Name Ms. Manning ap capstone Seminar: Summer Assignment 2017

I would like to take the opportunity to welcome all of you to AP Seminar for the 2017- 2018 school year. I recognize that the summer offers all of you an opportunity to unwind and relax and I encourage you to do just that. However, in order to prepare yourself for the upcoming course I ask that you complete the following summer assignment.

The AP Capstone Program will provide you with instruction on how to research, write, and present college level works. This program is founded on a concept known as QUEST:

Question and Explore

Understand and Analyze Arguments

Evaluate Multiple Perspectives

Synthesize Ideas

Team, Transform, and Transmit

Using this framework we will attempt to look at a variety of topics through a number of different “lenses.” Some of the possible themes that we may consider throughout the year are listed below:

Scoring will be based on completeness, effort, and punctuality. Please do not get overwhelmed by the assignment or the sources within it. Just do your best. I am grading you based on completing the assignment to the best of your ability and do not expect that everyone will get everything completely correct.

Part 1: 5 pts

Part 2: 95 pts

Source A- 20 pts

Source B- 10 pts

Source C- 20 pts

Source D- 10 pts

Source E and F- 35 pts

Part 1: Due Tuesday August 1

E-mail me to introduce yourself and acknowledge that you have reviewed your summer assignment. My email address is: smanning@middleboro.k12.ma.us. The email should include the following:

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  In the subject line:
  
  • 
    Your first and last name – AP Seminar
    
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  In the body:
  
  • 
    “I have reviewed the summer assignment and am aware of my responsibilities” or “I have reviewed the summer assignment and have the following questions…”
    
  • 
    Why did you decide to take AP Seminar? What are your short/ long term goals and how will this course help you achieve them?
    
  • 
    What is your biggest concern about taking AP Seminar/ What can I do to help YOU succeed?
    
  • 
    What themes from the first page interest you most? Choose two and explain why they are of interest to you.
    

This summer assignment is desiged to introduce you to some of the skills that you will be utilizing throughout the year, focusing mainly on identifying claims and supporting evidence, and analyzing lines of reasoning.

Below you will find various articles and works of art all surrounding a common theme. The instructions will be given with each source.

Source A

Objective: Identify and analyze the author’s line of reasoning.

Instructions:

1. 
   Number the paragraphs
   
2. 
   Identify the author’s main idea or thesis.
   
3. 
   Analyze the author’s line of reasoning- the expression, organization, and sequence of ideas the author uses to present his argument.
   

In a room at the United Nations overlooking New York's East River, at a table as long as a tennis court, around 70 of the best minds in artificial intelligence recently ate a sea bass dinner and could not, for the life of them, agree on the coming impact of AI and robots.

This is perhaps the most vexing challenge of AI. There's a great deal of agreement around the notion that humans are creating a genie unlike any that's poofed out of a bottle so far--yet no consensus on what that genie will ultimately do for us. Or to us.

Will AI robots gobble all our jobs and render us their pets? Tesla CEO Elon Musk, perhaps the most admired entrepreneur of the decade, thinks so. He just announced his new company, Neuralink, which will explore adding AI-programmed chips to human brains so people don't become little more than pesky annoyances to new generations of thinking machines.

A few days before that U.N. meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin waved away worries that AI-driven robots will steal our work and pride. "It's not even on our radar screen," he told the press. When asked when we'll feel the intellectual heat from robots, he answered: "Fifty to 100 more years."

At the U.N. forum, organized by AI investor Mark Minevich to generate discussions that might help world leaders plan for AI, Chetan Dube, CEO of IPsoft, stood and said AI will have 10 times the impact of any technology in history in one-fifth the time. He threw around figures in the hundreds of trillions of dollars when talking about AI's effect on the global economy. The gathered AI chiefs from companies such as Facebook, Google, IBM, Airbnb and Samsung nodded their heads.

