It's the subtitle that did it for me: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. In essence, what I've been trying to do with AI to enhance our learning environments is build a tool that grows with the learner. Not just to automate shit, or to remove the human (me!) from the loop, but to take advantage of real capabilities that will support my learners on their learning journey. Not so fancy as Nell's nanotech Primer, but of a piece.
So I now have a Socratic engine that is more of a mentor (and evaluator) than an answer generator or teacher, which adapts and meets each individual learner where they are, and requires them to use their own cognition. And actually, for the new cohort I have starting after Memorial Day, it serves as an example of the kind of thing I am teaching them to build, with observability, and all the code and prompts and other assets exposed so they can tear it apart.
There's still a great deal of tension between my personal ethics and what I must do to keep my job so I can continue housing, feeding, and clothing my children. Yeah, even that justification is a bit hollow, but it's the reality I am grappling with. My reasoning now is that if I do not build a tool that aligns with my philosophical inclinations, somebody else will build something that goes the opposite direction.
So I've designed things to explicitly address ethics, responsible use, cognitive surrender, etc. Really, taking my early work on Brother William and extending it directly into how I deliver courses in a time of constant change and pressure to use AI. I've baked in a lot of pedagogical "stings" that force them to engage metacognitively, pushing back on the tool, making ethical decisions, and whatnot.
In one of the other programs I teach (AWS re/Start), I just kicked off a month of AI/ML sessions, and I began with Diamond Age before we got into foundation models or anything technical. I reminded my learners that “AI” does not think, reason, or possess consciousness. It only “knows” a description of the world that it does not really interact with, generating plausible output that gives the appearance of intelligence. I was inspired by this passage:
“Public relations?” said Finkle-McGraw.
“Sir?” Modern etiquette was streamlined; no “Your Grace” or other honorifics were necessary in such an informal setting.
“Your department, sir.”
Hackworth had given him his social card, which was appropriate under these circumstances but revealed nothing else. “Engineering. Bespoke.”
“Oh, really. I'd thought anyone who could recognise Wordsworth must be one of those artsy sorts in P.R.”
“Not in this case, sir. I'm an engineer. Just promoted to Bespoke recently. Did some work on this project, as it happens.”
“What sort of work?”
“Oh, P.I. stuff mostly,” Hackworth said. Supposedly Finkle-McGraw still kept up with things and would recognize the abbreviation for pseudo-intelligence, and perhaps even appreciate that Hackworth had made this assumption.
Finkle-McGraw brightened a bit. “You know, when I was a lad they called it A.I. Artificial intelligence.”
Hackworth allowed himself a tight, narrow, and brief smile. “Well, there's something to be said for cheekiness, I suppose.”
I told the class that I prefer the term PI because "Artificial Intelligence" suggests we've invented a thinking machine, one that is truly intelligent, rather than just another fancy form of computing and abstraction that mimics intelligence. If I had my druthers, I'd actually go further and call it Virtual Intelligence, only because one of my old jokes is that the word 'virtual' means everything after it is a lie1, but PI works fine.
Terminology aside, I think generally I'll have a receptive audience in my latest cohort as we explore this scary new world together. I'm seeing recently-minted grads actively refuse the party line on AI's inevitability, and it gives me hope that they will use their own Organic Intelligence to do the right things for the right reasons.
I close with Dr King:
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man.
Like the rich man of old, we have foolishly minimized the internal of our lives and maximized the external. We have absorbed life in livelihood. We will not find peace in our generation until we learn anew that "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth," but in those inner treasuries of the spirit which "no thief2 approacheth, neither moth corrupteth."
Selah.
1 - A Virtual Private Network is not, in fact, physically private, but with encryption and logical isolation can be treated as such. A Virtual Circuit is not a circuit, and rather packet-switched with other control features to be circuit-ish enough for government work. Etc.
2 - Every artist might not be a cannibal, but every AI is a thief. A thief of intellectual property, a thief of human dignity, a thief that has no inner treasury of spirit.
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