Yesterday I attended a conference at the school where I work, a beginning of the semester gathering of faculty and administrators with a pretty good taco bar. Past conferences have run the gamut of fine-to-good, but I rather enjoyed my time at this mandatory meeting. This from a guy who once said his career ambition was to never have to go to meetings.
The highlight of the day, sorta, was a panel on artificial intelligence, a topic that one might have thought would be somewhat settled in the minds of academics who, for all their talk of critical inquiry and ongoing interrogations of staid ideas, can be loyal to theories and practices learned in years past. This ongoing conversation about AI could be seen as my collogues being exceptionally willing to revisit topics in need of revisiting. Or so I’d hoped before the chat.
While the panelists acquitted themselves admirably, I did have a beef with the way the chat re-trod the same talking points I’ve heard for, oh, two years or so. In a ridiculously futile effort to put these dull points to bed, allow me to address the following:
AI, I’m told again and again, is a tool; it only matters how one uses a tool. A hammer can build or destroy. Do we blame the hammer or the person holding it?
I will not do better than Frank Elavsky, so read his blog to find the best rebuttal to this rather facile take. But if AI has robbed you of the attention required to read two pieces of writing, here’s a direct response to the hammer analogy:
Even a hammer, made of wood and iron, requires trees to be cut down and earth to be mined up. A simple hammer requires laws to be written about fair treatment of workers in multiple industries, sustainability of various biological and geological environments, and regulation about the sale and use of the hammer. “It matters how you use it,” in regards to artificial intelligence ignores the reality that it also matters how AI is made, how AI is disseminated, the waste AI produces, the damage AI causes to economies and environments, and the overall impact that AI has on human life and culture.
A person on the panel used another example: train cars once being made to look like horses and carriages because people were afraid of the new technology, as people usually are. I thought immediately of not only Elvasky’s points but also Neil Postman’s argument that technology is never additive; it is ecological. The person who uses the example of the train implies that people were silly to worry about trains. Silly primitive people with their fears of tech! This stance also implies that the train did nothing to alter the landscape, commerce, industry, family, community, and our relationship with time and space. Perhaps not all these changes were bad—many could be labeled “good”—but that’s less the point. Tech has power. The world after the train was not the world as it was plus the train. It was a different world. The same can be said for the world after the printing press, the automobile, the airplane, the calculator (more on that in a second), the internet, and artificial intelligence. Postman argued that technology is so powerful in the way it remakes society that the responsible person will ask “what will this undo?” as opposed to only wondering “what will this do?”
The next example in favor of AI was, of course, the calculator as a now universally embraced technology and the audacity people once had while suggesting it would ruin students’ ability to do math. While the panelist was wise enough to admit that maybe comparing the calculator to AI is a bit of a false equivalency, they nevertheless doubled down on what is easily the most played note in the AI advocate’s symphony. Is it even worthwhile to address this? Don’t we know that 1. comparing the calculator to AI is the same as comparing a slingshot to a howitzer, and that 2. the calculator did have an effect? That we now allow calculators into classrooms—along with laptops, tablets, phones, and other questionable gadgets—hardly invalidates the point that the calculator changed things. Good or bad is, again, not exactly the point, as the person who employs this lazy comparison essentially states, “We once freaked out about one tech and now we don’t, so we’re therefore silly to freak out about this new tech” while ignoring the ways the old tech did, and the new tech will, alter the classroom, the student, the teacher, and our collective abilities.
(Right about now is when the average tech advocate calls me a luddite, sometimes out loud, sometimes with their eyes. So go ahead and say it.
Did that feel good? Okay. Happy for you. Let’s move on.)
The last point of the panel (spoken aloud in front of a room full of academics, no less) bothered me most. It bothers me most because the other two points, poor as I find them, at least spring from a line of thinking I can understand, even if they offer quick answers that ignore bigger ideas. The last point that bothers me more is: AI is inevitable and students need to learn it, therefore it is our ethical responsibly to teach it to them, to teach them how to use it responsibly (after all, it’s “just a tool.”).
There are actually two points in here crammed together, so let’s unpack them.
First: AI is not inevitable. STOP FUCKING SAYING THAT IT IS, please. Or, if you’re going to swallow this insidious talking point spewed from the bilious mouths of the tech CEOs who stand to make another mint off this technology at the expense of the world they cannot connect with, at least modify the bullshit by stating: Because our government is feckless, our president is corrupt, Silicon Valley operates like a Ponzi scheme, capitalism is rapacious, our citizens are beaten down, and our young people are set up to fail, AI is inevitable. Sam Altman and his ilk need us to believe that AI is inevitable the way rain is inevitable. Postman comes to mind, yet again; he argued that tech is soon seen as organic so much so that one cannot imagine a world without it the way one cannot imagine a world with trees and water. But AI is not organic, god-given, or inevitable. It is manufactured and foisted upon us, beta tested on the most vulnerable so that the most sheltered and wealthy can further isolate themselves and build private compounds on Kauai or jerk off to fantasies about colonizing Mars.
The second point that really irks me in the above-referenced statement is that we need to teach young people to use AI because not doing so would be unethical.
Okay, I get it—we lost. We who believe that college should be about education, growth, knowledge, fostering life-long inquiry and personal edification… we’re small in comparison to the folks who see college as job training. The goal post was moved from diploma to BA (MA?) long ago, and college is not what it might have once been, which is why jokes about majoring in something as silly and impractical as English have yet to exhaust themselves. But for fuck’s sake, we’ve capitulated to the college degree = career prerequisite crowd. Must we also capitulate to the AI evangelists?
Forget for a second that students are skilled at using AI already. Forget that the university need not solely be thought of in terms of return on investment. Forget all that shit. Oh wait—you may already have forgotten that if you’ve argued that AI is inevitable and it is therefore our ethical responsibility to teach young people to use it so they can be competitive on the job market. Because nothing says “I’m completive and skilled” like exporting your skills to a machine against which you cannot compete.
(Here is where people tend to bring up the point that there is much good AI can do, specifically regarding finding cures for diseases and so forth. This is when I have to remind those individuals that I am speaking against generative AI, not predictive AI. I’m all for using the robots to cure cancer. Got that? Okay then.
Here is also a good place for me to state that AI has a place in some classrooms where some disciplines are taught. I am not saying that it has no place in higher education, but in the humanities… nah.)
So are we good? I hope so. I mean, I know nothing I wrote above will stop the tide of AI (although I maintain some optimism that the tide is turning, as a lot of people seem to be souring on AI and its ghoulish and awkward hucksters), but let me dream for a second that these talking points are at last dispensed with, as I am fine (not really, but whatever) with a person embracing AI if they are at least doing so sans the flimsy shelter of fallacious arguments.
UPDATE.
I heard it again. “AI is just a tool.” Fucking hell, I couldn’t even get a day behind me before someone trotted that line out. I guess this shit is inevitable. Oh well, enjoy the robot-generated cat videos. I’m off to bed with a drink.
ADDENDUM:
Will AI innovate whisky production in Scotland? I doubt it, but maybe there is some way this tech can make this highest of human creations even better. That might be the thing to finally get me on the side of the tech bros. Look for me at the next Stanford Conference.
