My A.I. Lover
Hollywood's prescient chickens have come home to roost -- twenty years early . . .
I’m spending this week writing a column about a recent trip to Finland, but my focus was interrupted by the latest installment in the New York Times’ fabulous Op-Doc series – short films about any and everything that provide a window into what it means to be human in the 21st century.
My A.I. Lover tells the story of three young Chinese women and their relationships with their “Replikas,” “AI companions who care,” apparently for more than ten million people who have already found their artificial “soulmate.” It’s disturbing and dystopic – and, for anyone who wishes to look the implications of our current moment squarely in the eye, it’s also essential viewing.
As if the stories of these women aren’t unsettling enough, My A.I. Lover is effectively the plotline of a decade-old Hollywood film about the Technological Singularity – aka the moment when artificial intelligence pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with), human intelligence.
The film I’m thinking of is Spike Jonze’s “Her,” the story of a man who falls in love with his operating system, which also happens to be the first artificially intelligent OS (think Siri with a personality, and a conscience, and Scarlett Johansson’s voice). And not coincidentally, that film is set in 2044, the year that many techies had predicted the singularity would occur.
Yet here we are, in 2023, and media outlets like the Washington Post are already publishing articles like “Type in your job to see how much AI will affect it” (spoiler alert: anyone who isn’t a dancer is fucked). At a congressional hearing last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned of the ways A.I could “cause harm to the world.” And in another recent article on the subject, Geoffrey Hinton, who retired from his job at Google to speak more freely, proclaimed that it is “not science fiction” that smarter-than-human AI could be here in five to 20 years – compared with his earlier estimate of 30 to 100.
“It’s as if aliens have landed or are just about to land,” he said. “We really can’t take it in because they speak good English and they’re very useful, they can write poetry, they can answer boring letters. But they’re really aliens.”
Whoa.
For those of us who care about the future of education, the implications of this seem pretty clear: our timeworn fixation on content knowledge is a remnant of our Industrial-era model of schooling, in which the undisputed objective was to cram as much information as possible into the minds of schoolchildren.
Clearly, we need to turn the page. After all, anyone with a smart phone – let alone a Chat GPT account – already has instant access to the totality of human wisdom. Yet for most schools around the world, the Industrial-era edu-train rolls on, largely unimpeded from its singular destination.
What, then, should schools of the future be designed to do? And how will they help today’s 5-year-old navigate a world of unprecedented technological, ecological and ontological promise and peril?
There are a lot of possible answers, but here’s one that seems simple enough: Focus less on what we want kids to know, and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this — not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which young people develop new skills and habits to carry them successfully through life – and by being explicit as a school community which skills it is prioritizing, and why, and how.
Not surprisingly, Finland is among the converts.
Education there is based on a clearly stated vision of target abilities, rather than a prescriptive, content-based curriculum. And in 2016, the country took an added step by naming seven transversal skills and knowledge areas important to students’ success in life:
Thinking and learning to learn
Cultural competence, interaction, and self-expression
Taking care of oneself and managing daily life
Multi-literacy
Information and communications technology competence
Working life competence and entrepreneurship
Participation, involvement, and building a sustainable future
This is not to say Finland has it all figured out – as you’ll read in my column next week. But give them this: they recognize that the world depicted in My A.I. Lover is not only not going away – it’s ascending.
“We – all of us – don’t even understand what is coming,” said Mirjan Rasmus, the principal of one of the schools we visited. “The world that we knew, the world we grew up in, doesn’t exist any more. So we have to become more flexible in everything that we do.
“And we have to help one another find their way in what feels like this Brave New World.”
Thanks Sam for this one. Also looking forward to reading about Finland.
Beyond dancers, I like to think about how educators who have been focusing on knowledge beyond the “what” - who have been focusing on the development of good, compassionate, empathetic, loving humans who have a sense of agency and commitment to the wholistic “We” (to include all of us- human and other-than-human nature) -- these educators seem both insulated and potentially empowered and more effective with the tools of AI. Let’s hope AI can just free up more space for the awesome stuff of education!
And, though the Washington Post doesn’t mention it- I think anyone who works with connecting humans with other-than-human nature can hang out with the dancers.
Incidentally nature and outdoors jobs fail to appear in the search engine.
Great, Sam. Looking forward to your summary of the Finland visit!