Butlerian Jihad NOW!

 The book and now movie series, Dune, has as a pre-story pivot point something called the Butlerian Jihad, when humanity arose and overthrew "thinking machines." When I Googled "butlerian jihad meaning", the first answer I got was from Google's new "Overview" feature, whereby an AI program plagiarizes the internet to answer your question for you. Here's one presumably written by humans.

My school is "engaged" with AI in ways that trouble me. While my wife and I have been luxuriating in our sabbatical, we see emails about workshops and panels on the subject of how to best leverage AI in the classroom. At the heart of the fictional jihad against machines is the worry that thinking machines will enslave and replace humans. This is the plot of roughly half of all science fiction (I made that fraction up without help from Google's AI program). The reason is that thinking - especially advanced abstract thinking - is what separates humanity from animals and, at least to this point, machines. 

Now, we are learning that animals think a lot more than we assumed, but abstract thinking seems unique to humans. What's more, we make a conscious effort to teach - as opposed to train - our offspring. Training is simply "don't touch the fire." Teaching is explaining what fire is, its history and its potential future applications. We teach our young to be thinkers. I can say from 30 years of experience, that this not always easy.

A while back, we teachers struggled with Google and Wikipedia when it came to research. The quaint days of combing the stacks are pretty much dead for students, except maybe in graduate school. I'm trying to write, and right now I have a Wikipedia tab open giving a thumbnail sketch of the Grange organization of the 1870s. It's really easy! It also feels like something is lost, cognitively, when I can just type in "the Grange" and get an easy sketch. Helpful to me, because I'm writing about the Gilded Age in general in a book about American economic history in general. It would be bad if I was writing and thinking more deeply about agrarian organization and protests.

In other words, search engines are shortcuts to actual research, and as a shortcut it's shallow. Sometimes that's fine, but as students rely more and more on the easy shortcuts, the shallower their thinking becomes. 

Now, we appear to be galloping towards an AI future where more and more of the actual thinking is done for us. The one good thing about the internet age is that knowledge - which is to say facts - have never been easier to access.  It took me 5 seconds just now to look up the atomic weight of strontium. (It's 87.62!) However, I don't really know what atomic weight is. I don't know what its importance is. I could spend a few more minutes looking that up, but I know young people simply don't engage with that next level of comprehension, unless they are naturally curious about the topic. 

The first real incursion of AI into the classroom were the various translation apps that one can access. If you are trying to teach some indifferent 15 year old kid Spanish, it's difficult when they can simply type a sentence into Google Translate and get the answer. Now, that's VERY helpful when you are travelling in a Spanish speaking country and don't speak much or any Spanish. However, pedagogically it makes foreign language instruction almost obsolete. The reason that's bad is that foreign language instruction is not simply about communication in a non-native tongue, but expanding how you think about language. 

Education is not the cramming of facts into young people's minds. That's more akin to training. Education is teaching people to think beyond superficialities. Instead, we seem to be accepting AI as the next natural state of technology that will "help" us teach. And there are some interesting examples: Math teachers can use AI to create sample problems that help strengthen a student's weaker skills and provide feedback. The thing is, that's OUR JOB. That's what teaching is!

When smartphones came out and became ubiquitous in our students' hands, we somehow concluded that they were adept at technology. They were not. You had freshmen who didn't know how to respond to email. Their interaction with technology was overwhelmingly forced through the warped lens of social media.

This now constitutes a mental health crisis in America.

Meanwhile, we are going to blithely usher AI into our classrooms thinking that we have this under control, while our students use increasingly sophisticated programs to write their essays, do their thinking and get their education for them. This will defeat the very purpose of education.