From PC-DOS To AI: And Daphne Koller’s Thoughts On The Future

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Do you remember PC-DOS? Monochrome? As a person of a certain age, you probably get a wave of nostalgia when you see (usually in the movies) that black CRT screen, a glass bubble with little green letters and characters printed across it in neat lines.

But ultimately, businesses that kept using those old monochrome PC-DOS interfaces went the way of monochrome itself: Blockbuster Video being probably the most prominent example. Somewhere in the 80s and 90s, color capability blossomed: one color became four, then 16, then, well, thousands (you can read about it in a lot more detail here.)

Still, all of that old stuff is powerful iconography: BASIC, mainframes, the Apple IIe, etc. It reminds us of how far we’ve come in a few short decades.

I was interviewing Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, about her early experience, and she was reminiscing about these nascent technologies.

“It was just as punch cards were coming off, and people were actually able to program interactively, and we learned to program in BASIC,” she said. “There was this magic box that did what I said, and we got to write cool things like little games and such, and even back then, I saw the potential.”

Of her early philosophy on programming, she explained:

“I think I was enamored by the intellectual beauty of mathematical models of the real world … the beauty of taking something that was complicated and vague, and really building something that was mathematical and predictive, and allowed you to make smart decisions.”

Then, she noted, there was the desire to apply these beautiful things to the real world.

“Elegance is great, but does it help anybody?” she asked. “Does it help actual people, and do I perceive, can I actually viscerally feel, the impact that it's having on people's lives?”

The MacArthur Genius Award

Koller also described how winning the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” was further motivation during her career:

“I'd received a whole bunch of academic awards and accolades,” she said, “but those were always among what seemed like a relatively small group of qualified individuals … this was an award for which any resident of the United States was eligible to receive that award. And I was like, why me? What have I done to deserve being selected? I felt like I hadn't actually earned that recognition. And I spent much of my career following that, trying to kind of earn it retroactively, which I think was another pivotal moment on my journey to do something that is truly meaningful.”

A Leap of Faith

Koller also talked about the process of leaving Stanford to build Coursera.

“I had no idea how to build a company,” she said, comparing the decision to jumping off a cliff, when you don’t know where the bottom is. “It was definitely driven by what I saw was an incredible opportunity to have a massive impact.”

She addressed questions about course completion rates, noting that to date, Coursera has around 150 million “learners.”

“A lot of the people who came in to take the MOOCs weren't actually planning to finish them,” she said. “They viewed it as akin to picking up a non-fiction library book, and reading a few chapters, and walking away feeling like they'd learned something, and they felt like they had achieved what they wanted to achieve. Having said that, even among the people who came in with the declared intention to complete, our completion rate was lower than we would have liked.”

Different Types of Students

Later, Koller talked about various categories of students that they see at Coursera.

“There were the career-oriented learners who were there for improving their career prospects, and those tended to congregate more on the STEM disciplines,” she said. “We did have some who were taking courses in English, and wanted to become writers or journalists or something. We had people who were just lifelong learners, who were just taking courses in whatever, Greek history, because that's something they were curious about. And then there were people who wanted to improve their chances of getting into the right colleges, and were taking (a course) either as high school students, or they'd not gone to college directly out of high school, and wanted to be prepared for a college experience. Those were the three demographics.”

The Clinical Work

In terms of medical research, Koller also described working on an AI-driven process to reverse ALS disease pathology in motor neurons.

“We printed over 12 billion motor neurons in health and disease from different genetic backgrounds,” she said, “some from ALS patients, some from healthy controls, some healthy controls mutated with an ALS-causing mutation, and phenotyped them densely, and identified using AI as a first-ever ALS disease axis, which is what happens to a motor neuron when it gets ALS.”

It’s not a cure, she said, of the application of this research. Not yet. Koller uses the term “disease modification.”

“It significantly changes the trajectory of the disease,” she explained. “It's not just palliative - it's not just about the symptoms. It truly changes the disease progression: will we get it to come to a complete halt? I don't know. I really hope so.”

Let me also include this fairly involved comment on superintelligence and what Koller hopes is being built now:

“At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is to build, for human biology and disease, a formal foundation that allows us to make predictions that will eventually turn out to be true a large portion of the time,” she said, calling this type of research a “holy grail” for humankind. “And think about when physics was transformed, when we finally put calculus together with physics, so that we had calculus as a predictive framework of what's going to happen in physical systems. We don't have that for biology, because it's really too complicated. But AI, together with the right kind of data, I believe can provide that kind of fundamental predictive framework that will allow us to know which experiments to do, because we know which ones are going to turn out the right way.”

The Outcome

If you watch the video, I then ask Koller about the prospects for humanity: of whether we will rise to the occasion, recognize the benefits of AI, and get on a healthy path, or just get lazy and outsource our lives to robots.

“There's going to be a subset of us that continue to work towards something greater,” she replied.

I hope you enjoyed this foray into the past, and thoughts on the world of education, then, and now, in the AI age.

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