Friday, August 29, 2025

Fall 2025

 

From: boredpanda.com/illustration-before-after-ai-fails/

  It's been a turbulent season in the Ontario colleges system. Decades of underfunding combined with a sharp curtailing of international student visas has led to the current cuts to staff and program suspensions. Despite the reccomendations from their own expert panel, the povincial government has committed to fund only half of what was advised. The province continues to fund the Ontario college system at less than half of what is spent in the rest of Canada.

 I love what I do and believe in the importance of our mission, but it is disheartening that, while only a minority of ontarians want to underfund education they seem to control the political landscape. This is not a challenge unique to our provice, but more of a design feature to keep control in the hands of the wealthy and prioritze their narrow interests. Left unchecked, you need only look south to see where this path leads.

  AI continues to make waves in the creative industries. The voices sounding alarms seem to be drowned out in the race to create, and profit from, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The superintelligence that will inevitably follow almost immediately afterwards is the part that keeps me up at night.

  Currently, I have found any image generation tools to be of limited utility although the surrealist hallucinations provide some entertainment value. I continue to agree that the hype over AI has more to do with investor desperation to recoup sunken development cost than actual utility. The speed at which the tools are evolving does warrant attention. With a great deal of luck, the long term result will be a virtual assistants freeing us from drudgery, allowing more time for creative pursuits and not some malignant intelligence bent on our annihilation.

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