AI, Education, and the Essence of Being Human - Part 2
AI, Education, and the Essence of Being Human - Part 2
“At every significant technological transformation there is a fear of an automation anxiety, that it will have a broader impact than we expected. And jobs will change. Sometime in the future we’re going to look back on these people who unloaded these boxes from trailers and we’re going to think ‘why did we ever do that manually?’ But there’s a lot of people who are doing that job today that could be impacted…We used to farm with hand tools, and now we farm with machines. Nobody has really regretted that transformation, and I think the same can be said of a lot of manual labor we’re doing today.
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I don’t think people don’t want to work. People want to work. People need to work to feel productive. We don’t want to offload all of the work to the robots because I think people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. Self-satisfaction and feeling productive is such an ingrained part of being human that we need to keep doing this work. And I hope that the robots and the computers don’t end up being able to do all the creative work, because that’s the rewarding part. The creative part of solving a problem is the thing that gives you that serotonin or adrenaline rush that you never forget. People need to be able to do that creative work and just feel productive. You can feel productive over fairly simple work that’s just well done. ”
-Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics, Lex Fridman Podcast #374
In the previous post I shared the results of some of my first experiments with the new AI language modeling technology. While its implications as to the ultimate fate of human civilization are beyond my pay grade, I do think considerably about how it relates to the essence of being human. This is what I think about all the time, and it’s the conversation I have with my clients - what is the essence of your humanity, and how is that best expressed? Technological revolutions force us to reckon with this question on a societal level. Technology is anything that makes work easier and more scalable. And when technology intersects with communication, as it often does, its effect on our cognition feels particularly potent and existentially destabilizing, or so it often seems on the ground. It is always quite difficult to conceive of which forms the human experience will take next, in the strange and unpredictable worlds which are reliably opened up by new communication technologies. But we have always found answers which were better than we had hoped, even if it involved enduring dramatic and stressful times of transition.
A few examples:
Some of the ancients disliked the idea of writing. They anticipated that people would memorize less epic poems and sacred texts, which was correct. The Hebrew Old Testament is written with tropes to aid the rhythm and melody of recitation, which was largely intended to be a memorization aid. It is a much different experience to hear the Torah recited in this manner than read in translation. Muslims can relate given the typical presentation of the Quran. Our relationship to these texts is much different because we are literate.
The printing press fundamentally changed the ability of systems of centralized authority to control ideas. This catalyzed the often violent Protestant Reformation, which completely transformed society, religion, government, and commerce on every level. The liberalizing revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries would not have been possible without the complex arguments distributed through pamphlets from printing presses that allowed the wider populace to think critically and demand accountability from their ruling powers.
John Philip Sousa HATED record players. He (correctly) predicted they would weaken our collective musicianship and testified this before the US Congress. He saw the transition between an era in which everyone sang and played the piano to one in which we passively consume performance art. This has only accelerated thanks to radio, motion pictures, television, smartphones, and streaming.
The pocket calculator reduced our personal mathematical prowess. At one point, within the last century in fact, there existed a profession called “calculator”. Many were women. Calculators spent their working hours solving difficult and complex mathematical problems. They were hired by engineering and research firms, among others. This profession no longer exists.
The pattern always looks the same, isn’t it? We wonder what we will do with our time as information technology transforms our cognition and relieves the work burden. But we keep filling it, don’t we? We’re not living in the end of Wall-E yet, nor do I think we ever will be, so long as we don’t face some kind of extinction crisis brought about by careening exponential growth.
What does it mean to be human? It can include memorization, but need not. It can include making music each day, but need not. It can include solving complicated mathematical problems, but need not. It can include receiving our ideas from centralized structures of authority, but need not. We have endured all these transitions as our population has continued to grow. So, what do we do with our time?
And, pertinently, what do we teach our children (and lifelong learners)? What is the true essence of education as it seeks the essence of humanity? There is an answer in every age, on the other side of each technological and communicatory advancement. But education sometimes struggles to catch up, which I think is what many of us currently sense.
In a world where computation and linguistic generation can be outsourced to computers, what is it that we input to guide them? Computers still cannot guide themselves. Only we can. So what is the guidance that we offer, and from which metaphysical source does that emanate? That is the true question of education, in all times and all places, and each new technological and communicative revolution forces us to reconceive its shape, revealing that we had not found its final form, but only one that reflected a certain state of cognitive/economic development and application.
Today, I think, we experience the essence of our humanity to be highly enterprising, endlessly inventive, insatiably curious, and spiritually irrepressible. It’s the duty of all educators to respond to this, and it is thanks to the new language robots that we see it so clearly. But it’s a pattern as old as human cognition, and this is the exciting, and unpredictable, new chapter that opens up before us.