What Do We Need to Learn?

I’m fascinated, like all of us are, by the progress that LLM’s have made and “artificial intelligence”. I feel completely overwhelmed, though, as a teacher. I don’t know what we need to be teaching.

Okay, for one thing, I feel like we’re all going to get hooked on using AIs for various things, and pretty soon, when they are ubiquitous, they are going to be hidden behind a paywall, and those who can’t pay aren’t going to be “competitive” in whatever domain the AIs have taken over. Take something like accounting, which is definitely on the chopping block. No human accountant is going to be able to compete, and those who can’t get access to the right programs aren’t going to be able to get good accounting services. Not a big deal for small fries like me, but for any company larger than a few hundred employees, that’s going to be problematic.

Other than the threat of making us dependent then making us pay more and more for it (like a heroin dealer, “the first hit is for free”, except we’re actually helping create the heroin, as AIs are using our data, our lives, as training data for the AIs in the first place. We should be working on an iron-clad pre-nup before a marriage with ChatGPT, a Massey pre-nup on steroids), my worry is more about, well, what do kids really need to learn?

So, best case scenario: the kids of today will use AIs for many work-related tasks that humans will no longer have to bother themselves with. Humans will still need to do all the more manual tasks that machines can’t do as well: cutting hair, making violins, fixing the plumbing, whatever, but most jobs will be “how do I get the AI to give me this particular outcome?”, like properly figuring out payrolls, managing air traffic, or doing income taxes.

Worst case scenario: kids of today will have to compete with already established companies who hold the reins to AIs and their functionalities. There will be a use for people who don’t have access (or refuse to use) the technology, and those who cut hair, make violins, and fix pipes will still have jobs. I think we’ll know even less how to do things ourselves anymore, and if kids are too dependent on AI and other technologies, they won’t know how to function if (when?) everything goes black.

There are two worries I have about this takeover, insofar as teaching is concerned. One is that learning things is good for the brain, and if we use AIs and the internet in place of learning things ourselves, our brains will function less efficiently. The brain is partly like a muscle, and the fact of learning things, even just memorizing things, sharpens us. We don’t have to memorize all the dates in history, but we do need those dates to situate and contextualize what was happening at a particular time (so that we do learn from history and try not to repeat the mistakes of the past.) Brains also develop through the practice and use of abstractions. Just the fact of doing math, even if we do it badly, is good for our brain.

The second is that we are losing (faster than I ever thought possible) the ability to do things ourselves if the computers of the world ever go dark. A while ago, I found a beautiful magazine called The Small Farmer’s Journal. It rides a line between traditional lifestyles (i.e. Amish/Mennonite communities) and hippie do-it-yourselfers. The only people who know how to farm with horses and oxen today are found in rural communities in poorer nations, and, like, the Amish. They are the only ones who would know how to fix a plow, or make a pulling harness for oxen. Most farmers today have machines for a whole bunch of things, which of course makes farming less labor intensive, but even then we can’t subsidize them enough to make a decent living half the time. These tractors and machines, like our cars and trucks, have so much technology in them that they are often no longer fixable by that guy with the wrench. We don’t know how most of the things around us actually work. We haven’t for a while, but it’s just getting exponentially worse.

So where does that leave me? I teach language and phys ed. For my first worry, I still think it’s worth learning languages just for the workout it gives our brains. It’s healthy for the students, and there’s an additional to the bonus for teaching literature, where we learn how others think. We really have no other way of knowing what goes on in the minds of other people if we don’t have characters from literature to help us.

For my second worry, our population will need to have backups if those spiffy new systems don’t work anymore. We’ll still need to know how to do things, and have the capacity to do that, but that’s hardly a career path, unless there is a bigger movement to opt out of having our lives run by technology we don’t understand.

Am I teaching for survival after the tech apocalypse? Or am I teaching for the intelligent use of new technologies? Am I teaching empathy (through literature), so that we don’t forget the human in the whole equation?

In the future, so many jobs will fall under the heading “well, we don’t need a person to do that anymore, or that, or that, or that…” so what are we humans….for?

What use are we if all our tasks can be completed better and more efficiently by a machine? And in our capitalist society, could we accept just working on…making ourselves happier? Learning things for the pleasure of pushing our brains?

At least for Foro, his purpose is clear.