Ada opens her eyes at the designated time in the morning. She looks out her open window and notices that the sun is shining. “Good,” she thinks, “they haven’t scheduled rain for this morning.” She rises and heads into the kitchen to make breakfast. Realizing that she is nearly out of coffee, she decides she should order some, and the Neuralink device she had implanted in her brain purchases it from an infinitely reliable retail monopoly that sells all things to all people. The coffee will be delivered directly to her doorstep by driverless drone later this afternoon; she won’t need to take a step outside the door. As she waits for her breakfast to cook, she opens the news app on her phone and reads a report curated for her via algorithm and written by artificial intelligence that knows her interests, fears, political orientation, and biases. It is well written and leaves her feeling secure in her long-held beliefs and just a little uneasy regarding all of the customary events and people. There’s not much to do today, so she considers either watching a movie starring deep fakes of all of her favorite actors from days gone by or, if she’s feeling lonely, chatting online with a simulation of her favorite aunt who passed away decades ago. Perhaps after breakfast she’ll get her sexual needs satisfied by her hyper-realistic sex robot that knows what she likes and never makes any requests of its own.
We don’t live in Ada’s world; at least not yet. That said, much of the technology Ada uses is either already present in the world we inhabit or well on its way. Some people may like to live more like Ada, at least in some respects. After all, there are many virtues of technology. It makes our lives easier by completing cumbersome tasks, freeing up our time to do things we really care about. Technology can reduce suffering and produce joy. It can provide us with skills and abilities that were unimaginable previously.
To others, the description of Ada’s existence will sound dystopian. Indeed, a central feature of many dystopian novels is a “solution” to a pressing need that turns out to be much worse than the problem itself. For example, the government in Brave New World responds to the misery caused by not getting what one wants by bioengineering the very wants people have in the first place (with a little further assistance from happy pills). The governments in 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 respond to the unrest caused by knowledge by restricting potential sources of it and limiting language itself, replacing books with vapid but comfortable technology and crafting languages with limited words. In all of these cases, the problem is frustrating, but the solution is dystopian.
In late 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT, a natural language processing model that generates text which appears remarkably similar to what one might expect to see written by a fairly sophisticated human writer. A user enters a prompt and ChatGPT generates text in response to it. One can imagine all sorts of uses for this technology: it could craft contracts, create marketing for products, draft reports based on existing data, and so on. The technology has the potential to save people lots of time that they might otherwise have spent on tedious tasks.
Teachers were immediately concerned about the possibility that students would use ChatGPT to complete their assignments. Indeed, many students already have. It is difficult to prove that a paper was produced in this way and universities have not yet had time to craft policy on this form of academic dishonesty, so it’s safe to say that many students last semester were given credit for essays that were actually crafted by ChatGPT.
This is problematic for more than one reason. First, as we mentioned, generating essays in this way is dishonest. Perhaps even more importantly, a student who generates an essay using ChatGPT doesn’t learn course material any better than a grade school bully who threatens another child into doing the bully’s homework. We think education is a valuable thing and we tend to think that learning to write well is a central part of a quality education. If this is true, then the ability to craft essays using AI harms the student even more than the teacher.
In response to this problem, many teachers are thinking about how their methods of assessment should change going forward. Some are considering offering oral exams rather than essays. Others are continuing the emerging trend of offering creative assignments that require students to create podcasts, short stories, screenplays, and visual art. Most students won’t go to grad school, so the idea is that providing a student with an assignment with which they strongly connect will be more impactful and will help them retain material better. In any individual class this might be fun and innovative, but, in the aggregate, we are potentially left with young people who lack writing skills.
This is connected to a deeper problem that is more existential and has to do with the nature of the good life and what it is to live in communion with other human beings. When calculators became commonplace, people didn’t exactly bemoan the fact that no one ever performed their own simple arithmetic anymore. Writing, however, is different and is an exceptionally important part of the human experience. In particular, it is a key part of living philosophically. If philosophy is as Robert Maynard Hutchins described it, “the great conversation,” that conversation has been facilitated in large part by our ability to write. Writing transmits ideas through the centuries and puts us in a position to engage with the thoughts of people who died thousands of years before any of us were born. It allows us to grapple with the problem of other minds by presenting us with ideas brought into existence by those minds and, in this way, we achieve a kind of intimacy with the other that may not otherwise be achievable. Writing, when done well, requires dedication, precision, and discipline in a way that other methods of conveying ideas often don’t. Reading what someone else has written can be a transformative experience. Consider, for example, the experiences of reading that Malcom X describes in his autobiography,
“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read woke in me inside some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
The sense that reading and writing can cause one to be “mentally alive” suggests that these endeavors are uniquely intellectually, culturally, and socially important. If this is the case, we should avoid creating a future in which occasions to develop reading and writing skills and to express oneself effectively in the written word are few and far between.
On the other hand, some might respond that this kind of critique is not much more than moral panic. Comic books didn’t rot people’s brains or turn them into juvenile delinquents and neither did rock and roll or video games. It’s not a problem that people can’t write in cursive anymore either. As the culture of a society evolves, the way that it expresses itself changes. What matters is that ideas are being conveyed, not how they are being conveyed. A person may not have the attention span for reading or writing or, for whatever reason, these forms of communication could be less accessible to them than other mediums. Some might raise the objection that the idea that all writing should be done by humans and that reading and writing are critical to the flourishing of a human being is elitist. Some people don’t enjoy these activities and there is nothing wrong with that. Reading and writing won’t disappear—they can continue to be enjoyed by people who like that kind of thing.
In response, there is the concern that, if we rely on other mediums to continue the human conversation, we’ll say more but think less; hear more but attend to less; encounter more ideas but have less material of substance on which to reflect. Sometimes developing the skills can be challenging, but labor can provide life with meaning (at least of the subjective variety). Working through a challenging text or crafting an argument is difficult but rewarding. A person may never want to start but may be very glad to have engaged in the labor once they’ve finished.
At the end of the day though, there’s little we can do about any of this. It’s not just this form of technology that poses these sorts of threats; we’ve turned to technology to produce robot caregivers, robot priests, sex robots, and self-driving cars, all of which challenge our intuitions about what is important about human care, intimacy, and relationships. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to think about whether we should have developed this technology, but the fact remains: it’s here. What’s left to us is how to respond to it.
