Motivation and attentiveness are twinned foils for countless creative and educational pursuits. Both sensations induce sighs of underwhelmed lassitude at the prospect of climbing another of life’s hillocks, and flitting glances adrift from the scene of the present to the yawing gulf of the imagination. The history and practice of education may largely be seen as an exercise in precisely disciplining people’s willingness to pay attention and desire to excel. These two productive needs are summarized in the performance artist’s classic exclamation: “yes, I know the lines, but what’s my motivation?!”
Yet, technology seems to have all the answers and holds much promise in the field of augmented learning. Recently, Oprah Winfrey interviewed Bill Gates to that end. Gates propounded that AI, like a kindly tutor bearing a spoonful of sugar and some singalong tunes, will to students provide “that personalized notion” of connection with a human “who understands how to motivate you”. By “engaging the student in the rich way”, Gates continues, computer programs can draw out the best from their students. But what is it that makes an engagement rich, anyway? And can a tech genius, no matter his philanthropic bent, truly understand the core of human nature and transmit that core through a computer program? Let’s remember, other than in Hollywood (where a half century ago HAL the computer in the sci fi horror film 2001: A Space Odyssey was infamous for saying “I can’t allow you to do that”) the first moment a computer spoke to humans meaningfully was by stating something any dog could emit with a minor yip: “you’ve got mail”. Supposedly, technology has come a long way, baby, and now can incite us to write, think, learn, and express ourselves in Herculean ways.
One imagines a nail-filing stenographer seated dutifully at a desk while our genius minds frenetically unfurl a series of ideas just waiting to be combined into some miracle of erudite prose. This promise of lucid clarity and renaissance expressiveness is what AI is all about. Yet, the unasked question during Oprah’ television special AI and the Future of US remained: how will students be better motivated by a computer greeting them with helpful hints and useful aphorisms? When you know it’s just a fortune cookie you don’t take its prognostication as seriously as if it comes from a therapist or a good friend.
Shortcut To Trust and Respect?
Just as an acronym can shorten the space between memory and memory retrieval, AI holds much promise when it comes to the brutal boredom of editing and re-composing one’s writing, a process some liken to feeling ones very soul decompose in the blue glow of a late-night computer screen. But when it comes to motivation, that soulful stuff of passion and pathos, Gates’ assertion is that computers will somehow bring the best out of our intent. AI will somehow inflame pupil’s desire to desire to learn.
This prospect, rather than drawing on fear induced by a teacher’s stern sound of a meter-stick slapped against the chalkboard thereby to draw attention from a localized game of tiddlewinks, seems somewhat dubious. As in the human performance arts, or even the dog and pony show performing arts, to draw the best out of a human would seem to presume that we feel human connections—affinity is a great motivator. But can we get those feels from a machine? Friends of mine tested such barriers of verisimilute by dressing up a large toy doll in jeans and a shirt and placing her in a corner of their living room. At first visitors would be alarmed but, sure as a scarecrow only works for slow-witted birds of a Corvid feather, the doll was soon ignored – despite the wily grin plastered to her face.
AI will have to stretch our conscious selves beyond their normal point so as to allow us to accept and respect it as we would a teacher, and that may be beyond its present capacities. Then again, we live in a time of social media avatars and video game personas so maybe it will not be so much of a stretch for students to strive to impress a computer program as they would a beloved professor. The future is, as always, in our hands when it comes to acts of humanity including the act of interpreting the efficacy of an Other.
References
Gates, B on ABC News (Sep 12 2024). ‘AI And The Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special’. ABC TV. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6PGw57p-4E
Wiggers, KJ & Zeff, M. (2024). ‘Oprah Just Had an AI Special With Sam Altman and Bill Gates: Here’s The Highlights’. TechCrunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/ophah-just-had-an-ai-special-with-sam-altman-and-bill-gates-here-are-the-highlights/