Thursday, October 10, 2024

No wonder they rely on AI to read for them.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.





Are we slipping down the slope toward fully autonomous drones?

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/10/new-ai-powered-strike-drone-shows-how-quickly-battlefield-autonomy-evolving/400179/

New AI-powered strike drone shows how quickly battlefield autonomy is evolving

Small drones have been changing modern warfare at least since 2015, when Russia and Ukraine began to use them to great effect for rapid targeting. The latest addition is a strike-and-intelligence quadcopter that its builder hopes will do more things with a lot less operator attention.

The point of the Bolt-M, revealed by Anduril today, is to make fewer demands on the operator and offer more information than, easy-to-produce first-person-view strike drones, the type that Ukraine is producing by the hundreds of thousands. The U.S. Army, too, is looking at FPV drones for infantry platoons. But they require special training to use and come with a lot of operational limits. The Bolt-M, according to an Anduril statement, works “without requiring specialized operators.” The company has a contract from the U.S. Marine Corps’ Organic Precision Fires – Light, or OPF-L, program to develop a strike variant.



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