Episode 74: Tony Bates === Intro Music and Opening Quote --- [00:00:00] Tony Bates: It's a very narrow view. I'm all for Open Education Resources, my book's an open education resource. But, it is dabbling around the edges. There are a lot more important barriers to people accessing higher education still today that really isn't addressed by making books free. It's a much deeper problem than that. ... [00:00:26] Tony Bates: Access has changed a great deal and I think that, although there are barriers and some people are excluded, it's much more open and accessible now than it was, say, 50, 60 years ago, but then it damn well should be, shouldn't it? Otherwise you're not making any progress. Welcome to OE Global Voices --- [00:00:47] Alan Levine: Hello everybody, welcome again to OE Global Voices. This is a podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global. Every episode, we want to bring you conversation style, people, practices, ideas from educators from around the world. I'm your humble host, editor, and button clicker, Alan Levine. Introducing Dr. Tony Bates --- [00:01:05] Alan Levine: I'm really honored to have with me in the studio, a really, to me, a legend in the field of open education, Dr. Tony Bates. I was looking at his site and his full bio is 60 pages long, Tony, so I'm not going to read that. Is that okay? [00:01:18] Tony Bates: Yeah, that's great. [00:01:19] Alan Levine: Tony's been part of so many things, and he's been writing about it on his blog. He was there at the founding of the Open University. He's been leading research, writing books, traveling around the world. And I was fortunate to spend some time with Tony at a conference in in Guadalajara. And I've just been reading your blog a long time, and it's really been informative for me, especially over the last few months where you've been writing, I counted 20 posts, covering key points in your career. It just shows that you're still really keenly interested and active, in our field because, I read this thing where you created an AI bot. We had an email exchange over that. And just to me, that illustrates, you know, how you're still active and keenly interested. So I'm talking way too long. Let's get to our conversation. Hello and welcome, Tony. How are you today? [00:02:07] Tony Bates: I'm great. Yep. [00:02:08] Alan Levine: I like to ask people so we know where they are in the world. They usually would say a city a city and a country , but I also like to ask, where you're situated, where you're sitting and what do you see right now? [00:02:18] Tony Bates: Well, I'm sitting, on the traditional territories of the Musqueam and Coast Salish people, in Kitsilano in Vancouver. I'm looking out at the North Shore Mountains, an old house behind us being completely renovated and turned into three apartments. And a huge crane, building, probably a 12 story apartment block, which tells you everything you need to know about Vancouver. [00:02:43] Alan Levine: I can visualize it. I know those views and they're beautiful. Tony Bates' Early Life and Education --- [00:02:46] Alan Levine: So, where did you grow up? Where'd you spend your childhood years? [00:02:50] Tony Bates: I was brought up in England, I actually went to school with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones. I didn't know that until I read Keith Richards autobiography. I actually lived around the corner from him in Dartford in Kent. They were four years younger than me, so I probably beat the hell out of them. That's why, the way they, they are. So I think I can claim some credit for the edginess of the Stones. But they're not my favorite band, I have to tell you. [00:03:19] Alan Levine: So we'll diverge. Who's your favorite band? [00:03:22] Tony Bates: Well, I'm a jazz fan, so Gerry Mulligan's my favorite. [00:03:26] Alan Levine: Excellent. You never cease to amaze me. You grew up with the Rolling Stones! What did you think of school at that time of your youth? What kind of student were you? [00:03:35] Tony Bates: I was a reasonably good student. I got through my, in Britain you had a selective system at the age 11. I passed my Eleven Plus, went to a very traditional, English grammar school for two years. My parents moved to East London and I went to a less traditional grammar school there. [00:03:57] Alan Levine: What did you think you would be as an adult when you were in that part of your life? [00:04:01] Tony Bates: [laughs] I had no idea. [00:04:03] Alan Levine: Who does, right? [00:04:04] Tony Bates: Yeah, it really was day to day. I realized by the age of seven, I'd never be a professional footballer, which is really what I wanted to be. so, yeah, it was day to day after that. Founding of the Open University --- [00:04:17] Alan Levine: I started with your first part of your series, which is, of course, is how you were there at the founding of the Open University, What I understand is at the time, from the top level, there was this real strong motivation to create, what they called University of the Air. What was their idea what that would look like at the time in the early sixties? [00:04:36] Tony Bates: Yeah, I think you have to understand the background a bit. Only 8 percent of kids left school and went to university in Britain in 1969. That's when The Open University was started. Basically, it was a political decision