Is your tech "An insult to life"?

The problem with these students is they can’t write

Friends, I’m not a very good teacher. I don’t plan for class very well. I often trip over things, especially my own backpack. Now that I am older, the students seem to feel a genuine concern for my wellbeing. The various detritus I strew about the desk and floor are the “Chekov’s guns” of the class. My handwriting is horrible. I never teach the same class twice because once it is over, I’ve forgotten what I did that day.

One thing I do, and it really doesn’t take a PhD to do it, is respect the students. That’s as much as I can claim to have done to be a “good teacher.” (Editor-in-chief Kristin Gourlay is now in my head admonishing me for ‘deprecating myself.’)

It is surprising how many college professors one meets who don’t particularly like or respect students. They find them weird or dumb or annoying. Sure, some are annoying. Students don’t care about what you care about. They are distracted. They are all traumatized and dress funny.

More than once a writing professor has complained to me, without irony, that their students don’t know how to write.

Respect isn’t a measurable outcome. It won’t ever be mandated by a board of education. A learning platform can’t give it. An A.I. tutor will never feel it.

DEI is the fancy name for respect

A nice thing about respect is that everyone understands it, even if it is at heart undefinable. (Like hope, love, art, etc.) Diversity, equity, and inclusion are perhaps more specific but they require explanation. And because they use high-falutin’ SAT vocab, it is easy for the chronically squealing anti-woke army to bray against DEI as “unfair.” But DEI is just respect. To be against it is to be anti-respect.

When I had to go to work on a knee- scooter, it was respectful (and inclusive) that I could use an elevator to get to my classroom.

Also, it was fun to speed down the empty school hallways in the morning. Wheeeeeee.

A.I. does not respect you

Artificial Intelligence is now in ponzi-grift mode. Here’s an example I got from the newsletter “The Human Edge” entitled Simple AI Side Hustle (1 hour tops). The hustle is this:

a) A.I. will write a children’s book for you

b) You get ElevenLabs to narrate the book (“So good parents think it’s a human narrator”)

c) You upload the book to an audiobook platform like ACX.

d) You make $30 or so per month (supposedly).

BUT: why iterate just one book? Why not 300? Soon you’ve made $3000/month for one hour of work!

Perhaps I’m a wide-eyed optimist but it is hard to imagine many parents disrespect their kids so much they can’t be bothered to read to them. Or wouldn’t choose an actual book over random slop on an audiobook platform. I didn’t always want to read Go Dog Go every night for what seemed like decades, but I wasn’t going to let a computer do it for me either. 

So imprinted on me is Go Dog Go that my dying words will likely be: Do you like my hat? 

(If you know, you know.)

To grift is human

The Human Edge’s scheme is what started me thinking about respect. Generating three hundred children’s books to narrate and sell is disrespectful to human authors and human intelligence. Disrespectful to the planet Earth, already choked with pollution. Disrespectful to parents and children.

Not all, but many, of the “use cases” of A.I. seem to boil down to disrespect for humans.

Is respect the new hope?

It may be that technology is creating a world without empathy or respect. That some of us interact mostly online. That we conceive of ourselves or are conceived of as numbers, outcomes, nodes of information, our life the sum of our transactions. Our worth measured in empty respect on social media.

But take as true the simple and trite and maybe, as the kids say, basic idea that humans deserve respect. Then from that, though we may all define humanity and respect in slightly different ways, we can at least start to work together.

Before launching A.I. into our K-12 classrooms, we might ask ourselves: Does this technology respect us?

The answer is in how we use it. I respect the students too much to cede my syllabus and lessons to a word aggregator. (Also, I tried it and was bored — but no shade if you find it useful.)

Respect, of course, is valuable everywhere, not just the classroom.

Are immigrants human? It is an obvious fact about immigrants that they are human. There is no religious belief required to state this fact. They don’t need an opinion poll to confirm it. You can replace “immigrants” with the group of your choice.

If they are human, it follows via our basic, trite, cliched agreement that they deserve respect.

If I were god and in charge of the Democratic party, I would pitch respect as the new hope.

A gift from a teacher can be a phrase…

My poetry mentor Marvin Bell used to say, by way of critiquing a student’s poem, “If I were god and this was my poem, I would …..”

That framing has stuck in my mind these past 30-odd years.

If I were god and this was my country, I would start respecting people.

If I were god and this was my technology, I would ask myself ‘Does it respect humanity’?

But, of course, I’m not god, just a teacher of immigrants in a community college, in a program set to be defunded by the currently proposed federal budget. But while I’m here, I’ll just start with respecting the students.

Desire Paths sneaks up on you every two weeks with a post about what it means to be a human in an age of technology. Fun fact: both my mother and the Secretary of Education call artificial intelligence “A1” — I’m guessing, go with me, this is because on an old manual typewriter you used to use the lower case “l” as the number 1. The lowercase “l” and upper-case “I” are essentially the same in modern fonts. Therefor, A.I. looks like A1 to people who learned to type on a manual typewriter.

Just a theory. Which is mine.