OTHER DANGERS OF AI

Job Loss is Just One Worry

There’s a lot written about the loss of jobs with AI, but I think a bigger loss is going to be our ability to learn, persist, dig deeper and grow as human beings. I remember my delight when shopping for wedding gifts went from a hours-long torment in a department store to a few minutes on the Internet. Shortly after, everyone found we could get answers instantly…except that few people went deeper. We weren’t intrigued; we weren’t made curious by our investigations. And that’s sad.

When I went to Cal (in the dark ages before Al Gore invented the Internet), I spent countless hours researching in the many libraries on campus. I had to pore through many scientific journals, digging into a wide variety of articles to put together a research paper. Even for my lighter courses, the search and discoveries took a great deal of time. But rather than resent that, I found it made me even more curious. After reading three of the D’Artagnan romances (most only ever read “The Three Musketeers”), I found myself searching out material on Anne of Austria – did she really have an affair with a British lord while married to Louis? How did Cardinal Richelieu gain such control over France? The exercise was fascinating. Looking under-the-covers on stories was deeply rewarding. Bu does anyone do this anymore? Do they read past the AI-generated blurb on any subject?

To Be Human

Animals learn what they need to survive. In the wild, they find food and shelter, a mate…the basics of their lives. There is no evidence that they work hard to grow their knowledge or even learn how to learn. But being human goes beyond that. Our long lives give us the opportunity, perhaps the duty to learn, experience and grow. Not simply survive. It’s hard work, but necessary work if we are to exploit the potential of our great brains and become something more.

I was challenged, particularly in college and grad school, to think hard about everything I learned, not simply do rote memorization of a series of facts. In learning how to learn and how to research, I gave myself the chance to better myself in anything I wanted to try. Reading the paper would raise questions I had to get answered by delving into journals and talking to a variety of people. Hearing some music made me curious about the composer, the people playing the music, the context of the time period and so much more. I don’t know that kids in college are challenged in that way anymore and pushed to expand their knowledge base and their worldviews. I see so little evidence that the education I was fortunate enough to experience is still available at most colleges.

We have to do better. We cannot rely on AI-blurbs to get us through everything instead of doing the work ourselves. For one thing, as most AI’s scrub all the data on the Internet, their answers are likely to be wrong more than half the time. That’s concerning enough. Second, just copying an AI answer, with some manipulation, doesn’t help you to learn. Wikipedia also allowed a kind of cop-out, although information there was frequently wrong. But the big difference is that, most often, there were references you could click through to and learn where the information came from.

As a scientist, I was trained to test assumptions made by researchers, to look at the data and analyze if it was good enough to reach the conclusions they offered. Were the sample sizes and methods adequate? This is what made me wonder about AI and grow concerned. Even when I speak to younger people, I hear too much about reliance on what AI gives them. Even doctors using much smaller, more curated AI databases have begun to find more errors. At least, those who dig deep.

The movie WALL-E showed a society that had devolved into hopeless couch potatoes who let technology do everything for them. Looking at the fat slobs they had become, it showed a scary future which, at the time, didn’t seem possible. But isn’t that what the 30-somethings living in their parents’ basements have become?

Curiosity

“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.” - William Arthur Ward

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” - Albert Einstein

“Curiosity is the engine of achievement.” - Ken Robinson

I include these quotes to show you how important, how vital curiosity is. If you watch young children, they are inherently curious. First, they pick up everything, touch it, smell it, taste it. Later, they ask many questions, so often “why” questions that parents struggle to answer. But when a child is told too often to stop asking questions or is told “this is the way it is,” curiosity can be burned out of them.

Schools that don’t push exploration, that don’t encourage creativity, test them, repeat and reshuffle, that force too much memorization and not enough thinking stifle any curiosity that is left. We can’t afford this. Rewarding kids for spitting out the answer isn’t education. Education belongs to the teachers who challenge children to write fiction in class and then discuss it. Educators ask open-ended questions, not necessarily expecting the “right” answer, but one that is offered with a clear and reasonable explanation. Curiosity is how things get invented, how people move up in jobs (ideally) and how we all grow.

Kindling curiosity in students and giving out the more challenging assignments for both student and teacher will negate the ill-effects of AI. Rewarding curiosity will breed more of it in students and AI will feel like reading an encyclopedia.

The reality is that our minds are still potentially better than AIs, but if we continue to rely too much on AI and don’t build curious minds, no job will be safe from AI. None.