Is such lightning change good? Who knows? Even IPsoft's stated mission sounds like a double-edged ax. The company's website says it wants "to power the world with intelligent systems, eliminate routine work and free human talent to focus on creating value through innovation." That no doubt sounds awesome to a CEO. To a huge chunk of the population, though, it could come across as happy-speak for a pink slip. Apparently, if you're getting paid a regular wage to do "routine work," you're about to get "freed" from that tedious job of yours, and then you had better "innovate" if you want to, you know, "eat."

The folks from IBM talked about how its Watson AI will help doctors sift through much more information when diagnosing patients, and it will constantly learn from all the data, so its thinking will improve. But won't the AI start to do a better job than doctors and make the humans unnecessary? No, of course not, the IBMers said. The AI will improve the doctors, so they can help us all be healthier.

Hedge fund guys said robot trading systems will make better investing decisions faster, improving returns. They didn't seem too worried about their careers, even though some hedge funds guided solely by AI are already outperforming human hedge fund managers. Yann LeCun, Facebook's AI chief and one of the most respected AI practitioners, says AI will be used to discover and help eliminate biases and bring people together--yet for now, AI gets accused of uncovering our individual biases and serving up content that confirms and hardens them, thereby making half the country mad at the other half.

Grete Faremo, executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, beseeched technologists to slow down a bit and make sure the stuff they're inventing solves the world's great problems without making new ones. But another speaker, Ullas Naik of Streamlined Ventures, hinted at how quantum computing will soon greatly speed up development of thinking machines. He believes quantum computing is closer than most people think, and in case you don't know, a quantum computer will be so freakishly powerful, it will make any computer today seem as old-fashioned as an Amish buggy.

Put all this together, and AI might be the most wonderful technology we've yet created, helping humans get to a higher plane--if it doesn't turn against humans, Terminator style. Though most likely, it will land somewhere in between.

Here's a question worth considering: Is this AI tsunami really that different from the changes we've already weathered? Every generation has felt that technology was changing too much too fast. It's not always possible to calibrate what we're going through while we're going through it.

In January 1965, Newsweek ran a cover story titled "The Challenge of Automation." It talked about automation killing jobs. In those days, "automation" often meant electro-mechanical contraptions on the order of your home dishwasher, or in some cases the era's newfangled machines called computers. "In New York City alone," the story said, "because of automatic elevators, there are 5,000 fewer elevator operators than there were in 1960." Tragic in the day, maybe, but somehow society has managed without those elevator operators.

That 1965 story asked what effect the elimination of jobs would have on society. "Social thinkers also speak of man's 'need to work' for his own well-being, and some even suggest that uncertainty over jobs can lead to more illness, real or imagined." Sounds like the same discussion we're having today about paying everyone a universal basic income so we can get by in a post-job economy, and whether we'd go nuts without the sense of purpose work provides.

Just like now, back then no one knew how automation was going to turn out. "If America can adjust to this change, it will indeed become a place where the livin' is easy--with abundance for all and such space-age gadgetry as portable translators--and home phone-computer tie-ins that allow a housewife to shop, pay bills and bank without ever leaving her home." The experts of the day got the technology right, but whiffed on the "livin' is easy" part.

So for every pronouncement that AI is different--that the changes it will drive are coming at us faster and harder than anything in history--it's also worth wondering if we're seeing a rerun. For all we know, 50 years ago a group of technologists might have got together at the U.N. and expressed pretty much the same hopes and concerns as the AI group.

Except that was 1965. They would've talked over tuna casserole. At least the sea bass served at the U.N. confab represents progress.

Source B

Objective: Identify the central claim and give supporting evidence.

Instructions: Read the lyrics below and answer the questions that follow.

Mr. Roboto by Styx, 1984

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

You're wondering who I am

I've got a secret, I've been hiding under my skin

I'm just a man who needed someone

I'm not a robot without emotions

I'm just a man whose circumstances

I am the modren man

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto

Just when I needed to

The problem's plain to see

The time has come at last

1. 
   Number the paragraphs.
   
2. 
   Identify the author’s main idea or thesis.
   
3. 
   Analyze the author’s line of reasoning- the expression, organization, and sequence of ideas the author uses to present his argument.
   

