Through Time
Open courses for an age when a machine can do your thinking for you: how it works, how to work with it, and how to keep thinking for yourself.
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New here? Start with the prologue of the web course: your own site assembles itself.
Understand the machine and work with it
People who understand how the machine works can set it tasks and check its answers, instead of believing in magic.
The Web, End to End
How the web works, from the first page of 1991 to agents. In each era you build your own site again.
The machine 154 lessons availableAI: from symbols to agents
The whole history of artificial intelligence: rules, chatbots, neural networks, GPT, the labs, AGI and ASI, and what follows tomorrow.
Next: this course will be filled first, one lesson at a time.
The machine 41 lessons coming soonWorking with a machine: from a request to an agent
How to set a machine a task, hand it real work, limit what it may touch and check the result, even if you have never programmed.
The machine 18 lessons coming soonYour own tools: small programs and local models
How to build yourself a spreadsheet, a script or a local model without being a programmer, read code you did not write and keep your data safe.
The machine 16 lessons coming soonWork: tasks, careers and small organizations
How to break your job into tasks, decide what to learn next and count whether AI paid for itself in a small team.
The machine 17 lessons coming soon
The Noetic Singularity
At NoeticEcho we hold that people must develop their minds so as not to be left behind by superintelligence, and we call that aim the Noetic Singularity. It is an aim and a bet, not a forecast.
The Noetic Singularity: not falling behind
NoeticEcho’s aim is that people develop their minds and do not fall behind superintelligence: what that means and what can be said against it.
Your own mind 19 lessons coming soonAttention: who decides where yours goes
How attention works, what research says about it, and what feeds, notifications and chatbots do to it.
Your own mind 17 lessons coming soonMemory and writing: thinking when a machine remembers and drafts
What to hand to the machine and what to keep: memory, writing, reading and the skills that can fade when you stop using them.
Your own mind 18 lessons coming soonLearning something new: what holds up and what is legend
Which ways of learning have evidence behind them, how not to trust the feeling of knowing, and how to study with AI without it doing your thinking.
Your own mind 18 lessons coming soonReasoning when nothing is clear
How to build and take apart arguments, weigh odds, keep score of your forecasts, not give in to a machine out of habit.
Your own mind 16 lessons coming soonSteadiness: getting through a hard stretch
What research on emotions and stress supports and what it does not, how to get through a hard stretch, and when to see a professional.
Your own mind 17 lessons coming soonMeaning: who you are when work changes
What work gives beyond money, what happens when it goes, and what you want to keep doing yourself.
Your own mind 16 lessons coming soonDialogue: listening, disagreeing, thinking together
How to listen and disagree to some purpose, when a group is smarter than one person, and what changes when the other party is a machine.
Your own mind 17 lessons coming soonResponsibility: who answers for what a machine did
Ethics in plain words, the well-known cases of algorithms gone wrong, who holds the power, and what an ordinary person can do.
Your own mind 17 lessons coming soonImagination: making things beside a model, keeping your taste
What is known about creativity, how taste grows, and how to use a generator of text, images or music as a sketch, not as a stand-in.
Your own mind 18 lessons coming soon
Check
Convincing text now costs nothing, so checking has become an everyday skill.
Checking a claim: text, image, voice
How to check in minutes what a model told you, what a photo or video shows and whose voice that is, and when to stop checking.
Checking 18 lessons coming soonNumbers: reading other people’s data and charts
How to see what an average, a poll, a chart or a study shown to you actually says, and where it is likely to mislead you.
Checking 18 lessons coming soon
Keep what is yours
Your data, money, health, rights and children remain your business, however clever the machine gets.
Privacy: where your data goes
Who collects what about you, what happens to your chatbot conversations, and how to make a company answer you under the law.
What is yours 17 lessons coming soonSecurity: defending against an attacker
How to protect your accounts, money and family from flawless phishing and cloned voices, and what to do in the first hour after a breach.
What is yours 16 lessons coming soonMoney: personal finance and its new scams
How to work out a budget, a debt and a risk, what a chatbot can do with your money, and how to spot a scam with a synthetic face.
What is yours 18 lessons coming soonHealth: reading claims and using a chatbot sensibly
How to read claims about health and risk, what to ask a chatbot about symptoms, and when to see a doctor or call an emergency number at once.
What is yours 15 lessons coming soonChildren and AI: for parents and teachers
What is known about children and screens, how to handle homework and companion chatbots, and how to teach a child to check and to think.
What is yours 18 lessons coming soon
Follow new lessons
Lessons appear one at a time, and we promise no dates. To hear about them without giving an address, add the Atom feed to any feed reader: it asks this file by itself, and nobody learns who you are.
Project NoeticEcho. We make open courses because people who understand how things work can set a machine a task and check the answer, instead of believing in magic.