by the, then sort of left the center Labor government under Harold Wilson, to expand access to higher education. So this is back in, you know, 60 years ago. It's not a new thing, this idea of expanding higher education. It was first of all thought of as the University of the Air, but it became quite clear to the planning committee that it had to be more than that. They came around really with the idea that print would be the primary medium, with television and radio supporting the print documents. But they wanted the BBC for the prestige. If the BBC was producing the programs, then although it was a flaky kind of university, it must have something about it. The BBC component was, was quite important from a public relations perspective and getting the enrollments. Uh, the surprising things about The Open University is. when it opened, it opened with 24, 000 new students across the whole country. So, it was looking at large numbers, making access open to a very large number of people. One of the things that saved the university was that at that time, there was no graduate teacher education. There were teacher training colleges. This is a way for a very well educated workforce to get university experience. That actually was one of the success factors of the Open University-- these very keen, , bright people came in, even though it was meant to expand, to everybody. , In the early days, the teachers, or the prospective teachers, were a very important audience forthe Open University. Challenges and Innovations at the Open University --- [00:06:34] Alan Levine: So how did you come into this role to be there at that time? What was the entré for you to be able to do this work.? [00:06:41] Tony Bates: There were two things. One was pure accident. I was a full time education researcher working on a government project looking at the administration of very large high schools. That contract came to an end and I needed another one. York University had this advertisement for a research officer to look at. open and distance education. The second one is more personal. Uh, I get into university when I left school. For various reasons, partly family reasons, , I had really bad career advice at my old grammar school. "If you can't get into Oxford or Cambridge, don't bother boy", you know. And it was due to really luck that I was working as a lowly clerk on the railway. A friend of mine said, "Why don't you try and get a grant to go to teacher's training college? Because you're obviously miserable in this job", which I was. I went up to the London County Council and walked into this huge building on the Thames and found the right office eventually. But it was lunchtime. I had gone in my lunchtime, nobody was there. And then the door opened at the back and out walked this civil servant who looked a lot like Bill Nye, the actor. I remember that very clearly. He was putting his coat on to go to lunch and he looked at me and I could see him go, "What do you want?" And I said, "Well, I'm wondering if I can get a grant. He took his coat off, "Come and sit down. How many O levels? How many A levels? Why don't you want to go to university?" But I haven't got the qualifications. And he asked me what I got, and he said, "Well, yeah, you can get into any university in Britain except Oxford and Cambridge. What are you waiting for?" And so I got a grant and went to university. When the idea of the Open University came, open to anybody, you know, you didn't have to have any qualifications. Uh, Anybody could enrol for it. I thought "That's a fantastic idea." So I,I was highly motivated to get a job there. [00:08:34] Alan Levine: In the post you wrote about this period in your career, you included included that clip from the first chancellor of the Open University about the meaning of open. [audio inserted from Lord Crowther's inaugural address] [00:08:43] Lord Crowther: "But we are the open university and it is fitting that I should try to outline on what that claim is based and what we take it to mean. We are open, first, as to people. Not for us, the carefully regulated escalation from one educational level to the next by which the traditional universities establish their criteria for admission. We took it as axiomatic, said the planning committee, that no formal academic qualifications would be required for registration as a student. Anyone could try his or her hand, and only failure to progress adequately would be a bar to continuation of studies." [00:09:30] Alan Levine: It really embodies what you just described there. It's like giving people who didn't think they had the chance to get an education to do it by any means. And you write that it still rings true for you today. How do you see open education right now? [00:09:43] Tony Bates: I see it as very narrow. It's a very narrow view. I'm all for Open Education Resources, my book's an open education resource. But, it is dabbling around the edges. There are a lot more important barriers to people accessing higher education still today that really isn't addressed by making books free or, you know, it's a much deeper problem than that. It's still big financial barriers for many. There's not a lot of opportunities for second chance degree education still. Even in Canada, you know, there's continuing education and so on, but that's not quite the same. Access