Matt McFarland States News Service (June 6, 2016)

Google has launched a project to use artificial intelligence to create compelling art and music, offering a reminder of how technology is rapidly changing what it means to be a musician, and what makes us distinctly human.

Google's Project Magenta, announced Wednesday, aims to push the state of the art in machine intelligence that's used to generate music and art.

"We don't know what artists and musicians will do with these new tools, but we're excited to find out," said Douglas Eck, the project's leader in a blog post. Just as Louis Daguerre and George Eastman did not predict what Annie Leibovitz or Richard Avedon would do, "surely Rickenbacker and Gibson didn't have Jimi Hendrix or St. Vincent in mind."

Google has already released a song demonstrating the technology. The song was created with a neural network -- a computer system loosely modeled on the human brain -- which was fed recordings of a lot of songs. With exposure to tons of examples, the neural network soon begins to realize which note should come next in a sequence. Eventually the neural network learns enough to generate entire songs of its own.

The project has just begun so the only available tools now are for musicians with machine-learning expertise. Google hopes to produce -- along with contributors from outside Google -- more tools that will be useful to a broad group, including artists with minimal technical expertise.

[Google's psychedelic 'paint brush' raises the oldest question in art]

Efforts to use computers to make music stretch back decades. But experts say what's unique here is the extent of Google's computing power and its decision to share its tools with everyone, which may accelerate innovation.

"It's a potential game-changer because so many academics and developers in companies can get their hands on this library and can start to create songs and see what they can do," said Gil Weinberg, the director of Georgia Tech's center for music technology.

David Cope, a retired professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz and pioneer in computer generated music, believes it's inevitable that one day the best composers will use artificial intelligence to aid their work.

"It's going to rampage through the film music industry," Cope said. "It's going to happen just as cars happened and we didn't have the horse and buggy anymore." He's confident in this given the exponential growth of computing power, which for decades has doubled about every two years.

With digital tools improving so quickly, it's become difficult for musicians to stay on the cutting edge while also mastering their instrument of choice.

"The violinist uses the same instrument for a whole career potentially, and they develop the kind of virtuosity on that instrument because they have that intimate relationship with it day after day for years and years," said Peter Swendsen, an Oberlin professor of computer music and digital arts. "Software comes and goes in weeks sometimes."

Amper Music is a new start-up that like Google is interested in harnessing the latest software to create music. Amper uses artificial intelligence to create original songs that match the emotions a video producer wants to convey in their work. Creating the music takes only seconds.

"If you take the sum of everything that has affected music historically and add them together, in 20 or 30 years I think you'd look back and say, 'Wow, music AI rivals all of that,' said its co-founder, Drew Silverstein.

For now, the potential of music made with artificial intelligence is still largely unrealized. Silverstein is only beginning to tap the entertainment market in Los Angeles. The song Google's Magenta project released recently demonstrates what it's currently capable of, but also how much work lies ahead.

The machine-generated melody was primed with just four notes: C,C,G,G, by the Google Brain Team. (Project Magenta/Google)

"It is indeed very basic," said Swendsen, the Oberlin professor, after listening to the song. "That's not to say that the system they are using doesn't hold lots of promise or isn't working on a much deeper level than a simple random generator."

The emerging power of this technology is also a wake-up call for what makes us really human.

"A lot of the uniqueness that we like to ascribe to ourselves becomes threatened, said George Lewis, a professor of American music at Columbia University. "People have to get the idea out of their head that music comes from great individuals. It doesn't, it comes from communities, it comes from societies. It develops over many years and computers become a part of societies."

As machines have become more a part of our lives, we can count on them to share a hand in the artistic process. For the 75-year-old Cope, this is a great thing, and nothing to be afraid of.