The prospect of AI proof-reading our sloppy rough drafts contains an air of excitement. Sure, a few nuggets of genius emerge as we write and re-work our various essays but, along the way, countless hours fall off the cliff of time as we dot our proverbial I’s and mind our proverbial Q’s, bearing in mind the audience for this or that piece of prose. However, whereas an essay may write itself if left to the whims of a well-mannered AI program, the dignified and flighty human impulses surely require that Midas touch of our fallible expressive selves.
Take auto-correct, that cell phone tool that leads countless words and phrases to be evacuated of their meaning faster than a puppy dog from her urine when faced with the prospects of treats before a morning jaunt around the block. Only when, in my experience, we turn off auto correct for our text messages do we access our more creative impulses – creative turns of phrase, kitschy references with meanings known only to the sender and receiver, and neologism that stretch the boundaries of quantum linguistic mechanics. By ennobling our imperfect writing skills, made fully human, we realize our differences edified and attenuated away from the flattening and universalizing tendencies of modernity. Remember, only with modern compulsory educational institutions (which are no older than Canada) did modern time-keeping and grammar Nazidom really take off. So likely many of our best ideas may do well to be liberated, earnestly and honestly, from the need to affix our grammatical pelvises to the firing squad wall of perfect lexicon and syntax. If it’s “for marks” then we want to be correct, but if we are deploying rhetoric or engaging in daily discourse, then what works best is, to use a tautology, what works best. The circle is the hook, as it were. And uniqueness, difference in all forms, is what stands out most in the eyes of any audience.
Evidence of the need to celebrate stark difference as a way to celebrate the common bond of our humanity abounds when we find ourselves in, as the stuffy English aristocrat phrase goes, mixed company. Whereas the phrase once referred to the presence of a Lady amidst the boys club of a given smoking room setting, nowadays mixed company can mean a joining of ethnic or geographic difference—think here of a jubilant room of Oilers and Flames fans. Finding mixed cultural groupings whereby to do a little ethnographic research is nowadays eminently doable within the melting pot cultural pastiche of Canada. Indeed, for one winter of my life very few memorable or insightful conversations arose from basic mundane needs of people sharing a roof with one another. Instead, the swathes of sunlight that radiated connection between people came from the sharing of different stories from different backgrounds. It was the unknown, at times literally unimaginable, experiences of individuals from totally different cultures, akin to different programs of digital programming if you will, that made for a workable and interesting text of engagement.
That winter, unlike every other in my rural life, was one where I shared a roof with a variety of newcomer Canadians, or in some cases newcomer British Columbians. Rapt attentiveness and a realization of our shared desires to lead a fulfilling life in a free country quickly emerged as themes. Experiencing those coldest months at the boarding house of a lady I’d taken a shine too, and was later to marry, I found myself on occasion after dinner sharing a deck or a couch with a fascinating motley assortment of newcomers to Canada. Each would exit his or her room on occasion and we’d hold court, as it were, sharing instances unique to our backgrounds. What drew us together in affinity and attentiveness with one another was not general principles or shared facts so much as it was the vast geographic and cultural differences, not liminal to our prior minds, that each brought to the moment. Mystery of identity kept our attention as each in turn shared their version of a given life event. The phrase “wow, that’s so different from here, how things are where I’m from” was heard countless times—often with a smile, but always with curiosity. Could an AI program imitate these subjective details?
Generally, a few staple individuals were present, each born far away from the Southern Interior of BC and who now, for schooling or a lifetime, found themselves in our land of beaver and moose. A South African, a German, a Japanese, and a Syrian were collective conversation partners as we lolled away the long winter evening hours which everyone experiences, from family member to high security inmate, between the chime of the proverbial dinner bell and the invariable first yawns of bedtime’s clarion call. Rounding out the gang was my soon-to-be wife, Italian in heritage by way of Toronto, as well as a Manitoba expat whose core concern, besides plain quinoa and a furtive sensibility, seemed to be to air his grievances about the Mennonite community from which his family emanated. He agreed with group consensus that he had Daddy issues, as psychotherapists used to say, and he mouthed that term with a certain wry fondness—his Dad had expected his son to follow in footsteps of a religious stride, and when the son became an avid secularist social worker calamity ensued.