has changed a great deal and I think that although there are barriers and some people are excluded, it's much more open and accessible now than it was, say, 50, 60 years ago, but then it damn well should be, shouldn't it, so, otherwise you're not making any progress. [00:10:40] Alan Levine: Let's dial back to those first years. Like day to day, what were you working on and what was the first wave of open education looking like at the OU? [00:10:49] Tony Bates: Yeah, it was very interesting. They imported Systems Thinking from the US and David Merrill's approach to instructional design. I don't know if that predated him or post dated him, but it was that type of systematic approach to course design that they brought in. And that was really important. It worked very well, actually, for very large numbers. It's a very good model,very clear learning objectives, make sure that all the media reinforce each other. It was quite fun working on those early course teams. You had quite big teams of about 30 people. Half of them would be academics, but the other half would be instructional designers, uh, BBC producers. Part time tutors will be represented often on the course team so that they could feed back what they were getting from the students into the course design. But it took about nine months to develop a course. It wasn't a quick form of online and distance -- well, I wasn't even online then. My job was to evaluate the TV and radio programs that the BBC made. And that was very interesting because the BBC is, uh, I forget -- there was a Greek word that covers them and I can't remember. Hubris. Hubris is the word I'm looking for. So no matter hubris about the BBC, especially then they could do no wrong. They were the experts in using television. So anybody coming up and saying, "Well, I'm sorry, but that didn't work. The students didn't learn anything from this. In fact, you pissed them off." And they said, well, that's the student's fault. It's not, not our fault. Oh, it was very interesting discussions in the bar at the BBC after I presented my reports. In the end, the relationship with the Open University and the BBC was very good. There were some brilliant. absolutely brilliant television producers who , especially in Mathematics who took very abstract principles and provided concrete examples, helped a lot of students. But also there was a lot of, very loosely designed documentary programs that completely lost the students. These are part time students, uh, they were working. They didn't have time basically. They wanted more didactic lecture type programs, which the BBC didn't do. And I'm glad they didn't do because one of the things that my research showed is that there were things that television or video is very good for and is difficult to do in any other way, but you have to find what those unique affordances are. Good BBC producers were able to do that. They also were all graduates in the field in which they worked. Somebody who was doing a Physics program actually had a degree in Physics. So,they did have a good understanding of the subject area as well. That was very, very interesting. And then new technologies came in like audio cassettes and video cassettes, video discs, and we just kept evaluating the effect and so on. From very interesting things like audio, we found that generally, you know, this is a generalization, doesn't apply to everybody. But most people that we researched found audio more personal, that they felt they got closer to the lecturer through listening to an audio, a radio broadcaster or an audio cassette. The other thing was that we found that cassettes, actually changed the design principles because students could stop and start. You could build that into the design of a cassette. And then the learning effectiveness went right up. We had a perfect laboratory situation where we had exactly the same program in audio and radio and exactly the same as a recording. Then we could look at what students learn as a result. We could then change the design of the cassettes and see what happened then and look at the results. Because we had such large numbers of students, we got very statistically significant results. [00:14:47] Alan Levine: First of all, I'm thinking about, the scale of things that you're were doing. How did you communicate and coordinate because, you know, that was a time before we had a lot of communication channels. [00:14:58] Tony Bates: Yeah. Well, that came a bit late. What they had was a regional system of tutors. So,students could go to a local study center, often in the local college, they rent rooms, the university, and there'll be a local tutor in that subject area who would give face to face classes. And these tutors had a union and were represented at senate so they could feed back what was going on and what students liked and didn't like. That's how the university got most of its communication. But for the research, we did two things mainly. We did postal surveys. We put surveys in with the course materials and asked them when they sent their assignments in to return the questionnaires. And we went to the local centers and showed a video to a selective group, about 15, 20 students and got their qualitative feedback and combined that with the survey results. Yeah, it was, pretty labor intensive. I had some really good researchers