way more calculations for you. This was the base case of out with the old, in with the new.' He referenced the rise of GUIs in the 80s, a web-native interface in the 90s, and then, the evident advances of the twenty-first century. What Makes Change Happen? Throughout this, Yoon referred to something that he called the preference principle, which suggests that if you have more information about what someone likes, you can create more powerful technology around that, or in other words, more appealing technology. 'I spent time as a member of the research staff at Caltech in a behavioral economics lab, and this is actually an underlying principle that exists all across the world,' he said. When you look at welfare distribution, it's just a product of what people need, finding out what they need, and trying to distribute and allocate resources in an efficient manner. In order to do this effectively, you need to have honest information about what those needs actually are.' He covered auction theory and behaviors based on preference principles, like the fear of overbidding. He also cited the job world, and hiring decisions: 'If we want to have efficient labor allocation all across the world, what we need is a lot of information on what people's skills actually are, such that for a skill, a job that requires really high amount of skills,' he said. 'We don't assign someone who doesn't have those skills, and vice versa.' Then there's interface theory. 'This is something that is incredibly understudied, but crucial in consumer technology,' he said 'What do I mean by understudied? Well, think about the way that people talk about consumer tech form factor. It's very strange because it's not just about the hardware dimensions, right? This is a definition that a lot of people like to use. What are the hardware dimensions of any given product?' He gave the example of an iPhone and how that device changed over the years. 'It's not actually strictly about the dimensions itself, or else we'd see a more consistent pattern over time. It's also not just the end experiences that those dimensions create.' Developers, he suggested, are paying attention to these ideas, in trying to market better to a growing audience of users, and new generation with – you guessed it – changing preferences. 'Participation just means you have more aggregated preferences among a wide group of people,' he said, 'and more aggregated preferences means higher information quality, and therefore product quality.' Yoon cited Google, YouTube and LinkedIn as platforms that are doing this research, and making the most of the information they aggregate. He also pointed out that there are better ways to source the information itself. Language Matters Yoon talked about natural language, and unnatural language. Basically, he suggested, if you just ask a person to give information, it's awkward and unnatural. by contrast, if you use natural language, and social processes, that's going to be more effective in general. Natural language, he noted, equals trust. The Agentic Age How does this apply to AI in practice? We're starting to see AI agents take initiative and start to do things on their own. They made to be loosely directed by a human to reach an objective, but they come up with the tasks themselves. That means we're soon going to have all of these non-human actors in a world that was always being directed by human participants. That's probably a lot of what Yoon is pointing out with his preference principle, and incremental changes in technology that we have to reckon with if we're going to build a better way forward.
Los Angeles Times
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Opinion: Locked out of the library: How book bans deprive young Americans
When the school librarian told me that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was deemed too unsafe for 6th graders at my middle school, I apologized, closed the book, and did not dare touch it again for another two years. Ironically, for school districts and educational policymakers in the U.S., student safety and effective learning have not necessarily been presented as mutually exclusive values– however, recent calls for book bans in U.S. public schools have packaged access to literature in a false binary, with pressuring calls that one must be sacrificed for the other. While many have raised concerns about student mental and physical safety on campus, uncensored literature provides nuanced contextualization of social concepts beyond the classroom, brings light to untold stories of marginalized communities, and trains students in practical values and interpersonal soft skills that carry over into their adult life. Despite the fact that many books subject to bans handle sensitive social topics, this value makes it all the more important to handle such literature in pre-college classrooms. As opposed to a brute force approach of merely dropping books for all grades, students in their developmental years need sensitive, extensive approaches to rigorous and respectful analysis of said content under the guidance of a qualified teacher. Then-high-school-junior and now-Harvard-undergrad Sungjoo Yoon also disagrees with an oversimplified approach to the controversy: 'I acknowledged that Black students were being marginalized in our classrooms… but did not think that it was the fault of these books or their content…the solution was not to remove the books but to add books written by people of color and to better train teachers to teach these books sensitively to students'. Learning to conscientiously break down and maturely discuss narratives like racism against oppressed peoples of the past is far more important than temporarily shielding uncomfortable conversations and several angry phone calls in the classroom. Experiences in the playground, at lunch, in family settings, and in the broader society are not as much molded by the content themselves as much as if and how they are presented. Students not well-guided and essentially unexposed to those interpretation strategies miss out on discussions with peers on some of the most pressing societal problems of the day, a requisite to any responsible school curriculum. Ultimately, permanent banning of sensitive material entirely removes classroom environments where these educational conversations can take place. Beyond this foundation of teaching all demographics of students alike to responsibly approach potentially provocative content, stories of marginalized communities are disproportionately more likely to be locked out of the library. In a nation with diverse groups and minority populations that have historically significant stories to share, student education is notably limited when the stories they hear from family and community members are different or nonexistent in the narratives being taught within the four classroom walls. With book bans increasingly targeting stories about oppression against minority groups, 'people with lived experiences that differ from what's taught in the classroom, presented in a summer reading list…can feel outcast, ostracized, and alone…' (Publish Your Purpose). When students do not come across aspects of their heritage, background, culture, community, or any other defining aspect of their identity in public schools, educators and policymakers risk sending an implicit message to these groups that their stories are not worth sharing in American society. Without adopting an all-inclusive policy – emotional or dense, racist or non-sensitive – for which stories get to be told, side effects can range from societal exclusion to an unintentionally fostered sense of inferiority in students' communities beyond school. On the other hand, many have pointed out that exposing students to offensive, discriminatory, or potentially dangerous content could guide youth in the wrong direction, hurting not only their schooling years but the trajectory of how they choose to live their lives. From historically offensive terms referring to groups of people to inappropriate or irresponsible personalities appearing in books, a common fear is that children may have difficulty differentiating right from wrong: 'They commonly fear that these publications will present ideas, raise questions and incite critical inquiry among children that parents, political groups, or religious organizations are not ready to address or that they find inappropriate' (Webb). Uncomfortable discussions and premature exposure to harmful content can be awkward and indeed harmful for parents, students, and societal groups alike. However, while some students may still project unfavorable aspects of a character or storyline into their own lives, banning books entirely for all age groups actually increases the likelihood of such behavior. In reality, all of the students will come into contact with the words or ideas that are being shielded from them, whether this event comes in their pre-college years at a public, uncensored library or after they graduate. When students no longer have the choice to opt out of such important conversations as an adult, those skills untaught in school can make for some rather unpleasant and potentially detrimental (for both the grown students and those around them) interactions. In fact, by having been stripped of their right to such sensitive yet crucial information at a young age, 'entering the world after high school could be a rude awakening for them as well if they are unprepared for the realities that other people face… they might have a hard time dealing with the fact that most people are different from them' (Knipe). Quickly, the issue escalates from protecting students against unfavorable content into a lack of awareness and empathy. Essentially, the significance of reading these books comes not only in its academic value but also in its instrumental role as a developmental tool for social and emotional success. It is time to trust students and educators to begin these literary conversations about our world early on. I never did get to read that book, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', in middle school: it stayed stowed away under my bed for another two years, until I learned the librarian had not entirely been correct in her beliefs. It taught me valuable lessons, not about those words that that librarian had feared I'd come across, but about friendship, trust, and society to an extent no other literary work has done for me. By providing nuanced context for social issues that are far too critical for the upcoming generations, inclusively telling stories of all communities, and guiding students in interpersonal discussion skills, full access to books ensures that students do not miss out on lessons of life that no experience as an adult could replace. Related
