Professional Judgment in an Era of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Though artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and education now accomplishes diverse tasks, there are two features that tend to unite the information processing behind efforts to substitute it for professionals in these fields: reductionism and functionalism. True believers in substitutive automation tend to model work in human services by reducing the professional role to a set of behaviors initiated by some stimulus, which are intended to accomplish some predetermined goal, or maximize some measure of well-being. However, true professional judgment hinges on a way of knowing the world that is at odds with the epistemology of substitutive automation. Instead of reductionism, an encompassing holism is a hallmark of professional practice—an ability to integrate facts and values, the demands of the particular case and prerogatives of society, and the delicate balance between mission and margin. Any presently plausible vision of substituting AI for education and health-care professionals would necessitate a corrosive reductionism. The only way these sectors can progress is to maintain, at their core, autonomous professionals capable of carefully intermediating between technology and the patients it would help treat, or the students it would help learn

The Cowl - Orientation Issue n.6 - Jul 15, 1987

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Orientation Issue No. 6 - July 15, 1987. 12 pages

Artificial Intelligence: Uses and Misuses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was mostly regarded as science-fiction in the past but with the recent advancements in technology, it has silently crept into our lives. From social media to computer games to self-driving cars to military gadgets to personal digital assistants, AI is everywhere. This progress is also due to a paradigm shift in AI community where current trend is to make AI stronger in specific domains rather than making a human-like AI which can do anything. Resultantly, AI can now out-perform humans in many areas. But this progress of AI is scary for some people who are predicting the 201C;rise of machines201D; in half a century or so if AI progress remains unbridled

Islamophobia in European Schools: A Multinational Phenomenological Research

This study, which aims to investigate the existence of Islamophobia in European schools, an important part of the social structure, is designed as a phenomenological study. Data were collected through interviews with 36 teachers working in seven different European countries. As a result of the study, Islamophobia has been identified as an unignorable and a major problem in European schools. Moreover, it reveals that the teachers do not have enough knowledge about Islam, but the majority of participants have open or hidden Islamophobic tendencies. In addition, the teachers think that Islamic lifestyles and Muslims are not part of European cultures and that Muslim students should be subjected to intense cultural training. Again, the majority of the participants argue that the fight against Islamophobia can be achieved through prejudice and communication training for teachers. This study is important in that it is a pioneering work in the literature that investigates the entity of Islamophobia among teachers in Europe

Addressing the Elephant in the Room: Understanding the Daily Life of Undocumented Latino High School Youth

The 1.5 generation are the undocumented students who were born abroad and were brought to the United States by their parents at an early age. Many of these children came here during the population boom in the 1990’s and are now teenagers or in their mid 20’s. As they are finishing high school, nearly all of them are confused about their post-secondary options because of their undocumented status. The IL Dream Act, passed in 2011, qualifies undocumented youth to pay in-state tuition when attending public universities in Illinois and provides trained counselors who are aware of the college options and post-secondary resources for undocumented youth. However, this research shows that counselors may still be confused and unaware of the resources for their undocumented students, and about the struggles of their daily lives. This study intends to discover what school staff in McLean County know about the everyday life of their undocumented students and what kinds of post-secondary resources (available through the IL Dream Act) are being recommended to this unique group of students

“Pure People” and “Corrupt Elites:” Corruption Talk in the 2020 Election

The word “corruption” has two separate but interrelated meanings. The first kind of corruption refers specifically to an abuse of public office for private gain; the second is broader and indicates a disjunction between a political reality and the ideal to which that reality ought to conform. This paper explores the role of various forms of “corruption talk” in the 2020 presidential election. The first part of the paper examines the “supply side,” looking at the kinds of “corruption narratives” that politicians offered in 2020. Using natural language processing, I analyze how Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders spoke about corruption. I show that while Biden tended to speak about corruption in a manner familiar to political scientists — as an abuse of public office for private gain – Sanders and Trump used “corruption” in a completely different way, referring to it as a quality of social groups, corporate interests, “foreign” values, or even the “system” as such. I then examine the “demand side,” using data from the American National Election Survey (ANES) to demonstrate how various forms of “corruption talk” may have played a role in voting outcomes. Finally, I situate the rise of the anti-establishment appeal in the context of the neoliberal turn and propose that the most powerful tool to fight right-wing populism is a discourse that acknowledges the “corruption” of the status-quo and appeals to the principle of popular sovereignty, thereby providing a liberal and inclusive alternative to populism

Great Problems of Grand Challenges: Problematizing Engineeringﾒs Understandings of Its Role in Society

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges for Engineering report has received a great deal of attention from legislators, policymakers, and educators, but what does it entail for social justice considerations in engineering? This article situates the Grand Challenges report as a cultural artifact of the engineering profession--an artifact that works to reinforce engineering's professional culture, recruit new members, and reassert engineering's legitimacy in the 21st century. As such, the Grand Challenges report provides a unique opportunity to understand and critique the role engineering envisions for itself in society. The articles in this special issue of IJESJP identify four central critiques of Grand Challenges: authorial particularism, double standards in engineering's contributions to these challenges, bracketing of the “social” from “technical” realms, and deterministic definitions of progress. These critiques call for increased reflexivity and broadened participation in how engineers define problems and attempt to solve them

Free to Punish? The American Dream and the Harsh Treatment of Criminals

We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the US over the period 1980-2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the “Reagan revolution” in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic opportunities and beliefs about punishment are correlated. We present three pieces of evidence (across countries, within the US and an experimental exercise) that are consistent with the model.