working with me who went on to become top names in the field, like Diana Laurillard. It was great fun. [00:16:09] Alan Levine: So the arc of the career, what evolved at the Open University? And then we want to get to you jumping the pond over to Canada. How did those programs evolve? Obviously it sounded like you had more interaction or feedback to the BBC on that side and you were developing your own materials. [00:16:27] Tony Bates: Yeah, and also a lot of policy decisions for the university. Because television and radio was a scarce resource, they had to bid for resources. It wasn't a kind of automatic allocation, and so we developed a set of criteria for judging those proposals on the basis of the research that we'd done. What were the proposals most likely to be effective? On transmission times, there was a big fight over transmission times. The BBC wanted to push all the times into five o'clock in the morning and so on. And we could produce very effective data showing the bad effect of that. [00:17:08] Alan Levine: I'm just thinking like it's really a profound amount of vision and progressive thinking that supported doing this because some of this was unproven, you know, and you were proving it with your research. The kind of leadership that you're describing, to be able to do this is rather impressive. [00:17:24] Tony Bates: Yeah, we had a great vice chancellor who he was a medic, a medical educator from Scotland. Walter Perry. He was very dynamic leader. He fought the government if he didn't get the support he wanted. He was willing to make difficult decisions. He would take on Senate if he felt it wasn't really supporting students, for instance. And we had some very good deans, too. I mean, there was a lot of, ideological commitment of the staff towards the concept of open education that sort of drove the university in in its early days. Then after about 20 years, like every kind of institution, it became bureaucratic and lost its lost its dynamism, which is why I left. And I left over online learning, actually. [00:18:15] Alan Levine: Really? Transition to Online Learning and Move to Canada --- [00:18:16] Tony Bates: What happened was that I actually saw the internet for the first time in Vancouver when I was visiting a friend. I thought this is the best way to use computers in education, not this, programmed learning stuff, which I didn't really like because it wasn't in my view, achieving the higher level cognitive skills that you'd want from university students. It's all about memorization and so on. So I thought, yeah, yes, we can use computers for communication between students and between students and instructors, that's great. And a colleague, Tony Kay and I we tried this out on a social science, uh, second level course called DT 200. [00:19:03] Alan Levine: My wife was a student. We sent everybody a computer in a box and they had to set up the computer and a printer. I had to connect the computer and the printer. It was the day of DIP switches. My wife had come across the room trying to put this thing together and she says, "You've got to help me." I said, I can't, I can't, I'm on the course. I had no idea how to do it, you know?you have to listen to her though, right? That's a conflict. [00:19:29] Tony Bates: Yeah. But we tried very hard and it was very successful. We had, very good, community, It was, it was really before, um, discussion forums. It was actually a Canadian system, University of Guelph's CoSy system that we used. It was computer based communication. It was very successful, but we couldn't get the university to move away from the other. You know, it invested so heavily at a huge print operation. Of course, there was the BBC as well. Just adding this on top of everything else without replacing something wasn't going to work. I got frustrated. My wife and I met in Canada. So we wanted to go to Canada and that was a good time for me to move. After 20 years, you know, 20 years is enough in any institution. [00:20:18] Alan Levine: I'm a little curious the thing that you saw that you said the internet sparked you, what was it that your colleague or friend showed you in Vancouver? remember what it was? [00:20:28] Tony Bates: I didn't know him very well. He's David Kaufman from Simon Fraser University. And he said, "Come down to my basement. I've got something interesting to show you." So I was a bit nervous and went down and he had a standard, I think it was a Microsoft computer,, standard computer at the time. And this black box, which was a modem connected to the telephone. And,he said, "Look at this." And up came a screen with a list of names. It was basically an email list and you clicked on it and it was live. So if anybody was actually online, it would. bleep on their screen and they'd answer. So somebody answered from New York. We thought, Oh, this is neat. We started chatting about the weather and so on. And I said, ask him how old he is. And he came back, he was 12 years old. It was one o'clock in New York. And I thought that was a very appropriate way to be introduced to the internet. [00:21:25] Alan Levine: So your big jump to Vancouver. and that was your work with the Online Learning Agency was the first leg of your career there? [00:21:32] Tony Bates: That was my first job for five years. Yeah. I really had a kind of management job