先日おこなわれた「たのしい教育Cafe」で小禄さんが授業してくれた「折り染め習字」の様子です。
作品の一部を壁に張ってみました。
予想以上に壮観です。
これを30人とかのクラスでやると、もっとすごいでしょう。
ご覧ください。
人工知能｜コンピュータに心は芽生えるのか？
その頃の社会全体が、科学や技術の進歩にたくさんの夢と希望を重ねていたこともあったのでしょう、子どもの頃から科学・技術に大きな魅力を感じていました。
今でも科学・技術は様々な発展を見せています。
巧妙な「疑似科学」の台頭、「科学・技術に疑問を提唱する人たち」の考え方もあって、現代社会は、わたしが子どもの頃の様に両手を上げて迎えいれる様子はありません。しかし革新的という意味では、今の方が多大な成果を上げていると思います。
ところで小学校の頃から、わたしの心に宿っていた大きなテーマが、進歩によってコンピュータにも「心」が芽生えるのかということでした。
時は流れ、大学に入学した頃、やっとパーソナルコンピュータが普及し始めました。
今のiphoneの持つ処理能力の 1/1000 にも満たないコンピュータが150万円くらいした頃です。
何とかそれを手に入れ、プログラムを打ち込みながらコンピュータを学ぶうちに、
「人間が体系づけた命令系の延長にあるコンピュータに心が宿ることはない」
というのが私の一つの結論になりました。
ところで最近、画像認識に関する画期的理論ディープ・ラーニング（深層学習／多層構造学習）をきっかけに、〈人工知能〉が気になって学び始めています。
コンピュータが膨大な画像の中から「これはネコだ」「この数は１だ」と認識するプログラムは、かつてのコンピュータ技術からブレイク・スルー（画期的進歩）し、それがグーグルやカナダ トロント大学の成果ではっきりしてきました。
表面的にはわずかな変化に見えるかもしれませんが、コンピュータ自身による《教師なし学習》の可能性が見えてきたのです。
ノミの実験 （後編）｜板倉聖宣から学んだこと「王様は裸だ」
さて、前回紹介した「飛べなくなったノミと仲間の力で飛べる様になった（➡︎こちら）」という実験は本当なのでしょうか？
みなさんはどう思いますか？
二日間にまたがってweb上で検索してみましたが
「ご存じの方もいると思いますが」とか
「師匠から聞いた話ですが」とか「これは先輩から聞いた話」とか
「この話は有名な話なので聞いたことある方が多いと思いま
海外のサイトも調べてみました。
まず一つ、それらしいサイトに当たりました。
The Naked Scientists （裸の科学者）
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=11394.0
です。
しかしそこも
I found it on the web:（こんなwebサイトを見つけました）
という「伝聞」でした。
もともとは
Real Woman.（本物の女性）
http://www.realwomen.co.nz/content/view/43/17/
というサイトということです。
たどってみましょう。
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ノミ・トレーナーたちが観察したところによると・・・
Flea trainers have observed 〜
とありますが、いつどこで、どういう人なのかはわかりません。
しかも「ノミ・トレーナー」ってどういう仕事なのでしょう？
もっといろいろたどると
The 100 Top Inspirational Anecdotes and Stories
（高いインスピレーションを与える逸話と物語100）
https://books.google.co.jp/books
に似た内容が書かれています。
しかし、そこにも「ノミのトレーナーたちが観察したところ」と始まります。
名前も実験の日時も記されていません。
また、ノミを箱の中で閉じ込めてあと開けても外に飛び出ないという話はありますが、「仲間のノミを入れると、また高くジャンプした」という話はありませんでした。
もう一つ
LOST POTENTIAL Why Kids Give UP!
（失われた可能性 どうして子どもたちは諦めるのか）
https://books.google.co.jp/books
にも関連する記述が見つかりました。
文章上から十行目にこうあります。
I once heard about an experiment where fleas were caught, placed in a box and a lid placed on top of it. The fleas would jump again and again and again in attempt to get out.
私は以前、こういう話を聞いた事があります。閉じ込められた箱の中でノミは外に出ようと何度も何度も何度もジャンプします…
またもや『伝聞』です。
たどっていくのはここまでにしましょう。
もしもこのノミの話がきちんとした実験結果によるものだとしたら、「誰が、いつ、どこで」くらいの情報はすぐに入手できるはずですが、ここまで探してもたどることはできませんでした。
わたしの結論は
「ノミの話は〈ゆでガエル〉と同じく〈作り話〉である」
感動的な話はどんどん広まっていきます。しかしそれは本当の話ではなく「つくり話」である可能性があるのです。
もしも読んでくださっているみなさんの中で〈この実験は真実である〉という場合には連絡をください。ソースをたどって確かめてみたいと思います。
いろいろな人たちが「わからないことはわからない」と声をあげる。つまり子ども達の様に「裸の王様を、ハダカだ！」と声をあげてはじめて、一歩先にすすむことができるのです。私が板倉聖宣から学んだ重要な一つが、この事です。
長くなりました。
わたしが先生たちに初めて話した、このノミの話を「それは誰の実験ですか？」と聞いてくれたＲ先生に感謝しつつ、この項を閉じたいと思います。
たのしい教育で届けるのは「力」と「笑顔」と「元気」です！
たのしく実力ある教師を育てる活動も「たのしい教育研究所」の大切な仕事です。
スティブ・ジョブスのスピーチ
有名なスピーチなのですでに見た方もいると思いますが、教師になるために学んでいる方たちの中には、スティーブ・ジョブスを詳しく知らない方もいますから、ここに紹介させていただきます。
キリスト教由来で「B.C.／A.D. 紀元前／紀元後」という言葉がありますが、コンピュータを一般の人たちに普及させたという、人類への大いなる貢献で言えば
B.J.／A.J. ジョブス以前／ジョブス以後
と区切りたいところです。
わたしが時々語る
学ぶ中で「点」から「線」となり「面」となる。そしてそれが身体をもったものとして自分の中でイメージできるようになって生きる力となる。
という話も、ここに掲載したジョブスの言葉をきっかけにしたものです。まず聞いてみてください。
スピーチ英文を掲載します。
Thank you. I’m honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “We’ve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?” They said, “Of course.” My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story,” and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important thing I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for “prepare to die.” It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
沖縄から世界にたのしい教育を発信する「たのしい教育研究所」。
届けているのは「力」と「元気」と「笑顔」です！