We'll Ride the Wave of AI's and Thrive

Those who can't think more creatively than a chat bot are scared of them but mustn't hinder everybody else.

“You must’ve been drunk last night!” said my 17-year-old daughter this morning. “You suggested I write that I was using ChatGPT on a take-home test! Anybody who uses ChatGPT gets an automatic zero.”

Actually, I was entirely sober but can’t say the same for her teacher.

My suggestion was to look up some exotic writing method she was supposed to use for a take-home exam. Paraphrasing from memory, I suggested she write: “I looked through my class notes, used Google, asked friends, and checked ChatGPT and can’t find an explanation of this method anywhere so I’m going to guess what it is when answering the question.”

It was an entirely reasonable answer but so was her worry that any use of ChatGPT — including apparently even for the same type of reference we rely on Google for — is grounds for a zero.

I’ve been avoiding writing about AIs or much anything else to see how things shake out but the time has come. It’s clear, with ChatGPT (GPT3.5) and Sydney/Bing (ChatGPT4), that the AIs have arrived and that they’re here to stay.

While the term Luddite is overused the freakout from those in established occupations, including and especially education, is predictable. Still, their complaints are also pointless and more than a little depressing given what a teacher is supposed to do.

Let’s back up. Luddites are the anti-automation machine smashers of Germany way back when. While George Washington was smashing English Redcoats, Germans were smashing automated looms. Not long before, James Watt invented the condensing steam engine — that used so little coal it could be erected anywhere — freeing automated factories from the fast-moving streams their water wheels relied on and turbocharging the Industrial Revolution.

Despite that many of the Luddies allegedly had jobs dependent on machines — much like plenty of the hysterical anti-AIs of today rely on computers — they were terrified of automation. The government back then responded by elevating machine smashing to a capital offense, even executing several Luddites, but the activity continued until it became clear the machines were not a genuine job threat.

Plenty of Germans remained gainfully employed while the machines cranked out evermore and ever cheaper stuff. Today, Germany today is a manufacturing powerhouse with descendants of machine smashers working hand-in-hand with robots building BMWs, Mercedes, and all manner of other nice things.

Automation raised the standard of living for pretty much everybody it touched including even the artisan weavers it was supposed to replace. Was there less demand for their handmade cloth? That’s not entirely clear but there’s no question the price clothiers paid for fabric dramatically decreased: Dirndl and Lederhosen for all. Weaving itself was a miserable pre-automation task and there’s no indication weavers starved; they went on to do something more interesting.

Educational professionals in particular seem terrified of AI and maybe some of them should be. If they’re teaching the same class again and again, changing nothing and expecting students to parrot back material like an AI, then a real AI might be a genuine threat. But this high-cost/low-value model where the state and students pay a fortune to see who can best conform doesn’t sound especially healthy anyway.

Several professors attacked ChatGPT arguing it spits out incorrect answers to math or other test questions. True, but it’s a large language model, not yet programmed to do math. Ask those professors to, say, play a complex piece of classical music and most would botch it; it’s just not what they’ve trained to do. However, future AI versions — no doubt, coming soon — will be better at parsing math questions which they’ll run through a compute module and it will never miss a math question. That’s not an if; it’s a when.

For predictable, non-creative type answers AIs will soon enough never fail much of anything which is what has the educational elite so freaked out.

Students deserve better than teachers and professors “teaching” (using the word liberally) the same material class after class, year after year. AIs in cooperation with better teachers, those more likely to harness the technology than resist it, can create great lessons. They can open their students' big biological brains to new and exciting worlds rather than remain mired in repeating the past literally and figuratively.

Some schools have embraced AI, especially those in India and Israel, two countries that thrive on innovation. These schools are nudging their students to use AI as a tool, not threatening them for doing so.

Those who think creatively and differently will likely thrive in the new age of AIs. Granted, those who coast on the past — more than a few who got where they are specifically by rejecting creative thought — are likely to struggle but nothing is wrong with that. I’ve written before that I’ve been in organizations where people say “results don’t matter” but, of course, they do. Anybody who embraces acting like a machine, blindly following instructions, shouldn’t be surprised when a real machine replaces them.

I’ve never been so excited since I first saw Mosaic, the visual web browser developed way back when. It was clear the internet and the world wide web was about to open up a new age. Let’s embrace it and move forward, opening our minds to new ideas and our wallets to new investments in these magical technologies.

One doom-and-gloom prediction seems especially iffy: the death of journalism. If anything, the AIs are going to crank out so much crap that “SEO” will be hopelessly muddled. Already, we’re seeing people automating spam communications. Much like the web decreased the value of writing — turning “print dollars into digital cents” — the high volume of AI-generated nonsense might make thoughtfully created material more valuable, not less. If anything, people will be more likely to subscribe to and read ideas they know are thoughtfully written by people, not generated by machines focused on tricking other machines into higher search result placement.

AIs and people will work together just as people and machines have for ages. As I wrote this piece, spelling and grammar checkers did their thing helping me draft without getting in the way; ChatGPT improved the headline. This type of help makes it easier to focus on the material that actually matters but the material is still mine. This is how AI is most likely to function in the future: doing the mundane stuff people needn’t much think about. Which is exactly how automation and machines have always functioned.