there. Which is what I wanted. I'd been doing research for 20 years and giving advice, but never having the responsibility for the decisions. I got fed up with advising people and not being listened to. So I thought, okay, actually, it's much better to advise people than have to make decisions yourself. And,then I got recruited by UBC, I, moved there and was in Continuing Studies, mainly due to Walter Uegama, who was the director of Continuing Studies at the time. The government-- I don't know if you remember in 1995, 96, they withheld 1 percent or 2 percent of every institution's budget for one year and 1 percent for another year, and put it into a fund for the institutions to reapply for innovative teaching. And UBC being smart they put it all together as an institutional bid was about two and a half million dollars. And they got that back from the government. And so they were looking at what's the best way to spend this two and a half million? Now we've got it. I wasn't responsible for that, but it's brought in as part of that momentum that, got the university looking at, using educational technology more. We weren't talking about online learning at that time. We were just, "How do we use technology better?" But it was a very interesting time in the early 90s because all kinds of technology was coming together like electronic publishing. It was easier to create online courses. You didn't have to have that massive teams that they had at UBC because you could get stuff up on the web. When the worldwide web came in it really opened up the prospects for online and distance education. [00:23:18] Alan Levine: Yeah. Did you run into that computer science professor who invented an LMS? [00:23:23] Tony Bates: Again, a bit like the Rolling Stones, you know, I had contact, but, and I claim credit... Murray Goldberg wanted some money actually to hire ,a research student to actually bring WebCT to a viable product. And I had some money for distance education. So Dan Birch, the provost, called me and said, "Would you mind giving this bright young man some money?" And so I did. I wasn't like a venture capitalist, but it was money in into it that helped him get going. Um, Murray and I worked quite closely together. We immediately used WebCT, um, once it was ready for our first courses. So we were right in at the beginning of that. But Murray deserves all the credit. Didn't get a lot of credit from the Computer Science department for it, butthat's another story. [00:24:18] Alan Levine: Yeah,he went bigger. Open Publishing and Blogging --- [00:24:19] Alan Levine: You've written a lot of books, what was the impetus to do that? And, why did you decide to publish openly? [00:24:26] Tony Bates: Two reasons, mainly. First of all, had a good career. Let me back up a little bit. I've published several books commercially. It's damned hard work and you get very little money for it. = The publishers take 80 percent of the money, if you're lucky. If you're not, they take 90%. You do all the work. The one reason for going through a big publisher is for them to market it. They ended up asking me, whenever you go to a conference, please take a hundred books with you to sell at a conference. I was a bit pissed off with commercial publishers who I thought were being actually lazy and were not aware of what was happening in the online publishing world. They were really out of date and they still are actually. And secondly, I've had a good career. I mean, I've been paid mainly out of public funds. I've been working for universities or for public institutions all my life, nearly. I was fairly mature in my career. I'd more or less retired from universities, but I was working as a consultant. Frankly, I didn't need the money, not for the, problems of going through a commercial publisher and having them cream 80 percent of the money off. But the third is of course, I believe in open publishing. That's really important. BCcampus had launched its own textbook projects and I was very supportive of that. They were very supportive of me when I went to them and said, "Will you help me do an open textbook?" [00:25:56] Alan Levine: Hmm. [00:25:57] Tony Bates: They've been great ever since. That was the real impetus. And I wanted it read. A lot more people will read an open online textbook. Unfortunately BCcampus doesn't track book downloads very well. After about, I think it was half a million, they stopped counting, um,the number of downloads. I just reviewed an open textbook that came from Springer. Um, it was on future skills and it's in a PDF format. It's awful. You know, you,keep jumping when you get to the end of the page and you miss a paragraph. Where's it gone? They haven't learned anything. The publishers from about open publishing. They're still using a 1990s technology PDF format for downloading open textbooks. The great thing about an open textbook is how flexible it is, how easy it is to look things up and go straight to what you're looking for. You just search for something, uh, search through a whole book. It's not just the ideological thing, which I think is very important, but also pretty pragmatic thing that open textbooks are much more accessible than standard textbooks. [00:27:08] Tony Bates: Readers - they're much better and it's in relatively interactive as well. You know, I could put podcasts in for