What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines?

And what does it mean for schools?

Hola Global Jigsaw Community,

I think a lot about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on my children’s future. Will it empower them and help make them more effective at their work, or will it denude them of their autonomy and capabilities, rendering them irrelevant? What will it mean for their generation to even be human?

What’s clear is that our educational system needs to place these questions at the heart of its pedagogical philosophy. The idea of memorizing reams of information and regurgitating it in timed exams, in the manner that we are used to in Indian schools, is already laughably outdated. For better or worse, AI is going to substitute human memory. It will not only know vastly more information than the homo sapien brain is capable of, but will also be able to retrieve this store of knowledge nearly instantly and with accuracy.

The hours that school students today spend on handwriting and spelling, are similarly an anachronism. For future generations even using keyboards and spell checks, let alone pen, paper and dictionaries, will feel archaic. Ongoing technological advances are arriving at the point where the brain can directly interface with intelligent machines. In other words, humans will be able to communicate with machines simply by thinking. Writing may one day, in the not-so-distant future, become redundant.

Schools are consequently in urgent need of reorienting their role away from being instructors of Math, Science and English – something YouTube tutorials are already better at than most teachers - towards nurturing the human in their students. Which raises the question of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines?

Our anthropomorphic view of the world has always put “Man” at the center, differentiating us from other animals by virtue of our use of language, reason, and logic. So, what happens when the phone in our pocket is suddenly better than us at all these things? It becomes clear that what still makes us “special” is not memory, writing or knowledge, but our emotional lives. Our passions, grief, longings and other deeply felt experiences.

It is our imagination, intuitions, idiosyncrasies, epiphanies, and non-transactional kindnesses that schools today need to nurture. They could, for example, offer courses in Unusual World Views: where the emphasis is on thinking unpredictably, out-of-algorithm. Philosophy, with its smorgasbord of human thought from Advaita Vedanta to Epicureanism, Charvaka thought to Stoicism, would be better off being introduced in middle-school, rather than at the university level, as is currently the norm, at least in India.

Other subjects might include Empathy or the art of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Reading the Room or situational awareness is another candidate for a new curriculum where the focus would be on honing the ability to have an accurate perception of what is going on in one's immediate surroundings, even without it being explicitly articulated.

The international school my boys go to already has courses in emotional intelligence from primary school on. To give an example of their curriculum: in first grade they were taught to recognize their feelings using colour coded schema and then asked to devise solutions for bringing themselves back into the green zone (calm), if they had begun to cross the line into red (anger), or blue (sadness).

Children came up with solutions that ranged from listening to music, to hugging their moms. My favourite was a girl who drew a picture of a fish and declared her “happy strategy” was to eat salmon.

The point is not to be terrified. Panic about humans losing their free will to technology has existed around every breakthrough, from the telegraph to the typewriter. And long before these, when the alphabet itself was ‘new-tech,’ someone as exalted as the Greek philosopher Socrates had been convinced that writing would ‘introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it’, degrading the capacity of humans to remember. Socrates believed that writing would give students the appearance of wisdom without the actuality of intellect.

So, are we truly in danger from our phones? Or is our preoccupation with AI along the historic continuum of moral panics around new technologies? I would venture that as is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Technology has rarely been inherently good or evil despite what the techno-utopians or dystopians would have us believe.

My view is that AI tools will be of enormous help in outsourcing much of our current mental load and labour. But more importantly, they will distill what it really means to be human, revealing ourselves to us in the process. Are the schools listening?

xxxx

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Until next week,

Pallavi