Confronting the Existential Crisis of AI

"AI literacy" is necessary but does it obscure the bigger issue?

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Confronting the Existential Crisis of AI

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

EO Wilson, scientist, professor, author, founder of sociobiology

1. Washers and Driers Have Passed Us By

Way, way back, probably 25 years ago now, I taught a ten-week English elective for juniors and seniors that was titled something like, “Designing School.” The syllabus included A Separate Peace, Lorene Cary’s Black Ice, a memoir on being a Black female scholarship student at St Paul’s in 1974, excerpts from The Catcher in the Rye and lots of articles. It was before Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep was published although upon a re-read that likely had too much canoodling for me to include in 2000. It’s funny; in my memory I think of A Separate Peace as being the most old fashioned story but Catcher in the Rye was actually published 8 years before it, in 1951. But the Knowles novel is set in 1942, so that explains it.

The culminating project was for the kids to design a proposal for a new high school with a mission and proposed structure, graduation requirements and basic curriculum. They were so fun and interesting, I carried a folder with copies of those projects around with me when I moved for a long time; it might still be up on my in-progress third floor where things I don’t want to part with yet go to wait patiently. Of course, it was an elective so everyone in there chose to be in it, but it was as part of English 11 or 12, it wasn’t a pure choice. And in my memory, every kid was highly engaged in talking about this thing called “school” - what they loved, what they hated, when they were engaged, when they were growing, when they were bored out of their skulls. They also really enjoyed parsing out the role of authority in schools.

I read a lot about the history of school in preparation for the course and not just private schools but public schools as well. I find the subject totally interesting as it’s so culturally bound just as I find learning about how education works in other countries fascinating. I looked at a few high school notebooks from the 1940’s my parents still had stored in the attic.

And the most startling thing from my research was how consistently recognizable school was, starting in the early 20th century (and maybe even earlier) up until…now. It’s still, more or less, “intentional transmission of a body of knowledge with the side effect of developing good character.” A poetry project my mom did in the 1940s would not feel wildly out of place in some slightly stodgy but kind 9th grade English teacher’s classroom.

The kids of 2000 found the school life of A Separate Peace completely recognizable. And when you consider how much other things changed between 1942 and 2000 - washing machines and driers, for example, went from rare in 1940 to ubiquitous by the 1950s - it’s rather astonishing.

2. Maybe we should have kept them chained in the basement

Around 2000 was also when the first big tech wave became unavoidable in schools - in administration (creating schedules, keeping student records) in communicating (making grades and comments digital) and in creating “computer labs” where, I remember a session at NAIS where a roguish tech dude asked, “why are we keeping all the computers chained up in a basement?” I recently quoted a higher ed guy saying that with the enormous expense of the admin edtech revolution (email communcation, record keeping, etc.) - the investment itself and the time it takes for faculty and staff to become comfortable using it - higher ed maybe just came out ahead in terms of efficiency from where it was before it started.

And we’ve been swatting flies ever since trying to balance “the way school is” with new tech tools. And so often, as the depressingly correct Audrey Watters details in her work here (this is reviewing ed tech failures in the past - but what a past it is!) and currently, predictions about the edtech revolution completely changing education have often ended up being “fad of the year” boondoggles. When she spells it all out, it’s hard to deny the number of flops and dead-ends.

I recently read a Twitter/X post that went something like this: “Just watch - private schools will market AI literacy and then when that’s played out, they’ll market AI-free schools.” I winced.

There’s a lot of good people doing interesting work around the topic of AI literacy. I am not an expert and honestly, the idea of delving into every post I’ve seen recently about AI literacy, etc, just makes me want to take a nap. So my hat is off to all of you doing that work. I realize this is not an “either/or” situation and we need people making sense of what’s coming at us right now. I have found Chat GPT to be both very helpful and kind of shocking in its terribleness. The worst moment was when I asked it to do an polishing edit for an interview, using a very specific prompt as to the outcome I desired. It ended up adding a rather large chunk of Q&A that was pure hallucination. The confidence of the tone it used when spewing garbage was stunning. Take a look at this recent Substack post - it will reinforce your skepticism as to the current abilities of ChatGPT and increase the creepy factor. (It’s really worth your time!)

Hollywood’s going AI - this article details how AI will soon be able to take an existing film - say, John Wick, and edit out much of the worst violence to make a PG-13 version in minutes. It will likely be able to create whole new seasons of a show you loved that is now no longer in production. I can only imagine it’s not that far away that you can customize your art, another version of fan fiction - “Please create a ten show season exploring Severance character Irving’s backstory.”