instance. I can put activities in for students and I could provide feedback through the podcast for instance. So, there's much more flexibility. All publishers are doing are taking basically PDF copies and shoving them up on the web, which is, totally ignoring the potential of the technology. [00:27:34] Alan Levine: Yeah. It's a book model versus a web model, which you described so well. "Teaching in a Digital Age" was the first one you did with BCcampus? [00:27:42] Tony Bates: Yeah. It's the same book three times. It's in the third edition. That's another great thing about an open textbook. You can update it as you go. You don't have to wait five years. So on the section on artificial intelligence, I can just go in now and update that, and it's still current. I don't have to rewrite the whole book and go through a whole new publishing process and so on. So there's so much flexibility in open textbooks. I try to explain that to traditional academics, but to be fair, they need books published by recognized publishers in order to get ahead in their careers. But I, I'm saying to people, you know, when they get to 50, 60, you don't need this. What you need is people to read your work, and if you want, it read, then get it into an open textbook. [00:28:33] Alan Levine: And I've always gotten the impression you get a lot of feedback, people contact you and they tell you where they're using it, which you might not get as much commercially, right? [00:28:41] Tony Bates: You get comments coming. I, I you know, once a week I get a comment come in on the textbook because there's the opportunity for people to comment on each section on the book. [00:28:53] Alan Levine: In reading your series, I'm really touched. There's a fair amount of humor in your history. There's, kerfluffles that happen with your travel, your computers get stolen, and even there was the hurling of buns. Why does this happen to you, Tony? [00:29:08] Tony Bates: To be honest, I started writing my autobiography for my family and I wanted to make it interesting. I wanted my grandkids and great grandkids to read it. So I, I wanted it to be fairly amusing. Secondly, one of the few great things about being really old is you don't care anymore. I mean, if somebody realizes I was fired three times in my career, you know, to put that up when you're 24, but when you're 85, you don't care, you know? You can tell these stories without being worried about. somebody said, say, "well, yeah, he's an idiot! He's done some useful stuff, but yeah, he, messed up a few times, right?" Well, we all mess up a few times in our lives. I thought it'd be fun to share it on my blog, you know, I hope they enjoy the stories. [00:29:54] Alan Levine: It's very human. Well, this reader does. and speaking of which, you've been a very avid blogger for a long time. many people have put that aside. What's your motivation for continuing blogging your interest in your work? [00:30:07] Tony Bates: Yeah, there's not so much readership now as it say five or ten years ago. Right. I am probably not really up to date on how best to publicize it. I use LinkedIn and I still unfortunately use X occasionally to bring attention to it because there are still quite a few people using Twitter. you know, what's happened with the social media scene, it's become fragmented. So it's harder now to bring all. messages to one spot. It's a bit harder to publicize it. And also, you know, the stuff I'm writing is more personal now and probably less important than saying, "here's the latest theory on AI", you know? But the reason I keep the blog going is it gives me something useful to do with my time, now I'm retired. There's a limit to how many times I can play golf in a week. I'm telling these stories for my kids. And if I think it's appropriate for a wider audience, then I put it up. [00:31:00] Alan Levine: What do the kids think of the stories? [00:31:02] Tony Bates: Uh, they haven't read them yet. [00:31:03] Alan Levine: Well, shame. [00:31:05] Tony Bates: Burn my heart, my toughest audience. [00:31:10] Alan Levine: I'm intrigued. Reflections on Artificial Intelligence --- [00:31:11] Alan Levine: I mean, we mentioned artificial intelligence and it shows me a sign that you're still keenly interested. , I can't really ask you, what's your take? But are you positive? Are you curious? And what direction do you think we're going in with education? [00:31:26] Tony Bates: I have to say that. I've heard the hype about artificial intelligence since 1982, I think, when they set up, another research group at the Open University to look into, computer based learning and artificial intelligence. And it had never failed to deliver until the last couple of years. And I have to say that ChatGPT was a game changer. My take on it, I'm fairly pessimistic. Mainly because my real concern these days is about the power of the big tech companies. I fear it will be taken over by the big tech companies. We'll see their share prices and stocks go up and the money will go to the venture capitalists. And we'll all be worse off as a result. That's the negative part about it. Now on the positive side, I think yes, in medical research, in legal affairs, it will be very good. I met a colleague, a good friend of mine actually, who's trying to do research on whether AI can actually improve on the instructional