Education, AI, and Narcissism
Andy Kessler of the WSJ describes some conversations he has had with the founder/CEO of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.”
Three years ago, Sal Khan and I spoke about developing a tool like the Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.” It’s an education tablet, in the author’s words, in which “the pictures moved, and you could ask them questions and get answers.” Adaptive, intuitive, personalized, self-paced—nothing like today’s education. But it’s science-fiction.
Last week I spoke with Mr. Khan, who told me, “Now I think a Primer is within reach within five years. In some ways, we’ve even surpassed some of the elements of the Primer, using characters like George Washington to teach lessons.” What changed? Simple—generative artificial intelligence. Khan Academy has been working with OpenAI’s ChatGPT since before its release last December.
In the novel, the main character Nell asks about ravens, and “the picture zoomed in on the black dot, and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. ‘R A V E N,’ the book said. ‘Raven. Now, say it with me.’ ‘Raven.’ ”
Later, she asks, “What’s an adventure?” and “both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. . . . After awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.”
I admire what Khan Academy is trying to do for education..which, in America at least, needs all the help it can get…and I’m sure that AI has a lot of potential in this field. But a couple of things are bothering me here.
First, that Raven sequence. Is it really a good idea to teach reading with all those dramatic visual effects? Won’t kids later be disappointed when attempting to read anything that doesn’t include such effects? Indeed, I believe such concerns were raised, years ago, about Sesame Street.
Perhaps more importantly, consider that line After awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself. Really? Do we want to bring up people who are so focused on themselves that they can’t identify with even fictional characters who don’t look like themselves? Might be of different ethnicity, difference gender, different age. I thought the development such broader perspective was supposed to be one of the purposes of education in general and of literature in particular.
In A Preface to Paradise Lost, C S Lewis contrasts the characters of Adam and Satan, as developed in Milton’s work:
Adam talks about God, the Forbidden tree, sleep, the difference between beast and man, his plans for the morrow, the stars and the angels. He discusses dreams and clouds, the sun, the moon, and the planets, the winds and the birds. He relates his own creation and celebrates the beauty and majesty of Eve…Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.. And that “one thing” is, of course, Satan himself…his position and the wrongs he believes have been done to him. “Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament…”
One need not believe in a literal Satan, or for that matter be religious at all, to see the force of this. There is indeed something Satanic about a person who has no interests other than themselves. There do seem to be a lot of people today whose interests are largely restricted to themselves and to the endless struggle for power.
Maybe I’m overreacting to the potential harm of this kind of AI-based customization…perhaps it’s simply a cute trick which will help get students involved in learning rather than on random scrolling and status-measurement on their phones. But I see so much appeal to narcissism in so many types of communications these days…”The price YOU deserve”…”Here’s YOUR weather”…”Let’s check YOUR money–the Dow closed today at…”….and the narcissism is coupled with increasing pressure for group rather than individual identity…not “Our Customers” or “Our African-American Customers” but “Members of Our African-American Community.”
What do you think?
See also my related post Classics and the Public Sphere.
Welcom Wagon Essay Series: 2
This is a call for questions for the civic welcome wagon project.
There’s going to be an essay for each state. There’s going to be an essay for every metro area in the US
There’s going to be a prompt document of stuff that should be in each essay on both the state and metro area. I’m thinking of it as a sort of questionnaire. So what should be in these questionnaire documents?
Dealing With The Threat
This post is kind of a continuation of last week’s post, about the invasion of genetically male-claiming-to-be-gender-fluid into spaces formerly the preserve of genuinely, original-equipment-issue XX females … and no, I will not play the variable-gender game and use your favored pronouns. (Should you demand that of me, mine are ‘Your Highness’ and ‘My Lady’). I admit that yes, there are those very rare occurrences of people who are genuinely physically inter-sex from birth, and another small number who have fully undertaken to conduct their lives as the opposite sex of what they were observed to be at birth; this after careful consideration, with surgery, hormones, and the choice of suitable dressing/makeup. But it doesn’t really change anything at all, save the superficial impression. When in a thousand, two thousand, or five thousand years, a future archeologist excavates the bodies of one of those people, the skeletal features and residual DNA will read the remains as either male or female no matter what they maintained an appearance/pretense of being in life.
Frankly, I otherwise wouldn’t much care about the kinks of other adults. I’ve always subscribed to the wisdom of the Edwardian-era actress and correspondent with GB Shaw, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who famously remarked that she didn’t much care what people did in the bedroom, just that they weren’t doing it in the road and frightening the horses. My own metric was “consenting, adult, and private” which does admittedly leave open a wide range of sexual behaviors such as incest and polygamy. Really, I don’t care. Just don’t demand my rapturous approval. And don’t go about flaunting it in places where the rest of us just can’t look away, m’kay?
Welcome Wagon Essay Series: 1
On GitHub, there is now a public repository for essays to create a civic welcome wagon. A public repository in GitHub means anyone can contribute. If you don’t like what I wrote, fork it, write something better, and compete.
My previous post about using Git in this fashion can be found here.