There’s a lot to be nervous about. And it seems we’re all so overwhelmed and it all seems so far out of reach to do anything effective to moderate or stop it, we’re all just going along on this ride, hoping for the best. Never mind the fact that in an AI world, we seem to be putting a jaw dropping amount of power in the hands of very few individuals who don’t seem all that worried about the betterment of mankind. (The public tussle between the world’s richest man and the president of the United States is an example. Musk had access for months to an ocean of government-held data and now his people are embedded throughout the system - I can’t even fathom what kind of leverage he has now even beyond his vast wealth.)

I’m not saying this from any place of moral high ground because while I think this new age of AI feels both sketchy and inevitable, I would also love to have a very capable virtual assistant to execute routine tasks for me without having to hire an actual, messy, expensive person. I like convenience as much as the next person!

Ever since I started working in schools in 1996, we’ve been talking about innovation and new pedagogies and skills vs content and competencies and teaching kids not content, etc. etc. And then if you’ve ever done a few reaccreditation site visits, you know there’s not wild innovation going on in every classroom. And sometimes the kids just need to know the content. Schools are still mainly structured around transmitting a body of knowledge and demonstrating their mastery gets them into college.

But unlike chasing Facebook off proxy servers in the computer lab in 2005, AI is a different beast. And I’m not talking about abuses such as deep fakes - talk to your attorney about policies around that, stat. But many teachers are using it to make class prep easier. There are a lot of tasks it does well!

Kids cut corners; they get stressed; they cheat. For most of my career I’ve maintained that bad assignment design invites cheating and I have seen little evidence to disprove my theory. But generative AI is a whole other level because it can work with a sophisticated assignment and produce something reasonable. As a college student said in an article about the impact of generative AI I linked to in May, “Now it takes me two hours instead of ten to get an assignment done.” Is that even “cheating”?

And what is “AI literacy” when the tech keeps developing and goal posts keep moving?

3. Clearly establish why your school exists

I don’t have any easy answers. But I do think that we can approach this differently. Most schools have to really get down to brass tacks about who they are and what their mission is - truly establishing a mission that spells out why you exist, not what you do. And why you exist can’t be “to prepare students for the next step in their education.”

We have finally arrived in a place where the kid we’re trying to educate can create output without having metabolized the content - the body of knowledge doesn’t need to be truly “transferred.” And that’s just the beginning. Given the teacher shortage and the rates of kids struggling to learn how to read in public schools, there’s a lot of incentive for tech to develop excellent bot tutors and instructors. There’s a lot of juicy municipal money out there to be earned.

Maybe generative AI is just today’s Wikipedia - threatening at first and now just part of everyday life. It is hard to read Audrey Watter’s work and not brace for this current wave to fall apart; she has compelling points that can’t be dismissed. For sure, things never quite develop the way you think they will. Twenty years ago, people were predicting all the newspapers and network television would be out of business but yet they remain… sort of.

But education is at its root a human, social endeavor; Socrates sitting under an olive tree, mentoring Plato. The smartest thing a school can do is really dig in and answer that hard question - why do we exist - and why do we still exist if the machines can do our current jobs better than we can, for a fraction of the price and with way more flexibility?

And then the next question is, how do we walk the talk? Because you can’t fashion a reason for existing but then live in a contrasting reality that is “preparing kids for the next step in their education.” The cognitive dissonance would literally drive people nuts. And of course, you can default to a de facto reason for existing: “we give your kid an edge to get into the college of her choice.” But that direction just leads to a school with a yawning chasm at its center for the consumer to fill with their own vision and dreams while the school itself stands for nothing but accommodation. And does that sound like “education”?

As I said, I know the tiniest smidge about AI and even less about what’s coming at us. I am suspicious of tech companies, their profit motive, their data collection addiction. I’m sure they are tantalized by hooking consumers for life by age 3. But I see no sign the wave will peter out as it moves towards shore nor that anyone with power is interested in changing the bigger weather system creating the waves. I keep thinking about a speaker I saw maybe ten years ago who used the image of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa to illustrate the coming compounding of tech’s power and the speed with which it will improve.

Our prehistoric emotions and medieval institutions are just trying to adjust as best we can. The only way we can really thrive is to have some serious conversations about what the school is all about today and into the future, not ten years ago or twenty or at its founding. It’s hard work and it’s especially hard to engage in that work and do all the endless day to day, relationship intensive work of running a school. But I think it’s doing that work or risk being swamped by the wave.

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