We started off our fifth Tok day with a couple of book presentations followed by an analysis of the mock exhibition we wrote the last Tok day about language and technology. We analysed the exhibition of another student followed by writing down the key arguments in one sentence.
As an introduction into technology we looked at how it can be used to access as well as to acquire new knowledge and how it can change the quality of the knowledge available to humankind.
During the discussion we came up with the question: „What is technology? “Technology refers to objects which require technological know-how to be made and which are often created for a knowledge related purpose. We further looked at the evolution of writing technologies. From stone to papyrus to the printing press and nowadays the internet. This lead us to wonder in what ways technology helps us store more information. Technology gives us the possibility of storing our information in two ways, in physical and technical form.
In short, technology is one of the most important parts of dissemination (creation of knowledge and passing it on). Just like the printing press, the newer technological invention of the internet will change society due to the huge amount of information being made relatively easy to access for society.
During all of our ToK days we have talked about knowledge a lot. But what is the difference between knowledge, data and information? We asked ourselves this question and came to the solution, that data are observations. This contains simple measurements which are hard to compare and difficult to understand. Information is processed data, for example a graph. And Knowledge is information which can be applied to find a correlation.
These definitions became even more important in the afternoon. Mr Chau introduced us to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and how machine learning works.
We can break down AI‘s into three groups: weak AI, medium AI and strong AI. This means, that the weak AI can only solve specific problems, the medium AI can solve problems equivalent to humans and the strong AI is better than human at problem solving.
This raises the question, how does a machine get better at problem solving than humans?: Machine learning. But what does this contain?
Basically, it consists of humans feeding the AI data. The AI then tries to learn from this data to create more knowledge.
The process of machine learning can be very complicated and is not always fully comprehensible due to it‘s complexity.
To end of the day, we got to experience ourselves, just how complex machine learning can be, by attempting to complete simple exercises.