Meanwhile, our Syrian friend looked on with bemusement; in his country, he claimed, religion wasn’t at all something you would instinctively weaponize to rebel against your father. “We’re all born Muslim, that’s who we are” he intoned. Politics and life beliefs came second—as is the case for many world religions, arguably all of them except for Protestant Christianity. Religion appears in such cases as an essence you were born with, or rather enculturated into from birth along with gender (symbolized traditionally by the blue or pink infant wrist bracelet). Named Hassam, but preferring that we call him Sam, he expressed to us by reflection all that’s wonderful and desirable about Canada as a nation of newcomers: he arrived from a war-torn country enduring hideous times and arrived in a culture where the limits were economic more than violent. Suffice to say, Hassam was pleased as punch to have arrived with his family on Canadian shores. We assured him, being as he was closer to the far shore from his homeland, that one’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean was, in our view, a harbinger of good things to come—economically and socially.
See, while Sam had arrived with lovely wife and two young boys in tow, almost as soon as the proverbial gangplank had been hoisted aloft and the metaphoric sails had drifted into the mists of the seas leading back to where they came, his wife had left him. High and dry. Maybe too dry? He laughed, as our local Iraqi cab driver does, when I asked him in just how ever did devout Muslims cope with life’s travails without now and again imbibing a nip of liquor to assuage the sting? The sadness in Sam’s eyes was severe and not offset by his bushy moustache: can you imagine finding a perfect dream life and immediately afterward losing your family? I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I had seen his boys and their mom in the house down the way that they’d rented—the boys looking happy and drinking from the hose in a manner that many Canadian-born kids today only wish they were permitted to do. What we learned from Sam was that all the freedom in the world does not change the fact that our feelings are more powerful than our fact, as humans, and no drug or computer program teaching mindful mediation can erase the raw brutality of heartbreak.
By sharing our personal experiences, we all shared his pain as best we could. The Japanese tenant noted that she never wanted to return home lest she receive a lambasting from her family for having the mendacity to abandon her filial responsibilities in the Japanese family way. And our South African friend, well, he made a unique comparison to the stormy turmoil of life’s affairs of the heart. Down on the veldt, the prairie lands of his country’s interior, great thunderstorms would rip across the landscape—the sort of thing elephants evolved their mighty bellowing sound for, perhaps, if sheerly out of shock at the sound of such brutal thunder. On occasion, he said, a lightning bolt would pierce into a massive, girthy, baobab tree and cause the trunk to split into many vertical shards (in forestry we call this “rocking chairing”) as though a great explosive device had been stashed deep within the crotch of its trunk and then ignited. Sam from Syria was mesmerized more than normal, as we all were, at that imagery.
Out of our core, so many troubles emerge. The raw power of life’s push factors, those fears and anxieties that drive us forward in pursuit of perfection of at least a modicum of safety and security, seemed then as now crucial to one’s motivation. And with that in mind, can you imagine an AI program speaking, in dulcet but taciturn tones, to a pupil “if you do not complete this task you will fail, and I will be very disappointed in you”? Laughter, at least to my mind, would ensue even among the youngest of pupils. Only when we share real feelings and experiences with fellow humans, as every great teacher does in class, do we really find ourselves motivated to the hilt. Distance learning, far from leaving behind this realm of interpersonal subjectivity, in a proper syllabus adds to the equation by having reading material that puts into practice, in student lives and within assigned readings, the concepts on offer, where what is theory becomes what is life, and vice versa. But AI, unless it lies, can never say “the other day I tripped on a crack and wondered about my Mother’s back” – no kid would buy that story.
It would take an awful lot of wood-shedding before even the youngest generation believed a computer’s motivation dictum’s, especially when compared to the truths of adults. In fact, irony of babysitter club ironies, studies show that kids are less likely to believe or take as fact what a computer tells them! “’Until at least age eight or so, children are largely cautious when it comes to trusting the internet over a human source,’ said Danovitch. But it seems that as they learn more about computers, their relationship with them changes.” Whether our tendency to outgrow our preference for the truh of a teacher to the truth of a computer, as the study explores, remains to be seen. And plus, as what Oprah in her recent TV interview about AI failed to ask, the people programming the programs are complicit in biases, focuses, priorities, and themes that these programs deposit into our willing accomplice minds. No small concern given just how trusting and unwilling, in some cases kicking and screaming like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, young children can be.
Therefore, to find our motivation in life, and in learning, we must remember not only that our different backgrounds are most stimulating when we appreciate their abject foreignness to our own context but also, in the end, that being human is so much more than any algorithmic mapping of common denominators, thereby to average us all out into a believable facsimile of our component characteristics, can create. Then again, as critical thinkers, we must be a bit open to be swayed otherwise. As the Turing Test (which says the test of AI will be if we can’t tell it from a person) and Alan Turing’s tragic life in the closet attests, we only know someone is who we suspect they are, or who they say they are, when we didn’t know who they were to begin with. So perhaps, a computer teacher will one day slip into our realms like a thief in the night and we’ll not even know that no breathing human is inserting new knowledge into our craniums!