design process. In what ways can AI improve? He's thinking of taking Merrill's approach and seeing if it can be automated through AI. That will put a lot of my friends out of work if he does that. So I have those concerns. The problem is that , although they talk about neural networks, and I know Stephen Downes talks a lot about this, they're not the same as human neural networks. They don't operate in the way that humans think. They replicate the way, but they don't work in that way. Let me give you an example. ChatGPT is basically a probabilistic machine that looks at the likely consequences of one word being followed by another, right? And if you put enough stuff through it, uh, then it's going to be pretty accurate in predicting what the next word's likely to be. That doesn't mean to say it understands what it's doing. Now, Stephen would say, "well, how do we know?" But it's not the way that we think. , We might sometimes want to finish somebody's sentence, you know, because we know where they're going, but it's not really the way we generally converse. It's done in a different way. Now, we have a lot of psychological research about how people think. That's when I would get really concerned if AI gets hold of that and starts writing algorithms based on how humans actually think and not the way the computer scientists think they think. [00:34:05] Tony Bates: The other thing is the lack of transparency. That is a big problem. If you don't know how the algorithms work, and even the people who write the algorithms, if it's machine learning, don't know how they're working because they've changed as a result of whatever exposure they've had to data, then it becomes very worrisome because you've got no control over it whatsoever. And I have absolutely no faith in the big tech companies being able to, take ethical and responsible decisions in this area. They'll go where the money is. [00:34:38] Alan Levine: Oh yeah, [00:34:39] Tony Bates: And so that's my real negative concern about AI, not, AI itself, but it's like weapons and guns. It's, how they use that matters. And do you have faith in the arms industry, not to make horrible weapons? No, I don't because it's the way they make money and it's exactly the same with AI. It could be very useful, and probably will be in many areas, but it's open to huge amounts of, misappropriation. [00:35:11] Alan Levine: Right. and, you know, what say do we have in this? Are we gonna be swept along? What's our agency? And so I really like that sentiment. Like word association, I'm thinking back to what, you're talking about when we first got on the screen. You're talking about going to the market and cooking fresh halibut. That has no connection to what we were talking about. And, the mind does these multiple jumps that I find interesting. I'm happy with knowing, that the way our minds work can't be replicated yet by a computer. [00:35:41] Tony Bates: Well, I think they can though. That's the worrying thing. I think eventually they will be. Some AI people are working with, , neuroscientists and so on. Neuroscience is different from psychology. Neuroscience is like looking at a car battery, it doesn't actually tell you exactly where you're going to go with the car, you know. [00:36:02] Alan Levine: You have to be careful here about the analogies that people draw. If you're going to draw analogies, you have to have ones that are appropriate to the situation. Excellent. Well, it's been such a fun conversation, Tony. Closing Thoughts and Future Plans --- [00:36:13] Alan Levine: I appreciate it. I want to ask what's next? I mean, you're still very interested in your following things. you got golf coming up, you got family and you've got dinner that you're cooking tonight. Is there anything else that's piquing your curiosity these days? [00:36:27] Tony Bates: Not really.I like watching sport and TV and so on, so I've been watching the Euros and despairing at England. Another story, I was there in 1966 at Wembley when they won, and it was an amazing occasion. I paid a pound for the ticket, which was about two dollars. Those were the days. [00:36:52] Alan Levine: I have to say, you're an inspiration, Tony, your kindness, your humor, your dedication, and such an illustrious career that's still going. And I found out that you grew up with the Rolling Stones, like, where does it end? [00:37:05] Tony Bates: I They, they they will deny [00:37:09] Alan Levine: Well, I'll, I'll get Mick on the podcast and we'll see what can evolve. I'm going to thank you, Tony again. Each episode I pick a different musical intro track from the Free Music Archive. I thought about the themes of some of Tony'swork. I selected a track called "Distance" by an artist named Anitek that's licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial. You'll find this episode on our website VoicesOEGlobal. org and we hope you engage in follow up conversations with Tony in our OEG Connect community. And if anybody's listening, wants to share your ideas, your career, your ideas on AI or anything or suggest a future guest, um, please let us know.I, I just can't say thank you again enough, Tony. I really appreciate this. I like that we have this connection. [00:37:53] Tony Bates: No, it's a pleasure, I, I listen to your podcasts, I really enjoy them, so I feel honored to be invited. Thank you.